This man deserves it more than most of those who got one (I don't mean to take anything away from them, they did deserve one, just that Corbato's contributions to computing are enormous and more deserving than most; for instance, would there have been a Linux without his contributions? He led the Multics project, of which he was possibly the main figure -> Unix -> Linux). I guess that it comes down to a popularity thing, rather than actual importance.

See, this is why black bars are a bad idea. Anytime someone dies and doesn’t get a black bar, it becomes a moderator/admin-induced negative judgment on that person. Even if the moderators/admins may not even have been aware of it, that is the effect in practice.

I, too, was surprised at no black bar. This man had tremendous influence on computing. For me it was personal, since I began my career journey in IT in 1967 after being fascinated by a Teletype clacking away interactively with a GE timesharing system at my local school district. Perhaps it has been too many years, and people now are so familiar with the interactivity of personal computers and cell phones, that they have little knowledge of how revolutionary the concept of timesharing was in an era when nearly all computers operated in "batch" mode.