Gerrit Blaauw
Gerrit Blaauw Anne, named Gerry, ( born July 17, 1924 in The Hague) is a Dutch computer engineer.
Blaauw studied at the Delft University of Technology Electrical Engineering with the degree magna cum laude in 1946 and then with a grant from IBM in 1947 at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and then at Harvard University, where he in 1949 and made his master's degree at Howard Aiken on the Mark III and Mark IV computers worked. Aiken developed this with proven technology for the U.S. Navy, and they proved to be very reliable, which later was reflected in the ascribed at IBM Blaauw sentence: Established technology Tends to persist in the face of new technology ( Established technology tends to be against new technology to maintain ). In addition, he was later known then and later at IBM for his methodical approach to computer design. With his work on the Mark IV he received his doctorate in 1952 at Harvard. He returned to the Netherlands, where he was involved in the development of the second version of the relay computer ARRA at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam. The first version of 1952 by Carel Scholten and Bram Loopstra proved to be a failure, and the second version with the participation of Blaauw was a complete redesign. In addition to the ARRA II is also a version for Fokker, which was used in 1955 for the design of successful Fokker Friendship aircraft originated.
In 1955 he went back to the U.S. to IBM in the development department to Poughkeepsie, where he met Frederick P. Brooks on various projects (IBM 7030 STRETCH, IBM 8000 series ), and finally the key object by IBM in the mainframe area, System/360, worked, which was announced in 1964. He was next to Brooks, Gene Amdahl one of the leading engineers in the project. On him the use decreased from 8 bits ( 1 byte) character size instead of the then widespread 6 bit and he designed the Blaauw Box, a revolutionary system of address translation for the realization from virtual memory ( with paging ). Its use was indeed deleted from the draft of the first version, but came in version 67 and is probably its first use in a commercial mainframes. The System/360 was also a pioneer in the use of time-sharing and multiprogramming in the commercial sector.
After his time at IBM, he became a professor at the University of Twente, where he retired in 1989.
In 1994 he received the Computer Pioneer Award.
Writings
- With Frederick Brooks Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution, Addison -Wesley 1997