Robert S. Barton

Robert Stanley Barton (born February 13, 1925 in New Britain , Connecticut , † January 28, 2009 in Portland , Oregon ) was an American computer scientist and computer architect.

Barton studied mathematics at Iowa State University with a bachelor's degree in 1948 and a master's degree in 1949. He gained his first experience with computers in 1951 in the Applied Science Department of IBM . From 1954 he worked as a programmer for Shell , including on computers for the Burroughs Corporation . From the end of the 1950s he worked for Burroughs in Pasadena , initially on a compiler for an ALGOL -58 version (called BALGOL) on the Burroughs 220. From 1960 he was an independent consultant, for example for Beckman Instruments (data processing in connection with satellite systems) , Lockheed and especially for Burroughs, where he was one of the main architects for the B5000 (from 1961). In 1963 he worked for Control Data Corporation in Australia . From 1965 he was at the University of Utah , where he was professor of electrical engineering from 1968 to 1973. At the same time he was a consultant at General Electric and Burroughs, among others , where he worked on the architecture of the B6700 and B1700. At the University of Utah, he influenced students like Alan Kay , James H. Clark (co-founder of Netscape), John Warnock , Ed Catmull , Alan Ashton (Word Perfect co-founder), Duane Call (co-founder of Computer System Architects) and the computer graphics Pioneers Henri Gouraud and Bùi Tường Phong . After his time at the University of Utah, he worked in the research department of Burroughs in La Jolla .

At Burroughs, he implemented computers with commands based on the stack memory concept, first in the B5000, which was already optimized in the instruction set for the execution of a high-level programming language (Algol). These ideas arose from his studies of reverse Polish notation by Jan Łukasiewicz while he was still at Shell.

With Alan L. Davis , he developed the first computer with data flow architecture , the DDM-1 (a cooperation between the University of Utah and Burroughs) from 1972 to 1976 .

In 1977 he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award . In 1974 he was a keynote speaker at the ACM National Meeting in San Diego . In 1979 he received the Eckert Mauchly Award .

Fonts

• Functional Design of Computers , Communications of the ACM, Volume 4, Issue 9, 1961, p. 405
• A New Approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer , Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, May 1961, pp. 393-396.
• A Critical Review of the State of Programming Art , AFIPS Joint Computer Conferences, May 1963, pp. 169-177.
• Ideas for Computer Systems Organization: A Personal Survey , Software Engineering, Vol. 1, 1970, pp. 7-16

Web links

• Biography on the McDowell Award pages
• Obituary at the University of Utah