Harold Lawson

Harold W. Lawson, called Bud, ( born December 13, 1937 in Philadelphia ) is an American computer scientist.

Lawson graduated from Temple University with a bachelor's degree in 1959 and in 1983 was awarded a PhD degree at the Royal Swedish Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

While at IBM, he invented 1964/65, the pointer variable and integrated them into the programming language PL / I. It has also been adopted in programming languages ​​such as C, Pascal, C and Ada, and found an example application in the code developed by MIT and Bell Laboratories in the late 1960s MULTICS operating system, which was programmed in PL / I and eg used by General Electric and Honeywell. He taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in the late 1960s and in the 1970s and 1980s at the University of Linköping in Sweden. In 1983, he was there one of the founders of the Institute for computer science (IDA ). He also taught at the Technical University of Barcelona, the University of Malaya, the University of California, Irvine and Keio University. In 1988 he gave up teaching and worked as a consultant.

He was involved in the development of Cobol compiler for the UNIVAC II, Grace Murray Hopper 1959-1961.

As a computer architect, he was involved in the design of the MLP -900 computer (1969 /70) of the Standard Computer Corporation and was an architect of the F-CPU (Flexible Central Processing Unit) at Data Saab ( 1971-73 ).

From 1975 on, he dealt with computer systems such as in the power supply, in railways, automotive, medical and military.

In 2000 he received the computer with other Pioneer Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Writings

• A journey through the system landscape, College Publications 2010