He was born in 1949, in the town of
Merrimac in northeastern
Massachusetts to two dairy farmers. He studied at
Northeastern University, Boston, where he earned a B.A. in
mathematics (1967–1972). , he resides in Redwood City, California with his wife, Jo. He has a son named Joseph, and a daughter named Mariko, a Doctor of Physical Therapy in Los Altos, California.
Studying Subsequently, he pursued graduate studies in mathematics at MIT, from 1972 to 1973; he was tapped by
Patrick Winston to become a permanent member of the
artificial intelligence (AI) Lab at MIT, but funding difficulties made it impossible to retain him. Gabriel tried to start up, with Dave Waltz, an AI Lab at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, but after two years the lab fell through due to general apathy. During this time, from 1973 to 1975, Gabriel managed to earn an MS in mathematics. Because of some of his mathematical work, Gabriel was then admitted to
Stanford University; during that time (1975–1981), he served as a
teaching assistant to
John McCarthy, the founder of Lisp; he ported
Maclisp from its native
operating system, the
Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) to
WAITS. He earned a PhD in
computer science (on the topic of natural language generation); and he and his wife Kathy had a son. Around this time, he became a spokesperson for the
League for Programming Freedom.
Postdoctoral work After earning a PhD, he continued to work on AI projects for McCarthy, although his thesis advisor was
Terry Winograd. He eventually began working for
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he recruited several of the researchers and programmers for a company,
Lucid, Incorporated, he founded in 1984 and would leave in 1992. It survived until 1994. Gabriel was at various times the President and Chairman of Lucid Inc. The product the company shipped was a Lisp
integrated development environment (IDE) for
Sun Microsystems’
reduced instruction set computer (RISC) hardware architecture named
SPARC. This sidestepped the main failure of
Lisp machines by, in essence, rewriting the Lisp machine IDE for use on a more cost-effective and less moribund architecture. During this time, Gabriel married his second wife, and had a daughter; he later divorced his second wife in 1993. Eventually Lucid's focus shifted (during the
AI Winter) to an IDE for
C++. A core component of the IDE was
Richard Stallman’s version of
Emacs,
GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs was not up to Lucid’s needs, however, and several Lucid programmers were assigned to help develop GNU Emacs. Friction arose between the programmers and Stallman over how to handle
graphical user interface (GUI) issues, and Lucid forked Emacs, and thus became mainly responsible for the birth of what would come to be called
XEmacs. One of his hires was another notable programmer,
Jamie W. Zawinski.
Own business and open-source software After Gabriel left Lucid, Inc. for good, he became a Vice President of Development for
ParcPlace Systems (1994–1995), and then a consultant, for, among others, Aspen Smallworks, before joining
Sun Microsystems as a Distinguished Engineer. There, Gabriel was an influential contributor to the evolution of the open source software strategy, culminating in publication of the book
Innovation Happens Elsewhere. In 2007, he joined
IBM Research as a Distinguished Engineer.
Association for Computing Machinery Gabriel has received the
Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) 1998 Fellows Award, and its 2004 ACM-AAAI
Allen Newell Award. The citation reads: "For innovations in programming languages and software design, and promoting the interaction between computer science and other disciplines, notably architecture and poetry." ==Works==