• 1932 October 10
    (b.) - ?

Bio/Description

An American engineer and former IBM employee, known for his work on the APL programming language and multiple systems for IBM, he was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts He received his B.A. degree in 1954 from Harvard University and his M.A. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1959 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his Ph.D. in 1964 from Harvard. After he served in the United States Navy as an officer in the Pacific Fleet, he joined IBM in 1959. He started in the Research Division in the development of formal language descriptions. In 1965 he joined the Advanced Computing Systems project to work on high performance computers. In 1970 he became Director of Architecture and Planning in the new Communications Systems Division, where he turned his attention to networking and high speed communications. In the last year before his retirement in 1990, he was appointed first President of the IBM Academy of Technology, which he held for a year. He had been advisor to the National Bureau of Standards and Visiting Professor at some universities. He was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and received multiple awards and honors, In 1981 he was awarded the IBM Fellow for "technical leadership in the development of system network architecture."; in 1988 he received the Data Communications Interface Award; in 1989 the IEEE Simon Ramo Medal; and in 1992 he was elected members of the National Academy of Engineering (Computer science). He has authored and co-authored numerous publications to include: "Use of tree structures for processing files." Communications of the ACM 6.5 (1963): 272-279; with Salton, Gerald, "Some flexible information retrieval systems using structure matching procedures." Proceedings of the April 21?23, 1964, Spring Joint Computer Conference. ACM, 1964; with Falkoff, Adin D., and Kenneth E. Iverson, "A formal description of system/360." IBM Systems Journal 3.2 (1964): 198-261; "A Graph-Theoretic Algorithm for Matching Chemical Structures." Journal of Chemical Documentation 5.1 (1965): 36-43; and with Jarema, David R., "IBM data communications: a quarter century of evolution and progress." IBM Journal of Research and Development 25.5 (1981): 391-404.