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For a former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, see
Robert S. "Bob" Barton (February 13, 1925 – January 28, 2009) was recognized as the chief architect of the Burroughs B5000 and other computers such as the B1700. He directed a research lab for Burroughs Corporation in La Jolla, California. He also taught, from 1968-1973, as a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah with David C. Evans, Ivan Sutherland, and Thomas Stockham.
| Robert Stanley Barton | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | February 13, 1925 New Britain, Connecticut |
| Died | January 28, 2009 (aged 83) Portland, Oregon |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Fields | Computer science mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Utah Innovations & Inventions |
| Alma mater | State University of Iowa |
| Known for | Burroughs B5000 stack architecture |
| Influenced | Alan Ashton Duane Call |
| Notable awards | IEEE W. Wallace McDowell Award IEEE-ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award (first recipient) |
Barton was the first recipient of the ACM/IEEE Computer Society Eckert–Mauchly Award in 1979: For his outstanding contributions in basing the design of computing systems on the hierarchical nature of programs and their data.
He was also recognized as a Charter Computer Pioneer by the IEEE Computer Society for his work in Language Directed Architecture. Barton designed machines at a more abstract level, not tied to the technology constraints of the time. He employed high level languages and a stack machine in his design of the B5000. Barton's B5000 design lives on in the modern Unisys ClearPath/MCP systems. His work with stack architectures was the first implementation in a mainframe computer. Hewlett-Packard would later use the stack architecture in its HP calculators with reverse polish notation.
Barton's thinking has been broadly influential. He influenced the thinking of Alan Kay in the development of object-oriented programming, Smalltalk, and the modern GUI systems built into the Macintosh and later Microsoft Windows.
His Ph. D. students at the University of Utah were Duane Call, co-founder of Computer System Architects; Alan Ashton, co-founder of WordPerfect; and Al Davis, University of Utah professor of computer science. Other Utah students that he influenced included: Alan Kay, James H. Clark co-founder of Silicon Graphics, John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems, Ed Catmull of Pixar, Henri Gouraud (Gouraud Shading) and Bui Tuong Phong (Phong shading).
Barton died on January 28, 2009, in Portland, Oregon, age 83.[1]
Selected papers
- Barton, Robert S., "Functional Design of Computers", Commununications of the ACM 4(9): 405 (1961)
- Barton, Robert S., "A New Approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer", Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, May 1961, pp.393-396.
References
- ^ "Robert Barton, 83, services pending", The Hillsboro Argus, 2009-01-30.
External links
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