David Evans, of Evans and Sutherland and then Adobe, Pixar, and Silicon Graphics, has died. He was the force that brought us smooth 3D graphics. "There are few people who have had the intellectual power and personal touch that, combined, create excitement and knowledge in several generations of students and co-workers." [Mark R. Anderson , SNS, 06Oct98.]

Not at the same level, but still a matter of some regret, computational linguist Grady Ward -- not dead! -- has lost a suit filed by the Church of Scientology and will have to pay $200/month for the rest of his life for having posted copyrighted teachings of the church online. Ward created a great series of NLP utilities called the Moby Lexicons: Moby Words, Moby Pronunciator, Moby Part-of-Speech, Moby Thesaurus, Moby Shakespeare, etc. These were commercial products, but he gave them free to the NLP community when he stopped developing them. and . [Jorn Barger , comp.ai.nat-lang, 28Sep98.]

-- Ken