Robert S. Barton

Robert Stanley "Bob" Barton(February 13, 1925 – January 28, 2009) was the chief architect of theBurroughsB5000and other computers such as theB1700,a co-inventor ofdataflow architecture,and an influential professor at theUniversity of Utah.

Robert S. Barton
Born	(1925-02-13)February 13, 1925 New Britain, Connecticut,U.S.
Died	January 28, 2009(2009-01-28)(aged 83) Portland, Oregon,U.S.
Alma mater	State University of Iowa
Known for	Burroughs B5000 Stack machine
Awards	IEEE W. WallaceMcDowell Award IEEE-ACMEckert–Mauchly Award(first recipient) IEEE Computer Pioneer Award(charter recipient)
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science Mathematics
Institutions	University of Utah Burroughs Innovations & Inventions
Doctoral students	Alan Ashton Alan Davis

His students at Utah have had a large role in the development of computer science.

Barton designed machines at a more abstract level, not tied to the technology constraints of the time. He employed high-level languages and astack machinein his design of the B5000 computer. Its design survives in the modernUnisysClearPath MCP systems. His work with stack machine architectures was the first implementation in amainframe computer.

Barton died on January 28, 2009, inPortland, Oregon,aged 83.

Career

Barton was born inNew Britain, Connecticutin 1925 and received his BA in 1948, and his MS in 1949 in Mathematics, from theUniversity of Iowa.His early experience with computers was when he worked in theIBMApplied Science Department in 1951.

In 1954, he joined theShell Oil CompanyTechnical Services, working on programming applications. He worked at Shell Development, a research group in Texas where he worked with aBurroughs/Datatron 205computer. In 1958, he studiedIrving CopiandJan Łukasiewicz's work on symbolic logic andPolish notation,and considered its application to arithmetic expression processing on a computer.

Barton joinedBurroughs Corporation,ElectroData Division, inPasadena, Californiain the late 1950s.He managed a system programming group in 1959 which developed acompilernamed BALGOL for the languageALGOL 58on theBurroughs 220computer.

In 1960, he became a consultant forBeckman Instrumentsworking on data collection from satellite systems, forLockheed Corporationworking 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 forControl Data Corporation,he returned in 1965 to join the Computer Science staff of the Department of Electrical Engineering at theUniversity of Utahwhere, from 1968 to 1973,his colleagues includedDavid C. Evans,Ivan Sutherland,andThomas Stockham.His Ph.D. students at the University of Utah were Duane Call, cofounder of Computer System Architects;Alan Ashton,cofounder ofWordPerfect;andAl Davis,University of Utah professor of computer science. Other Utah students that he influenced included:Alan Kay,James H. Clarkcofounder ofSilicon Graphics,John Warnock,cofounder ofAdobe Systems,Ed CatmullofPixar,Henri Gouraud(Gouraud shading) andBui Tuong Phong(Phong shading).

After 1973, he devoted his full-time to Burroughs Systems Research inLa Jolla, San Diego, California,working on new computer architectures and systems programming.

Awards

• IEEE 1977W. Wallace McDowell AwardRecipient.“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 SocietyEckert–Mauchly Awardin 1979:For his outstanding contributions in basing the design of computing systems on the hierarchical nature of programs and their data.
• Charter Computer Pioneerby theIEEEComputer Society for his work inLanguage Directed Architecture.

Selected papers

• Barton, Robert S. (January 1961)."Another (Nameless) Compiler for the Burroughs 220".Communications of the ACM.4(1): 0.11.doi:10.1145/366062.366070.
• Barton, Robert S. (May 1961)."A New Approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer".NJCC Conference Proceedings.19th Joint Computer Conference, Los Angeles, California, May 9–11, 1961. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. pp.393–396.doi:10.1145/1460690.1460736.Retrieved2020-12-07.
• Barton, Robert S. (September 1961). "System Description for an Improved Information Processing Machine".ACM Conference Proceedings.16th Association for Computing Machinery National Conference, Los Angeles, California, September 5–8, 1961. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. pp.103.101 –103.104.doi:10.1145/800029.808539.
• Barton, Robert S. (September 1961). "Functional Design of Computers".Communications of the ACM.4(9): 405.doi:10.1145/366696.366774.S2CID47077103.
• Barton, Robert S. (May 1963)."A Critical Review of the State of the Programming Art".AFIPS Conference Proceedings.23rd Joint Computer Conference, Detroit, Michigan, May 21–23, 1963. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. pp.169–177.doi:10.1145/1461551.1461574.Retrieved2020-12-07.
• Barton, Robert S. (December 1969)."Ideas for Computer Systems Organization: A Personal Survey".Software Engineering.3rd Computer and Information Sciences Conference, Miami Beach, Florida, December 18–20, 1969. Vol. 1. New York: Academic Press. pp.7–16.ISBN9780323157445.Retrieved2020-12-07.

Quotes

"Systems programmers are the high priests of alow cult."(1967)

References

• "Robert S. Barton: IEEE 1977 W. Wallace McDowell Award Recipient"

Further reading

• Waychoff, Richard,"Stories about the B5000 and people who were there",April 9, 1979

External links

• The Early History of Smalltalk by Alan C. Kay
• History of the School of Computing – University of Utah
• History of the College of Engineering – University of Utah(see pp. 52, 63)
• A Critical Review of the State of the Programming Art
• A New Approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer (Barton, 1961)