Massachusetts Computer Associates (originally just Computer Associates), also known as COMPASS, was a software company founded by Thomas Edward Cheatham Jr. and based in Wakefield, Massachusetts from approximately 1961 to 1991, focusing primarily on programming language design and implementation, especially source-to-source transformation. [1] It was acquired in the late 1960s by Applied Data Research.
Many well-known computer scientist were employed by, or consulted for, COMPASS at some point in their careers, including Michael J. Fischer, Stephen Warshall, Robert W. Floyd, and Leslie Lamport. [2] Some of the systems they worked on include AMBIT/G [3] and IVTRAN, a Fortran compiler for the ILLIAC IV. [4]
Leslie Lamport wrote his influential "Time, Clocks" paper while he was at COMPASS. [5] [2]
The original vectorizing compiler for the ILLIAC IV was written at COMPASS [6] with contributions by Lamport, who worked there part-time. [7]
Robert Floyd's Treesort algorithm was published while Floyd was at COMPASS. [8]
Applied Data Research (ADR) bought Massachusetts Computer Associates in the late 1960s. [9] ADR was sold to Ameritech in 1986 and then by Ameritech to the (unrelated) Computer Associates of New York. [10] Shortly after ADR was sold to Computer Associates, Compass was in turn sold to SofTech.
Computer programming is the process of performing particular computations, usually by designing and building executable computer programs. Programming involves tasks such as analysis, generating algorithms, profiling algorithms' accuracy and resource consumption, and the implementation of algorithms. The source code of a program is written in one or more languages that are intelligible to programmers, rather than machine code, which is directly executed by the central processing unit. To produce machine code, the source code must either be compiled or transpiled. Compiling takes the source code from a low-level programming language and converts it into machine code. Transpiling on the other hand, takes the source-code from a high-level programming language and converts it into bytecode. This is interpreted into machine code. The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate the performance of a task on a computer, often for solving a given problem. Proficient programming thus usually requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algorithms, and formal logic.
Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a 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 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++.
Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist and mathematician. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX and the author of its first manual.
Robert W Floyd was a computer scientist. His contributions include the design of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm, which efficiently finds all shortest paths in a graph and his work on parsing; Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm for detecting cycles in a sequence was attributed to him as well. In one isolated paper he introduced the important concept of error diffusion for rendering images, also called Floyd–Steinberg dithering. He pioneered in the field of program verification using logical assertions with the 1967 paper Assigning Meanings to Programs. This was a contribution to what later became Hoare logic. Floyd received the Turing Award in 1978.
Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, formal language theory, the lambda calculus and type theory.
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Clock synchronization is a topic in computer science and engineering that aims to coordinate otherwise independent clocks. Even when initially set accurately, real clocks will differ after some amount of time due to clock drift, caused by clocks counting time at slightly different rates. There are several problems that occur as a result of clock rate differences and several solutions, some being more acceptable than others in certain contexts.
SIMD within a register (SWAR), also known by the name "packed SIMD" is a technique for performing parallel operations on data contained in a processor register. SIMD stands for single instruction, multiple data. Flynn's 1972 taxonomy categorises SWAR as "pipelined processing".
Stephen Warshall was an American computer scientist. During his career, Warshall carried out research and development in operating systems, compiler design, language design, and operations research. Warshall died on December 11, 2006 of cancer at his home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is survived by his wife, Sarah Dunlap, and two children, Andrew D. Warshall and Sophia V. Z. Warshall.
Applied Data Research (ADR) was a large software vendor from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. ADR is often described as "the first independent software vendor".
Kanianthra Mani Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a professor at Caltech since 1989. He also served as Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology.
David J. Kuck, a graduate of the University of Michigan, was a professor in the Computer Science Department the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1965 to 1993. He is the father of Olympic silver medalist Jonathan Kuck. While at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign he developed the Parafrase compiler system (1977), which was the first testbed for the development of automatic vectorization and related program transformations. In his role as Director (1986–93) of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development (CSRD-UIUC), Kuck led the construction of the CEDAR project, a hierarchical shared-memory 32-processor SMP supercomputer completed in 1988 at the University of Illinois.
Datacom/DB is a relational database management system for mainframe computers. It was developed in the early 1970s by Computer Information Management Company and was subsequently owned by Insyte, Applied Data Research, Ameritech, and Computer Associates International, Inc. Datacom was acquired by CA Technologies, which renamed it to CA-Datacom/DB and later to CA Datacom/DB. In 2018, Broadcom acquired CA Technologies which included the CA Datacom product family. In 2021, Broadcom has dropped the CA and now refers to the product family as Datacom or Datacom/DB.
Michael John Fischer is an American computer scientist who works in the fields of distributed computing, parallel computing, cryptography, algorithms and data structures, and computational complexity.
Information Processing Letters is a peer-reviewed scientific journal in the field of computer science, published by Elsevier. The aim of the journal is to enable fast dissemination of results in the field of information processing in the form of short papers. Submissions are limited to nine double-spaced pages.
TLA+ is a formal specification language developed by Leslie Lamport. It is used for designing, modelling, documentation, and verification of programs, especially concurrent systems and distributed systems. TLA+ is considered to be exhaustively-testable pseudocode, and its use likened to drawing blueprints for software systems; TLA is an acronym for Temporal Logic of Actions.
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