John Mashey

Last updated
John Mashey
Born
John R. Mashey

1946 (age 77–78)
NationalityAmerican
Education Pennsylvania State University (PhD)
Occupations
  • Computer scientist
  • director
  • entrepreneur
SpouseAngela Hey

John R. Mashey (born 1946) is an American computer scientist, director and entrepreneur.

Contents

Career

Mashey holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Pennsylvania State University, [1] where he developed the ASSIST assembler language teaching software. [2] He worked on the PWB/UNIX operating system at Bell Labs from 1973 to 1983, authoring the PWB shell, also known as the "Mashey Shell". [3] He then moved to Silicon Valley to join Convergent Technologies, ending as director of software. [4] He joined MIPS Computer Systems in early 1985, managing operating systems development, and helping design the MIPS RISC architecture, as well as specific CPUs, systems and software. [4] He continued similar work at Silicon Graphics (1992–2000), contributing to the design of the NUMAflex modular computer architecture using NUMAlink, ending as VP and chief scientist. [4] [5]

Mashey was one of the founders of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) benchmarking group, was an ACM National Lecturer for four years, has been guest editor for IEEE Micro , and one of the long-time organizers of the Hot Chips conferences. [4] He chaired technical conferences on operating systems and CPU chips, and gave public talks on software engineering, RISC design, performance benchmarking and supercomputing. He has been credited for being the first to spread the term and concept of big data in the 1990s. [6] [7] [8] He became a consultant for venture capitalists and high-tech companies and a trustee of the Computer History Museum in 2001. [9] [4] In 1997 he received Pennsylvania State University's first Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award for Computer Science and Engineering. In 2012, he received the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ("Flame Award") "for his contributions to the UNIX community since its early days". [10] [11]

He has written articles for the Skeptical Inquirer [12] regarding climate change denial. In 2010 he published a 250-page critical report on the Wegman Report. [13] Mashey's report concluded that the Wegman Report contained plagiarized text. This story was featured in USA Today , [14] and he was interviewed in Science magazine, which stated that he was "spending his retirement years compiling voluminous critiques of what he calls the 'real conspiracy' to produce 'climate antiscience'." [15] His research has investigated the secretive funding of climate contrarian thinktanks. [16] Mashey blogs at DeSmogBlog, which focuses on global warming. [17]

Mashey became a scientific and technical consultant for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in 2015. [18]

Personal life

Mashey is married to Angela Hey, a Cambridge University and Waterloo University graduate with a Ph.D. from Imperial College, London.[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew S. Tanenbaum</span> American-Dutch computer scientist (born 1944)

Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum, sometimes referred to by the handle AST, is an American-born Dutch computer scientist and retired professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unix shell</span> Command-line interpreter for Unix operating system

A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or shell that provides a command line user interface for Unix-like operating systems. The shell is both an interactive command language and a scripting language, and is used by the operating system to control the execution of the system using shell scripts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Gosling</span> Canadian computer scientist (born 1955)

James Arthur Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas McIlroy</span> American mathematician and computer scientist

Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is an American mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed several Unix tools, such as echo, spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr. He was also one of the pioneering researchers of macro processors and programming language extensibility. He participated in the design of multiple influential programming languages, particularly PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">USENIX</span> Organization supporting operating system research

USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several conferences in these fields.

ASSIST is an IBM System/370-compatible assembler and interpreter developed in the early 1970s at Penn State University by Graham Campbell and John Mashey along with student assistants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Lions</span> Australian computer scientist (1937–1998)

John Lions was an Australian computer scientist. He is best known as the author of Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code, commonly known as the Lions Book.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RISC iX</span> Discontinued Unix operating system

RISC iX is a discontinued Unix operating system designed to run on a series of workstations based on the Acorn Archimedes microcomputer. Heavily based on 4.3BSD, it was initially completed in 1988, a year after Arthur but before RISC OS. It was introduced in the ARM2-based R140 workstation in 1989, followed up by the ARM3-based R200-series workstations in 1990.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Patterson (computer scientist)</span> American computer pioneer and academic (born 1947)

David Andrew Patterson is an American computer scientist and academic who has held the position of professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976. He is a computer pioneer. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at Google. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stuart Feldman</span> American computer scientist

Stuart Feldman is an American computer scientist. He is best known as the creator of the computer software program Make. He was also an author of the first Fortran 77 compiler, was part of the original group at Bell Labs that created the Unix operating system, and participated in development of the ALTRAN and EFL programming languages.

The Thompson shell was the first Unix shell, introduced in the first version of Unix in 1971, and was written by Ken Thompson. It was a simple command interpreter, not designed for scripting, but nonetheless introduced several innovative features to the command-line interface and led to the development of the later Unix shells.

The Programmer's Workbench (PWB/UNIX) was an early, now discontinued, version of the Unix operating system that had been created in the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Group of AT&T. Its stated goal was to provide a time-sharing working environment for large groups of programmers, writing software for larger batch processing computers.

Michael E. Lesk is an American computer scientist.

SUPER-UX was a version of the Unix operating system from NEC that is used on its SX series of supercomputers.

The PWB shell was a Unix shell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margo Seltzer</span> American computer scientist

Margo Ilene Seltzer is an American computer scientist. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan H. Rodger</span> American computer scientist

Susan H. Rodger is an American computer scientist known for work in computer science education including developing the software JFLAP for over twenty years. JFLAP is educational software for visualizing and interacting with formal languages and automata. Rodger is also known for peer-led team learning in computer science and integrating computing into middle schools and high schools with Alice. She is also currently serving on the board of CRA-W and was chair of ACM SIGCSE from 2013 to 2016.

Jason Nieh is a professor of Computer Science and co-director of the Software Systems Laboratory at Columbia University. He was the technical advisor to nine States regarding the Microsoft antitrust settlement and has been an expert witness before the United States International Trade Commission. He was Chief Scientist of Desktone, which was purchased by VMware, and currently holds the same position at CertiK.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Software Tools Users Group</span>

The Software Tools Users Group (STUG) was a technical organization started in 1976, in parallel with Usenix. The STUG goal was to develop a powerful and portable Unix-like system that could be implemented on top of virtually any operating system, providing the capabilities and features of Unix in a non-proprietary system. With its focus on building clean, portable, reusable code shared amongst multiple applications and runnable on any operating system, the Software Tools movement reestablished the tradition of open source and the concepts of empowering users to define, develop, control, and freely distribute their computing environment.

Rudd Canaday is an American computer systems engineer and a previous member of the technical staff at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, credited to co-develop the initial design of the Unix file system. In 2015 he joined a Palo Alto based tech startup, Entefy, as a Senior Architect & Engineer.

References

  1. ↑ Mashey, John R. (1974). Semantic error detection in programming languages (PhD). Dissertation Abstracts International B. Vol. 35. Pennsylvania State University. p. 2700. ISBN   9798641079790.
  2. ↑ Mashey, J.R. (February 1973). "ASSIST: Three year's experience with a student-oriented assembler". ACM SIGCSE Bulletin - Proceedings of the 3rd SIGCSE Symposium on Computer Science Education. 5 (1): 157–165. doi:10.1145/800010.808101. S2CID   45453765.
  3. ↑ Dolotta, T.A.; Haight, R.C.; Mashey, J.R. (July–August 1978). "The Programmer's Workbench" (PDF). Bell System Technical Journal. 57 (6 Part 2): 2177–2200. doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1978.tb02148.x. S2CID   21869088.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "John Mashey". Trustee bio. Computer History Museum. Retrieved September 28, 2016.
  5. ↑ John Mashey (August 30, 2000). "NUMAflex Modular Design Approach: A Revolution in Evolution" . Retrieved September 28, 2016.
  6. ↑ Fan, Wei; Bifet, Albert (December 2012). "Mining big data: current status, and forecast to the future". ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter. 14 (2): 1–5. doi:10.1145/2481244.2481246. S2CID   141328.
  7. ↑ Lohr, Steve (February 1, 2013). "The Origins of 'Big Data': An Etymological Detective Story". New York Times . Retrieved September 28, 2016.
  8. ↑ John R. Mashey (April 25, 1998). "Big Data ... and the Next Wave of InfraStress" (PDF). Slides from invited talk. Usenix. Retrieved September 28, 2016.
  9. ↑ "Board of Trustees". Core. 2 (3). Computer Museum History Center: 1. October 2001.
  10. ↑ "Flame Award". USENIX. 2011-12-06. Archived from the original on 14 September 2014. Retrieved 2020-04-12. 2012: John Mashey receives the USENIX Flame award for his contributions to the UNIX community since its early days. He has made contributions to rigorous, disciplined systems evaluation, particularly the SPEC benchmark suite. Mashey worked on the Programmers Work Bench (PWB) and the UNIX operating system, including the creation of the PWB shell (or Mashey Shell). John has given over 500 public talks on software engineering, RISC design, performance benchmarking and supercomputing and is currently a trustee of the Computer History Museum.
  11. ↑ "Flame Award". USENIX. 6 December 2011.
  12. ↑ Mashey, John R. (2011). "Strange Problems in the Wegman Report". Skeptical Inquirer.
  13. ↑ Mashey, John R. (2010). "Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report: A Façade for the Climate Anti-Science PR Campaign" (PDF). Deep Climate (blog). 1.02.
  14. ↑ Dan Vergano (2010-11-23). "Experts claim 2006 climate report plagiarized". USA Today.
  15. ↑ Kintisch E (10 June 2011). "Newsmaker Interview: John Mashey: Computer Scientist Goes on Offensive to Defend Climate Scientists". Science . 332 (6035): 1250–1. doi:10.1126/science.332.6035.1250. PMID   21659577. (article paywalled)
  16. ↑ Suzanne Goldenberg (14 February 2013). "Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks". The Guardian . Retrieved 14 February 2013.
  17. ↑ Mashey, John. "John Mashey's blog". Desmog. DeSmogBlog . Retrieved April 14, 2015.
  18. ↑ "Ten Distinguished Scientists and Scholars Named Fellows of Committee for Skeptical Inquiry - CSI". www.csicop.org. Archived from the original on 2015-10-16. Retrieved 2015-10-15.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.