Jonathan Fay

Jonathan Fay is an Argentina-born, American software developer and computer scientist who writes software for Astronomy, imaging and visualization. He is a principal software engineer on Microsoft HoloLens and the principal architect of the WorldWide Telescope at the American Astronomical Society. He was Lead Developer for Microsoft Image Composer and other imaging products at Microsoft. He has patents and patent applications in imaging, visualization and information security.
Biography
Fay's first entry in the commercial software market came in 1982 at the age of 16 with the introduction of Chart-EX an application to make charts from business spread sheets on a personal computer. It was marketed by LNW Computers for the LNW-80 and which touted what was at the time high-resolution graphics: 480x192 in 8 colors.

Fay joined Microsoft in 1993 working for Microsoft Consulting Services. While trying to help clients solve memory problems deploying Windows 3.1 in corporate network environments he discovered that the common "Out of Memory" messages that many Windows users received even when there seemed to be plenty of free memory and few applications were running, were not actually a fundamental windows limitation, but a hiccup from Windows past: all applications needed 512 bytes of RAM in DOS memory for a Task Database Entry. This limitation seemed like it could potentially choke adoption of Microsoft Windows and Office in corporate network environment. Fay's solution was a program called stryper, later renamed memvalet, that would purposely fragment a portion of DOS low memory to allow the room for many applications to run.
In February 2006 Fay joined the Microsoft Next Media Research Group led by Curtis Wong.
In the following years, Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay led the development of WWT at Microsoft Research. In 2009, Fay helped integrating the WorldWide Telescope with the Galaxy Zoo project, a crowdsourced citizen science astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. The WWT software was open-sourced in 2015 and is hosted on GitHub. The .NET Foundation now holds the copyright and since 2016 the project is managed by the American Astronomical Society.
Fay contributed to the ASCOM standard for control of astronomical equipment. During his work on the WorldWide Telescope ASCOM client he created the reference .NET Framework prototype classes that led to the ASCOM Version 5 redesign. The observatory was designed as a proving ground for observatory automation as well as an astronomy education outreach resource.
The observatory building and the property it was on were sold in July 2021.
SETI Institute published a half-hour interview with Fay about his research recorded at SETIcon 2012.

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