After helping pioneer campus networks at Carnegie Mellon’s Andrew Project, Rosenthal’s career in Silicon Valley started forty years ago at Sun Microsystems. He was a Distinguished Engineer working on window systems including the X Window System and various parts of Sun’s Unix operating system. In 1993, he left Sun to become the fourth employee at Nvidia where he co-architected how programs communicated with Nvidia’s first chip.
In 1998, Rosenthal began prototyping the LOCKSS software at Stanford with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). From 1999 to 2002, he continued developing LOCKSS at Sun Labs before returning to Stanford to work on the program under a major NSF grant, remaining there until his retirement in 2017.
In addition to his numerous technical publications, he has been
blogging since 2007 on topics such as digital preservation economics, storage media, and decentralized systems.
In 1998, Victoria Reich and David Rosenthal co-founded the LOCKSS (“Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”) Program at Stanford University Libraries; LOCKSS aimed to ensure the long-term, low-cost preservation of digital materials and empower organizations, particularly libraries, to steward and preserve their own digital collections. The LOCKSS software has since been adopted as an economical, easy-to-use, and robust basis for the massive, global, publisher-supported CLOCKSS network and networks preserving, among others, e-journals and government documents. Through research, development, and maintenance, the proven technologies mitigate technological, economic, and legal threats to data persistence
