David W. Barron

David William Barron FBCS (9 January 1935 – 2 January 2012) was a British academic in Physics and Computer Science who was described in the Times Higher Education magazine as one of the "founding fathers" of computer science.[3]

David W. Barron
Born(1935-01-09)9 January 1935[1]
Died2 January 2012(2012-01-02) (aged 76)[2][3]
Southampton, Hampshire, England
NationalityBritish
SiglumDWB
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom
Known forIonospheric Studies
Programming Language Design and Implementation
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics
Computer Science
InstitutionsUniversity of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory
University of Southampton
British Computer Society
Doctoral studentsDavid De Roure (1990)[4]

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[5][6] 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. His research involved very early work in computer applications and he was a user of the original EDSAC 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 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). 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.[7] CPL was notable for leading to BCPL and hence B and then C programming language.

Barron left Cambridge in 1967 to take up a chair of computer science at the University of Southampton 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.[8]

He was one of the founding editors of Software: Practice and Experience,[9] 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 programming.[10] In subsequent years Barron wrote texts on Recursive Programming (1968),[11] Assemblers and Loaders (1969),[12] Operating Systems (1971 and 1984),[13][14] Programming Languages (1977),[15] Pascal Implementation (1981),[16] Advanced Programming (1984),[17] Text Processing and Typesetting (1987)[18] and Scripting Languages (2000).[19]

On his personal web page Barron modestly described himself as "old-fashioned scholar, relic of the past".[20]

References
  1. Grant, John (1971). Who's who of British scientists. ISBN 978-0-58211464-7. Retrieved 2012-01-11.
  2. "Professor David Barron". In Memory and Celebration. University of Southampton. 2012-01-02. Archived from the original on 2020-03-10. Retrieved 2012-01-11.
  3. "David Barron, 1935–2012". Times Higher Education. TES Global. 2012-02-02. ISSN 0049-3929. Archived from the original on 2020-03-10. Retrieved 2012-02-03.
  4. De Roure, David "Dave" Charles (1990). A lisp environment for modelling distributed systems (quasi parallel lisp) (PhD thesis). University of Southampton. Order number AAIDX94677. (261 pages)
  5. Rishbeth, Henry; Barron, David William (1960). "Equilibrium electron distributions in the ionospheric F2 layer". Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics. 18 (2–3): 234–252. Bibcode:1960JATP...18..234R. doi:10.1016/0021-9169(60)90095-7.
  6. Barron, David William (1959). "The 'Waveguide mode' theory of radio wave propagation when the ionosphere is not sharply bounded". Philosophical Magazine. 4 (45): 1068–1081. Bibcode:1959PMag....4.1068B. doi:10.1080/14786435908238287.
  7. Barron, David William; Buxton, John N.; Hartley, David Fielding; Nixon, Eric; Strachey, Christopher S. (1963). "The main features of CPL". The Computer Journal. 6 (2): 134–143. doi:10.1093/comjnl/6.2.134.
  8. Barron, David William (2010). "EDSAC: A Programmer Remembers". The Computer Journal.
  9. "Software: Practice and Experience". Wiley. doi:10.1002/(ISSN)1097-024X. ISSN 1097-024X. Archived from the original on 2016-03-28.
  10. Barron, David William; et al. (1967). Titan Autocode programming manual (3 ed.). Cambridge, UK: University Mathematical Laboratory, University of Cambridge. OCLC 459308. Retrieved 2020-03-10. (108 pages)
  11. Barron, David William (1968) [1967]. Written at Cambridge, UK. Gill, Stanley (ed.). Recursive techniques in programming. Macdonald Computer Monographs (1 ed.). London, UK: Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. Bibcode:1970rtp..book.....B. SBN 356-02201-3. (viii+64 pages)
  12. Barron, David William (1978) [1971, 1969]. Written at University of Southampton, Southampton, UK. Floretin, J. John (ed.). Assemblers and Loaders. Computer Monographs (3 ed.). New York, USA: Elsevier North-Holland Inc. ISBN 0-444-19462-2. LCCN 78-19961. (xii+100 pages)
  13. Barron, David William (1971). Computer operating systems (1 ed.). Chapman and Hall.
  14. Barron, David William (1984). Computer operating systems: for micros, minis, and mainframes (2 ed.). Chapman and Hall.
  15. Barron, David William (1977). An introduction to the study of programming languages. Cambridge University Press.
  16. Barron, David William (1981-04-07). PASCAL - The Language and its Implementation. Wiley Series in Computing. Vol. 23 (1 ed.). Wiley. ISBN 0-47127835-1. (312 pages)
  17. Barron, David William; Bishop, Judith "Judy" Mary (1984). Advanced Programming: A Practical Course. Wiley series in computing (1 ed.). John Wiley & Sons Ltd. ISBN 0-47190521-6. (277 pages)
  18. Barron, David William; Rees, Michael "Mike" J. (1987). Text processing and typesetting with Unix. International Computer Science Series (1 ed.). Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-20114219-8. (464 pages)
  19. Barron, David William (July 2000). The world of scripting languages. Worldwide Series in Computer Science (1 ed.). Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-99886-0. (506 pages)
  20. Barron, David William (2010). "David Barron". School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. Archived from the original (personal web page) on 2012-03-06. Retrieved 2010-06-17.
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