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Robert (Bob) Barton
Encyclopedia
Robert Stanley "Bob" Barton (February 13, 1925 – January 28, 2009) was recognized as the chief architect of the Burroughs B5000 and other computers such as the B1700
, and a co-inventor of dataflow. Barton's thinking has been broadly influential. As one example, Barton influenced the systems and higher level computer language
thinking of Alan Kay
who went on to further develop object-oriented programming, co-design Smalltalk
, and develop concepts key to modern GUI
systems built into the Macintosh
and later Microsoft Windows
.
Barton designed machines at a more abstract level, not tied to the technology constraints of the time. He employed high-level languages and a stack machine
in his design of the Burroughs Corporation B5000 computer. Barton's B5000 design survives in the modern Unisys
ClearPath/MCP systems. His work with stack architectures was the first implementation in a mainframe computer
. Hewlett-Packard
would later use the stack architecture in its HP calculators
with reverse polish notation
.
Barton died on January 28, 2009, in Portland, Oregon
, at the age of 83.
. His early experience with computers was when he worked in the IBM Applied Science Department in 1951.
In 1954, he joined the Shell Oil Company
Technical Services, working on programming applications.
While at Shell, in preparing for a conference in Michigan in 1958, Barton was reading Irving Copi
's 1954 textbook on "Symbolic Logic" and saw a reference in it to Polish notation
. This made him curious about it and its application to arithmetic expressions and their processing on a computer. He also then read the works of Jan Łukasiewicz who had invented "Polish Notation" back in the early 20th century for use in logic.
Barton joined Burroughs Corporation (ElectroData Division) in Pasadena, California
in the late 1950s after he had worked for some time at Shell Development, a research arm of the Shell Oil Company in Texas where he used and programmed an early Burroughs/Datatron 205 computer.
He managed a system programming group in 1959 which developed an ALGOL
-like compiler for Burroughs. The early programming language was known as BALGOL and was implemented for the Burroughs 220 machine. The language and compiler were an early implementation of the International Algebraic Language (IAL) also known as ALGOL 58
.
In 1960, he became a consultant for Beckman Instruments working on data collection from satellite systems, for Lockheed working on satellite systems and organizing of data processing services, and for Burroughs continuing to work on the design concepts of the B5000.
After an assignment in Australia in 1963 for Control Data Corporation
, he returned in 1965 to join the Computer Science staff of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah
. From 1968 to 1973 he taught as a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah with David C. Evans
, Ivan Sutherland
, and Thomas Stockham
. His Ph.D. students at the University of Utah were Duane Call, co-founder of Computer System Architects; Alan Ashton, co-founder of WordPerfect
; and Al Davis
, University of Utah professor of computer science. Other Utah students that he influenced included: Alan Kay
, James H. Clark
co-founder of Silicon Graphics
, John Warnock
, co-founder of Adobe Systems
, Ed Catmull of Pixar
, Henri Gouraud
(Gouraud Shading
) and Bui Tuong Phong
(Phong shading
).
After 1973, he devoted his full time to Burroughs Systems Research in La Jolla, San Diego, California
, working on new computer architectures and systems programming.
Burroughs B1700
The Burroughs B1000 Series of computers consisted of three major generations which were the B1700, B1800, and B1900 series machines originally introduced in the 1970s and continued later on....
, and a co-inventor of dataflow. Barton's thinking has been broadly influential. As one example, Barton influenced the systems and higher level computer language
High-level programming language
A high-level programming language is a programming language with strong abstraction from the details of the computer. In comparison to low-level programming languages, it may use natural language elements, be easier to use, or be from the specification of the program, making the process of...
thinking of Alan Kay
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...
who went on to further develop object-oriented programming, co-design Smalltalk
Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...
, and develop concepts key to modern GUI
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
systems built into the Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
and later Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
.
Barton designed machines at a more abstract level, not tied to the technology constraints of the time. He employed high-level languages and a stack machine
Stack machine
A stack machine may be* A real or emulated computer that evaluates each sub-expression of a program statement via a pushdown data stack and uses a reverse Polish notation instruction set....
in his design of the Burroughs Corporation B5000 computer. Barton's B5000 design survives in the modern Unisys
Unisys
Unisys Corporation , headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a long established business whose core products now involves computing and networking.-History:...
ClearPath/MCP systems. His work with stack architectures was the first implementation in a mainframe computer
Mainframe computer
Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...
. Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
would later use the stack architecture in its HP calculators
HP calculators
HP calculators are various calculators manufactured by the Hewlett-Packard company over the years.- History :In the 1960s, Hewlett-Packard was becoming a diversified electronics company with product lines in electronic test equipment, scientific instrumentation, and medical electronics, and was...
with reverse polish notation
Reverse Polish notation
Reverse Polish notation is a mathematical notation wherein every operator follows all of its operands, in contrast to Polish notation, which puts the operator in the prefix position. It is also known as Postfix notation and is parenthesis-free as long as operator arities are fixed...
.
Barton died on January 28, 2009, in Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, at the age of 83.
Career
Barton received his BA in 1948, and his MS in 1949 in Mathematics, from the State University of IowaUniversity of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
. His early experience with computers was when he worked in the IBM Applied Science Department in 1951.
In 1954, he joined the Shell Oil Company
Shell Oil Company
Shell Oil Company is the United States-based subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, a multinational oil company of Anglo Dutch origins, which is amongst the largest oil companies in the world. Approximately 22,000 Shell employees are based in the U.S. The head office in the U.S. is in Houston, Texas...
Technical Services, working on programming applications.
While at Shell, in preparing for a conference in Michigan in 1958, Barton was reading Irving Copi
Irving Copi
Irving Marmer Copi was an American philosopher, logician, and university textbook author....
's 1954 textbook on "Symbolic Logic" and saw a reference in it to Polish notation
Polish notation
Polish notation, also known as prefix notation, is a form of notation for logic, arithmetic, and algebra. Its distinguishing feature is that it places operators to the left of their operands. If the arity of the operators is fixed, the result is a syntax lacking parentheses or other brackets that...
. This made him curious about it and its application to arithmetic expressions and their processing on a computer. He also then read the works of Jan Łukasiewicz who had invented "Polish Notation" back in the early 20th century for use in logic.
Barton joined Burroughs Corporation (ElectroData Division) in Pasadena, California
Pasadena, California
Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology , the Jet...
in the late 1950s after he had worked for some time at Shell Development, a research arm of the Shell Oil Company in Texas where he used and programmed an early Burroughs/Datatron 205 computer.
He managed a system programming group in 1959 which developed an ALGOL
ALGOL
ALGOL is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in the mid 1950s which greatly influenced many other languages and became the de facto way algorithms were described in textbooks and academic works for almost the next 30 years...
-like compiler for Burroughs. The early programming language was known as BALGOL and was implemented for the Burroughs 220 machine. The language and compiler were an early implementation of the International Algebraic Language (IAL) also known as ALGOL 58
ALGOL 58
ALGOL 58, originally known as IAL, is one of the family of ALGOL computer programming languages. It was an early compromise design soon superseded by ALGOL 60...
.
In 1960, he became a consultant for Beckman Instruments working on data collection from satellite systems, for Lockheed working on satellite systems and organizing of data processing services, and for Burroughs continuing to work on the design concepts of the B5000.
After an assignment in Australia in 1963 for Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
, he returned in 1965 to join the Computer Science staff of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah
University of Utah
The University of Utah, also known as the U or the U of U, is a public, coeducational research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The university was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret by the General Assembly of the provisional State of Deseret, making it Utah's oldest...
. From 1968 to 1973 he taught as a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah with David C. Evans
David C. Evans
David Cannon Evans was the founder of the computer science department at the University of Utah and co-founder of Evans & Sutherland, a computer firm which is known as a pioneer in the domain of computer-generated imagery.-Biography:Evans attended the University of Utah and studied electrical...
, Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal...
, and Thomas Stockham
Thomas Stockham
Thomas Greenway Stockham was an American scientist who developed the first practical digital audio recording system, and pioneered techniques for digital audio recording and processing as well....
. His Ph.D. students at the University of Utah were Duane Call, co-founder of Computer System Architects; Alan Ashton, co-founder of WordPerfect
WordPerfect
WordPerfect is a word processing application, now owned by Corel.Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General Corp. minicomputer system in 1979...
; and Al Davis
Alan L. Davis
Alan L. Davis is an American computer scientist and researcher, a professor of computer science at the University of Utah, and associate director of the C. S. department there....
, University of Utah professor of computer science. Other Utah students that he influenced included: Alan Kay
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."He is the president of the Viewpoints Research...
, James H. Clark
James H. Clark
James H. Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon...
co-founder of Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
, John Warnock
John Warnock
John Edward Warnock is an American computer scientist best known as the co-founder with Charles Geschke of Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company. Dr. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and Chairman and CEO for his remaining sixteen years at the company...
, co-founder of Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...
, Ed Catmull of Pixar
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios, pronounced , is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio has earned 26 Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and three Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Its films have made over $6.3 billion worldwide...
, Henri Gouraud
Henri Gouraud
Henri Gouraud may refer to:*Henri Gouraud *Henri Gouraud...
(Gouraud Shading
Gouraud shading
Gouraud shading, named after Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes...
) and Bui Tuong Phong
Bui Tuong Phong
Bui Tuong Phong was a Vietnamese-born computer graphics researcher and pioneer. His publications are most often referred to using his family name, Bùi, which comes before his given name by Vietnamese name convention, but his inventions are remembered under his given name Phong, since it is...
(Phong shading
Phong shading
Phong shading refers to an interpolation technique for surface shading in 3D computer graphics. It is also called Phong interpolation or normal-vector interpolation shading. Specifically, it interpolates surface normals across rasterized polygons and computes pixel colors based on the interpolated...
).
After 1973, he devoted his full time to Burroughs Systems Research in La Jolla, San Diego, California
La Jolla, San Diego, California
La Jolla is an affluent, hilly seaside resort community, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean in Southern California within the northern city limits of San Diego. La Jolla had the highest home prices in the nation in 2008 and 2009; the average price of a standardized...
, working on new computer architectures and systems programming.
Awards
- IEEE 1977 W. Wallace McDowell AwardMcDowell AwardThe W. Wallace McDowell Award is awarded by the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other similar innovative contributions that fall within the scope of Computer Society interest...
Recipient. “For his innovative architectural computer concepts, such as stack processing, data stored with self-describing tags, and the direct execution of higher level languages, as embodied in the B-5000 and successor machines” - Barton was the first recipient of the ACM/IEEE Computer Society Eckert–Mauchly Award in 1979: For his outstanding contributions in basing the design of computing systems on the hierarchical nature of programs and their data.
- Charter Computer Pioneer by the IEEE Computer Society for his work in Language Directed Architecture.
Selected papers
- Barton, Robert S., "Functional Design of Computers", Commununications of the ACM 4(9): 405 (1961)
- Barton, Robert S., "A New Approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer", Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, May 1961, pp. 393–396.
- Barton, Robert S., "A Critical Review of the State of Programming Art", AFIPS Joint Computer Conferences, May 1963, pp 169–177.
- Barton, Robert S., “Ideas for Computer Systems Organization: A Personal Survey”, Software Engineering, vol. 1, Academic Press, New York, 1970, pp. 7–16.
Further reading
- Waychoff, Richard, "Stories about the B5000 and people who were there", April 9, 1979