Allan L. Scherr

Last updated

Allan L. Scherr
Born (1940-11-18) November 18, 1940 (age 82)
Baltimore, Maryland
Education
Awards Grace Murray Hopper Award (1975)
Scientific career
Fields Computer science
Thesis An Analysis of Time-Shared Computer Systems (1965)

Allan L. Scherr (born November 18, 1940) is an American computer scientist notable for his work in time-sharing operating systems and leading the original development of the IBM MVS operating system, used on IBM mainframe computers.

Scherr was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 18, 1940. In 1958, he graduated from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. In 1962, he earned his S.B. and S.M. at MIT, where his studies were focused on computer logic design. [1]

As a Ph.D. student at MIT, Scherr was a part of the original group of graduate students in Project MAC (a part of the future Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and earned a Ph.D. in 1965. His research involved measuring and modeling the performance of the Compatible Time-Sharing System, which earned him the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1975. [1] [2]

In 1965, Scherr joined IBM. He worked on the architecture for the IBM System/370 computers and did work that was instrumental in establishing the IBM System/360 Operating System. In 1971, he became a part of the IBM task force that proposed the creation of MVS, and managed the project until its release in 1974. In 1977, he took over the management of the development of the IBM DPPX for the IBM 8100 minicomputer. In 1991, he became vice president of technology of the IBM Consulting Group. [1] He was named an IBM Fellow in recognition of his contributions to IBM. [3]

After leaving IBM, he retired from the EMC Corporation in 2001, where he was senior vice president of software engineering. [3] In 2015 he ran for Town Board of Rhinebeck, New York. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MVS</span> Operating system for IBM mainframes

Multiple Virtual Storage, more commonly called MVS, is the most commonly used operating system on the System/370, System/390 and IBM Z IBM mainframe computers. IBM developed MVS, along with OS/VS1 and SVS, as a successor to OS/360. It is unrelated to IBM's other mainframe operating system lines, e.g., VSE, VM, TPF.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operating system</span> Software that manages computer hardware resources

An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Time-sharing</span> Computing resource shared by concurrent users

In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conversational Monitor System</span>

The Conversational Monitor System is a simple interactive single-user operating system. CMS was originally developed as part of IBM's CP/CMS operating system, which went into production use in 1967. CMS is part of IBM's VM family, which runs on IBM mainframe computers. VM was first announced in 1972, and is still in use today as z/VM.

This article presents a timeline of events in the history of computer operating systems from 1951 to the current day. For a narrative explaining the overall developments, see the History of operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fernando J. Corbató</span> American computer scientist (1926–2019)

Fernando José "Corby" Corbató was an American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VM (operating system)</span> Family of IBM operating systems

VM is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CP/CMS</span> IBM operating system specializing in virtualization

CP/CMS is a discontinued time-sharing operating system of the late 1960s and early 1970s, known for its excellent performance and advanced features. It had three distinct versions:

The Job Entry Subsystem (JES) is a component of IBM's MVS mainframe operating systems that is responsible for managing batch workloads. In modern times, there are two distinct implementations of the Job Entry System called JES2 and JES3. They are designed to provide efficient execution of batch jobs.

OfficeVision was an IBM proprietary office support application.

Richard P. Gabriel is an American computer scientist known for his work in computing related to the programming language Lisp, and especially Common Lisp. His best known work was a 1990 essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big", which introduced the phrase Worse is Better, and his set of benchmarks for Lisp, termed Gabriel Benchmarks, published in 1985 as Performance and evaluation of Lisp systems. These became a standard way to benchmark Lisp implementations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Kotok</span> American computer scientist

Alan Kotok was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Steven Levy, in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, describes Kotok and his classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first true hackers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VPS/VM</span>

VPS/VM was an operating system that ran on IBM System/370 – IBM 3090 computers at Boston University in general use from 1977 to around 1990, and in limited use until at least 1993. During the 1980s, VPS/VM was the main operating system of Boston University and often ran up to 250 users at a time when rival VM/CMS computing systems could only run 120 or so users.

This article covers the History of CP/CMS — the historical context in which the IBM time-sharing virtual machine operating system was built.

The history of IBM mainframe operating systems is significant within the history of mainframe operating systems, because of IBM's long-standing position as the world's largest hardware supplier of mainframe computers. IBM mainframes run operating systems supplied by IBM and by third parties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OS/360 and successors</span> Operating system for IBM S/360 and later mainframes

OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB and Input/Output Control System (IOCS) packages for the IBM 7090/7094 and even more so by the PR155 Operating System for the IBM 1410/7010 processors. It was one of the earliest operating systems to require the computer hardware to include at least one direct access storage device.

James George Mitchell is a Canadian computer scientist. He has worked on programming language design and implementation, interactive programming systems, dynamic interpreting and compiling, document preparing systems, user interface design, distributed transactional file systems, and distributed, object-oriented operating systems. He has also worked on the design of hardware for computer graphics, high-level programming language execution, and audio input/output.

Tom Van Vleck is an American computer software engineer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edson Hendricks</span> American computer scientist

Edson C. Hendricks, an IBM computer scientist, developed RSCS, fundamental software that powered the world’s largest network prior to the Internet and which directly influenced both Internet development and user acceptance of networking between independently managed organizations. Within IBM, the resulting network later became known as VNET and grew to 4000 nodes. In the academic community, VNET formed the base for BITNET which extended to 500 organizations and 3,000 nodes. VNET was also the networking design underpinning EARN in Europe, and NETNORTH in Canada.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Computer Pioneers - Allan L. Scherr". history.computer.org. IEEE Computer Society. Retrieved May 30, 2019.
  2. "Allan L. Scherr". awards.acm.org. Association for Computing Machinery.
  3. 1 2 Scherr, Allan L. (January 1, 2005). "Managing for Breakthroughs in Productivity". SSRN   655822.
  4. "Rhinebeck Candidate Profiles". Poughkeepsie Journal . October 29, 2015. p. 5A. Retrieved June 6, 2019 via Newspapers.com.