19 Jan
2023
19 Jan
'23
9:30 p.m.
My guess is that Ivan Sutherland probably qualified
back when he still
programmed ... I mean, after all, he invented the linked list in order to
implement his thesis program (Sketchpad) in about 1960.
I don't know whether Sutherland invented the linked list, but if he
did, it had to be before he worked on sketchpad. I attended a lecture
about Lisp in 1959 in which McCarthy credited list-processing to
IPL-V, whose roots Newell places in 1954. Sketchpad ran on TX 0, which
became operational in 1956.
My nomination for a triple-threat computer guy is Vic Vyssotsky. A
great programmer, he invented the first stream-processing language
(BLODI) and bitwise-parallel dataflow analysis. As an architect, he
invented the single underlying address space for multics. As a
manager, he oversaw the building of and later ran the lab that became
AT&T Research. Finally he founded the DEC Cambridge Lab. He was a
subtle diplomat, too, who more than once engineered reversals of
policy without ruffling feathers.
Relative to linked lists, I remember Vic perceptively touting the then
startling usage J=NEXT(J).in Fortran.
Doug