Olivia Hussey Eisley, star of the 1968 film “Romeo and Juliet” and the slasher classic “Black Christmas,” has died, according to a post on her Instagram page. She was 73.

“It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Olivia Hussey Eisley, who went peacefully at home surrounded by her loved ones on December 27th,” the statement posted on her Instagram reads. “Olivia was a remarkable person whose warmth, wisdom, and pure kindness touched the lives of all who knew her.”

“Romeo and Juliet” was the British-Argentine actress’s big break, winning her a Golden Globe for her performance as Juliet.

Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic love story was not without its controversies. In late 2022, Hussey Eisley and co-star Leonard Whiting filed a lawsuit against Paramount Studios, which produced the film, for allowing the movie to be released with scenes showing them nude when they were minors. According to the complaint, Zeffirelli told Hussey Eisley and Whiting – who were 15 and 16 at the time, respectively – that “they must act in the nude or the picture would fail.” The suit was dismissed in May 2023.

Hussey Eisley later starred in the 1974 horror film “Black Christmas” and appeared in the 1978 Agatha Christie adaptation “Death on the Nile.” She also worked with Zeffirelli again in 1977, playing Mary in the TV mini series “Jesus of Nazareth.”

In the 90s, Hussey Eisley starred in several horror flicks including “Psycho IV: The Beginning,” and “It,” a miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. Later, in the early 2000s, she starred in the biogrophical film “Mother Teresa,” thriller “El Grito” and comedy “Tortilla Heaven.”

Born on April 17, 1951, in Buenos Aires, “Olivia lived a life full of passion, love, and dedication to the arts, spirituality, and kindness towards animals,” the statement said.

“Olivia leaves behind a loving family— her children, Alex, Max, and India, her husband of 35 years David Glen Eisley, and grandson, Greyson, and a legacy of love that will forever be cherished in our hearts,” the statement read.

“As we grieve this immense loss, we also celebrate Olivia’s enduring impact on our lives and the industry. We thank you for your thoughts and prayers during this difficult time and ask for privacy as we mourn the loss of a truly special soul.”

After earning his Ph.D., Thomas Kurtz joined Dartmouth College in 1956 as a mathematics professor and the director of the university’s computing center, which consisted of a single computer. Kurtz and colleague John Kemeny worked around this hardware limitation by developing the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), which operated from 1964 to 1999.

Having solved the problem of the computer’s accessibility, Kurtz and Kemeny set out to improve its usability for students. Existing programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL could be esoteric, so the pair developed an alternative: Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC. The school described the new language as “a simple combination of ordinary English and algebra, which can be mastered by the novice in a very few hours… There is enough power in the language BASIC to solve the most complicated computer problems.”

As a small, portable, easy-to-use language, BASIC proliferated, with variations for almost all platforms, becoming the introduction to software development for generations of computer users. It also launched countless careers and institutions: Microsoft BASIC was one of the first products from Microsoft when it was founded in 1975; the company later developed Applesoft BASIC to help launch Apple Computer’s Apple II personal computer. A young Richard Garriott used Applesoft to write the first Ultima computer role-playing game.

Kurtz retired from teaching in 1993. He received the IEEE’s Computer Pioneer Award in 1991 and was named an ACM Fellow in 1994. In 2023, he was inducted as a Computer History Museum Fellow, with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates presenting the award. Dartmouth College produced a documentary about BASIC for the language’s 50th anniversary.

Kurtz died at 96 from sepsis.

Roy Clay was one of nine children raised in a household without electricity or a toilet. He nonetheless grew up to become the one of the first Black Americans to graduate from St. Louis University, earning his degree in mathematics.

After being denied a job interview at McDonnell Aircraft Manufacturing on account of his skin color, Clay persisted in applying until he finally got a job. He worked at McDonnell as a computer programmer for two years, then joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he wrote software to monitor an atomic explosion’s radiation diffusion. The reputation he developed there as a talented software developer landed him a job at Hewlett-Packard.

At HP, Clay wrote software for and led the development of the company’s first minicomputer, the 2116A, released in 1966. The computer and its immediate successors sold exceptionally well for decades, helping cement HP’s leadership in the early computer industry. Rising through the ranks at HP, Clay helped expand its talent pool by hiring engineers from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Clay left HP in 1971 to start a consulting firm that advised the likes of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a leading venture capital firm that helped shape Silicon Valley. In 1977, he formed his own company, ROD-L Electronics, a manufacturer of electrical safety test equipment. ROD-L hired a diverse workforce and offered employees a flex-time schedule as well as full tuition reimbursement. Said Clay, “If you’re not bothering to learn more, then you’re becoming unproductive.”

Clay was a pioneer not just in IT, but in politics: he was the first Black council member for the city of Palo Alto, California (1973–1979) and was elected to the position of city vice mayor (1976–1977).

As a trailblazer who worked tirelessly to diversify the tech industry, he earned the nickname “Godfather of Silicon Valley” — an honorific he adopted for his 2022 self-published memoir, Unstoppable: The Unlikely Story of a Silicon Valley Godfather.

Clay passed away at 95.

Born in Zhovkva, Ukraine (then part of Poland), Romankiw emigrated to Canada, where he attained citizenship and earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. After earning a master’s and Ph.D. in metallurgy and materials in 1962 from MIT, he joined IBM.

At that time, IBM’s mainframes relied on drum storage for memory, which was slow, heavy, expensive, and limited to a few hundred kilobytes. In the 1970s, Romankiw partnered with co-worker David Thompson to invent magnetic thin film storage heads. The innovation spanned almost a dozen patents that reduced the size and increased the density of data storage devices. Any modern device that uses magnetic-head hard drives (as opposed to solid-state drives) still employs Romankiw’s innovations. His work earned him a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2012.

Romankiw spent his entire career at IBM, earning the rank of IBM Fellow in 1986. He also became a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society in 1990. Among Romankiw’s other developments and 65 patents were inductive power converters and inductors for high-efficiency solar cells.

He was 93 when he passed.

When Xerox PARC developed the Alto computer in 1973, it debuted a new paradigm: the graphical user interface (GUI), an abstraction between the user and the computer’s underlying data. To develop GUI programs, developers also needed a new model to work with.

University of Oslo computer science professor Trygve Reenskaug was visiting PARC in 1979 when he came up with the solution: the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. Originally designed in Smalltalk, an object-oriented language that was developed at PARC from 1972 to 1980, MVC eventually became popular for developing web applications, including in Ruby on Rails.

MVC wasn’t Reenskaug’s only innovation: in 1963, he developed an early CAD program, Autokon, which was widely used in maritime and offshore industries. And in 1986, he founded software company Taskon, where he developed the software package OOram (Object-Oriented role analysis and modeling). OOram later evolved into data, content, and interaction (DCI), a software development model that continues to be used to this day, such as in Tinder’s mobile app.

Reenskaug remained humble about his contributions, writing, “I have sometimes been given more credit than is my due.” He cited teammates Alan Kay, Jim Althoff, Per Wold, and Odd Arild Lehne, among others, who carried the baton before and after him.

Reenskaug was 93 when he died.

In 1958, after returning to the USA from a Fulbright scholarship teaching computer design in Australia, Chester Gordon Bell enrolled in a Ph.D. program at his undergraduate alma mater, MIT. But Bell was lured by Digital Equipment Corporation to drop out of school in 1960 and become DEC’s second-ever engineer. There, he contributed to the architecture of the PDP-1, PDP-5, and PDP-11 minicomputers and was the principal architect of the PDP-4 and PDP-6. The PDP-1 was DEC’s first computer, and although only about fifty were manufactured, it paved the way for the commercial success of later models.

After a six-year hiatus to teach at Carnegie Mellon University, Bell returned to DEC in 1972 as vice president of engineering. During this stint, Bell co-architected and oversaw the development of the VAX series of “superminicomputers,” as DEC referred to them. Along with the PDP line, the VAX computers were so successful, they led DEC to become the industry’s second biggest computer manufacturer.

In 1983, Bell had a heart attack, which he blamed on the stress of working for DEC’s often overbearing co-founder, Ken Olsen. Bell retired from DEC — but his career stretched on for decades more. He went on to be an assistant director at the National Science Foundation; vice president of research and development at Ardent Computer; and principal researcher at Microsoft, where he championed lifelogging — recording and storing every aspect of one’s life digitally.

Bell also co-founded what is now the Computer History Museum of Mountain View, California; established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize to honor innovations in high-performance computing; and was granted the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1991. He died at 89 from pneumonia.

Bringing people and ideas together and assuring they work well is what good leaders do. And that’s what Daniel Lynch did throughout his career.

After earning a master’s degree in mathematics, Lynch worked in the United States Air Force, where he learned to program. That skill set led him to positions at Lockheed Martin and then Stanford Research Institute, where he encountered the ARPANET. The precursor to the internet inspired his passion for computer networking, and he helped replace the ARPANET’s NCP protocol with TCP/IP, offering broader compatibility and networking.

Nonetheless, early internet developers proliferated a variety of incompatible applications and protocols. To get them all talking to each other, Lynch founded Interop, an annual conference that launched in 1986 with internet pioneer Vint Cerf as the keynote speaker. The show was an instant success, providing a much-needed space for direct communication among industry peers.

One of the early draws of Interop was the InteropNet, a local-area network (LAN) consisting of 120 miles of wires connecting 7,000 machines. With each of the show’s vendors being part of the InteropNet, it was an opportunity to test how hardware and software from different manufacturers would or could talk to each other. Interop also published 117 issues of a monthly technical journal, ConneXions (1987–1996).

Interop was sold to Ziff-Davis in 1991 and merged with their Networld event in 1994; the conference became known as Networld+Interop until 2005, when it again adopted the name Interop. The show hit its peak in 2001 with 61,000 attendees.

In 1994 — one year before he left Interop, and four years before PayPal was founded — Lynch co-founded CyberCash, an online payment service. CyberCash filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and was acquired by VeriSign — then, in 2005, by PayPal.

Lynch was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2019. He died at 82 from kidney failure.

John Walker didn’t find his success overnight: the son of a doctor and a nurse, he studied astronomy before switching to electrical engineering; founded the hardware company Marinchip Systems in 1976; and then co-founded Autodesk in 1982. The company’s first product was an eponymous office automation program.

It was AutoCAD that finally gave Autodesk and Walker their fame. Walker didn’t invent computer-assisted design — the term “CAD” was coined in 1959 — but previous CAD software had largely been limited to more powerful mainframe computers; AutoCAD was one of the first implementations to be available to the masses.

Originally developed as Interact CAD, AutoCAD was demoed for CP/M computers at the 1982 Comdex industry trade show, where it was met with wild acclaim. It ushered in a design revolution in architecture, engineering, interior design, manufacturing, and more. AutoCAD is still used and supported today, with the latest version having been released for Windows and macOS in May 2024.

Walker himself was a talented software developer and author who enjoyed writing more than he did managing: shortly after Autodesk went public in 1985, he stepped down as CEO. He moved to Switzerland in 1991 and retired in 1994 at the age of 45.

In retirement, Walker wrote many books, including The Hacker’s Diet: How to Lose Weight and Hair Through Stress and Poor Nutrition (which, “notwithstanding its silly subtitle, is a serious book about how to lose weight,” wrote Walker); and The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience, an 889-page PDF that saw its fifth and final revision in 2017.

Walker was 74 when he died from head injuries sustained from a fall at home.

When the manhunt was on for Whitey Bulger, on the lam for 16 years and the fbi’s second-most-wanted after Osama bin Laden, officers would often check bookshops. He liked books. In his shabby apartment in Santa Monica, California, where he turned up living as Charlie Gasko behind thick black curtains, he had 200 books. True, they hid the holes in the walls where he stashed guns and $800,000 in cash. But he read them, too.

Words entertained him, and they plagued him in a way. Like people calling him “Whitey” from his blond hair, which infuriated him, when he should have been “Jimmy”, or “Boots”, from the cowboy boots he wore. Or like the words “good” and “bad”. Clearly he was bad, because he was a racketeer, an extortionist (though “rent collector” was the term he preferred), an arms trafficker and a mobster. His first spree of robberies in 1955 was bad in the classic Hollywood style, bursting into banks with a pistol in each hand and fleeing with his girlfriend in a getaway car. James Cagney was in his mind then. Later he wore with pride his belt buckle from Alcatraz. As crime became his fixed career, from the 1970s to the 1990s, no one in eastern Massachusetts dared cross him.

Yet in Southie, home turf, he bought turkeys for the poor at Thanksgiving and held open doors for women. By day at least, he was still that neat well-mannered boy from the Mary Ellen McCormack housing project who would sort out local bullies with threats, or lightning fists, to help the weak. The rockiness happened outside home. Some of the money he made went on weapons for the ira, a good cause, as many in Southie saw it. As he told some federal drug agents once, as they were frisking him and stripping his car, they were the good-good guys, and he was bad-good.

“Crime” and “business” were another slippery pair of words. He despised stimulants of any kind: seldom sipped wine, never smoked. But for more than a decade, as boss of the Winter Hill Gang, he controlled the drug trade in the city and, to a large extent, horses, dogs, loan-sharking and the liquor trade. All the vices. Power was wrested from other mobsters, especially from Italian-American gangs, as any enterprises might outdo each other. If liquor retailers got successful they soon fell foul of his protection rackets, as did the owner of the store that became the South Boston Liquor Mart, the favourite hangout of his political allies. If drug distributors wanted to operate on his territory, he shook them down, making $30m at it by one estimate. This criminal behaviour was obviously business, too. And there were rules. Heroin was banned in South Boston because it was a dirty drug, stuck in your arm with a needle that gave you aids. Instead, he dealt with a dozen big cocaine distributors all over the state. Cocaine was taken socially and cleanly. Dirty, clean—a thin line, again.

The word that bugged him most was “informant”. A snitch, a rat. While he was “in retirement” in California the story got out that he had been recruited by John Connolly of the fbi, in 1975, to inform on the Patriarca crime family and on rival Irish gangs. He helped the agency well into the 1990s, getting in exchange free rein for his business activities and immunity from arrest. Since his brother Billy, who always looked out for him, was at the time president of the state Senate, the most powerful politician in Massachusetts and a fount of patronage, it was a cosy arrangement both for local fbi field officers and for him. The agents even bought their Christmas wine at the South Boston Liquor Mart.

Nonetheless he denied it passionately. Among the Irish in Southie there was nothing worse you could be called, than a rat. He insisted he had never been one. As a thief from the age of 13 he’d had many a beating in police stations, but had not cracked. In prison he had been put in solitary for months, but told them nothing. He would go to hell before he did. The way he saw it, Connolly, who was a rogue agent anyway, had given him useful business information and he had paid him for it; it was that way round. He insisted from the very start, sitting in Connolly’s car that night, that his role and title would be “strategist”. Any ratting had been done by others, including his chief associate, Steve Flemmi, not by him. That word “associate”, too, had a business ring to it. And it preserved the distance he liked to keep from almost everyone, in case they were no longer his friend and, with eyes cold as marble and that hair-trigger violence he was famous for, he had to kill them.

That last was a word he avoided altogether. At his trial in 2011 on 32 counts of racketeering, extortion and weapons possession he was also charged with complicity in 19 killings, and was convicted two years later of 11 of them. He said he was not guilty, though the evidence was heard in court, clearly enough. How he had chained Bucky Barrett and tortured him into handing over the proceeds from a bank robbery, then shot him in the head anyway. How he had stabbed Louie Litif with an ice pick, and gunned down Eddie Connors in a phone booth; how he had joked about his victims, as he drove past the spots where he had buried them.

When he first killed a man, shooting him point-blank between the eyes, he picked the wrong, innocent brother of a pair of twins. His then-boss told him not to worry; the man smoked too much, and would die soon anyway. It was a lesson in callousness he did not forget. He occasionally regretted the shame he had brought on his family, but for his victims and their relatives he felt nothing. Most, as he saw it, had been informants. And if you silenced an informant, was that not good?