Anatol Holt began as a UNIVAC I programmer under John W. Mauchly, in 1952. Together with the late William J. Turanski he developed a programming environment for the UNIVAC family called "Generalized Programming" - a very early example of CSCW. From 1963 to 1974, Holt was Principal Investigator under ARPA's IPTO sponsored research called the "Information Systems Theory Project". During this time Holt cooperated with CarlAdam Petri, (GMD, Bonn, Germany), in the development of Petri nets.

Since 1974 Holt has been active in various industrial and university settings. In 1979, together with Paul Cashman, Holt launched the world's first "coordination program" on the ARPA net (Monitor Software Trouble Reports). Some years later, Holt and venture capitalist Eli Jacobs, founded "Coordination Technology, Inc." for the development of a new system software platform to support distributed electronic work environments.

In the last 6 years, Holt has lived and worked in Milano, Italy, where (among other things) he has been active at the University of Milano. In 4 of these years, he authored a book titled Organized Activity and Its Support by Computer, recently produced by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Holt holds an Ms in mathematics from MIT, and a PhD in descriptive linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.