“Ed Fredkin and the Physics of Information: An Inside Story of an Outsider Scientist”, 2016 (; backlinks):
[cf. oral history] This article tells the story of Ed Fredkin, a pilot, programmer, engineer, hardware designer, and entrepreneur whose work inside and outside academia has influenced major developments in computer science and in the foundations of theoretical physics, and, in particular, in the intersection thereof, for the past 50 years.
…A self-made millionaire, a USAF jet fighter pilot, an inventor, an entrepreneur, and an independent intellectual and autodidact, Fredkin has been working mostly outside the corridors of academia all his life. As a freshman at Caltech in 1952, he studied with scientists such as Linus Pauling but dropped out and joined the air force in the middle of his sophomore year. As one of the early hardware and software designers and computer experts in the United States, he befriended geniuses such as John McCarthy (1927–84201113ya), Richard Feynman (1918–88), and Marvin Minsky (1927–892016). As a full professor at MIT (without so much as a bachelor’s degree), he shared his innovative and novel ideas about computers, programming, robotics, graphics, and relationships between physics, information, and computation with many colleagues and students, guiding the latter through projects ranging from the world’s first computer navigation system in an automobile, to exploring how arbitrary synchronous counters could be constructed using nothing but J-K Flip Flops, or how a computer could be built that could operate without dissipating any power whatsoever.