David William Barron

FBCS Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

(9 January 1935 – 2 January 2012) was a British academic in Physics and Computer Science who was described in the ''

Times Higher Education ''Times Higher Education'' (''THE''), formerly ''The Times Higher Education Supplement'' (''The Thes''), is a British magazine reporting specifically on news and issues related to higher education. Ownership TPG Capital acquired TSL Education ...

'' magazine as one of the "founding fathers" of computer science.

Family

He married his wife, Valerie. They had two children: Nik and Jacky.

Work

Radio wave propagation

Barron's work with Henry Rishbeth on radio wave propagation was pioneering in furthering the understanding of how radio waves were reflected at the ionospheric boundary.

Computer science

Barron began his academic career in Cambridge University where he took a PhD in the

Cavendish Laboratory The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the School of Physical Sciences. The laboratory was opened in 1874 on the New Museums Site as a laboratory for experimental physics and is named ...

. His research involved very early work in computer applications and he was a user of the original

EDSAC The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. Inspired by John von Neumann's seminal ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', the machine was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the Universi ...

computer, the world's first stored-program electronic computer to go into general service. After his PhD he joined the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory and contributed to the development of the

EDSAC 2 EDSAC 2 was an early computer (operational in 1958), the successor to the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC). It was the first computer to have a microprogrammed control unit and a bit-slice hardware architecture. First cal ...

computer. In the early 1960s, he was leader of software development in the Titan project, a joint effort with Ferranti Ltd to develop a reduced version of the Atlas computer. In this role he led the Cambridge efforts to develop the Titan Supervisor (a multi-programming operating system) and CPL (

Combined Programming Language Combined may refer to: * Alpine combined (skiing), the combination of slalom and downhill skiing as a single event ** Super combined (skiing) * Nordic combined (skiing), the combination of cross country skiing and ski jumping as a single event * T ...

). The Titan Supervisor led in due course to the Cambridge Multiple-Access System which provided a pioneering time-sharing service to a large user community in Cambridge and was also later employed in the Cambridge-based Computer Aided Design Centre. The CPL project broke new ground in language design and application generality, and the resulting defining paper was written by the original development team. CPL was notable for leading to

BCPL BCPL ("Basic Combined Programming Language") is a procedural, imperative, and structured programming language. Originally intended for writing compilers for other languages, BCPL is no longer in common use. However, its influence is still ...

and hence B and then

C programming language ''The C Programming Language'' (sometimes termed ''K&R'', after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the language, as well as ...

. Barron left Cambridge in 1967 to take up a chair of computer science at the

University of Southampton , mottoeng = The Heights Yield to Endeavour , type = Public research university , established = 1862 – Hartley Institution1902 – Hartley University College1913 – Southampton University Coll ...

where he remained until his retirement in 2000. As a computer scientist, he contributed to many fields as computer science developed into a discipline of its own. At Southampton he continued his almost unique abilities in writing and lecturing. In 2009, on the 60th anniversary of the completion of the Cambridge EDSAC computer, he delivered a seminal lecture on what was involved in programming this pioneering machine in the 1950s. He was one of the founding editors of '' Software: Practice and Experience'', and served as the editor from 1971 for over 30 years. Barron is the author of many texts that explained the emerging subject to generations of students and researchers. With others he published, in 1967, the manual for

Titan Autocode Autocode is the name of a family of "simplified coding systems", later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge and London. Autocode was a generic ...

programming. In subsequent years Barron wrote texts on Recursive Programming (1968), Assemblers and Loaders (1969), Operating Systems (1971 and 1984), Programming Languages (1977),

Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...

Implementation (1981), Advanced Programming (1984), Text Processing and Typesetting (1987) and Scripting Languages (2000). On his personal web page Barron modestly described himself as "old-fashioned scholar, relic of the past".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Barron, David William English computer scientists Fellows of the British Computer Society Academics of the University of Southampton 1935 births 2012 deaths