People

Additional contributions welcome. To add items you must be registered and signed in, see the Welcome page for details, or send items to  mts-comments@umich.edu. Many of the biographical sketches below began life in the People section of Tom Valerio's MTS Wiki.

More photographs may be found in the Images section of this web site.

Initials are used to attribute some of the comments that appear below as follows: ACG is Andy Goodrich, JCO is Jeff Ogden, JS is John Sanguinetti, and MTA is Mike Alexander.

Michael T. Alexander (Mike, MTA.)

Photograph of Mike Alexander
"There have been many contributors to MTS, but the credit for molding its original structure is shared by Michael T. Alexander and Donald W. Boettner ...". ["A Faster Cratchit", UM Research News, January 1976, page 15]

Research Assistant, Research Associate, Senior Systems Research Programmer, and Assistant Research Scientist at the Computing Center and ITD Research Systems at the University of Michigan, 1965-1996.

Mike came to Ann Arbor in 1964 as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, but after one semester got bored with that and took a job at the Computing Center writing software for an IBM 1410 to spool input and output for the IBM 7090 that provided academic computing support. In 1965 Time Sharing was all the rage and the University, along with others, convinced IBM to build a special time sharing version of the S/360 which eventually became the S/360-67.  To get a head start with time sharing the Computing Center and the CONCOMP project leased a S/360-50 to try out ideas before the 360/67 arrived.  Since there wasn't room in the machine room for both the model 50 and the 1410, Mike rewrote the spooling software to run on the model 50.  That led more or less directly into working on an experimental time sharing system on the S/360-50.  When the S/360-67 arrived in January 1967, this spooling and time sharing system was moved to that. Within the next year or so virtual memory support was added and it turned into a real time sharing system. At that time the University still expected to run IBM's TSS, but that never happened and MTS became the main time sharing system for U-M and several other universities.  Mike stayed at UM until 1996 and spent most of that time guiding the development of MTS, although he did work on some other things such as Macintosh network drivers. Mike is retired and still lives in Ann Arbor.

JCO: I know that Don and Mike were the first MTS developers. I've always assumed, but I'm not sure if anyone actually told me, that Mike mostly did UMMPS and Don mostly did the command language. Is that fair? MTA: Yes, that's correct.

Mike was one of the authors of Chaos, a leading computer chess program from 1973 through 1985. Written in FORTRAN, Chaos started at RCA Systems Programming division in Cinnaminson, NJ with Fred Swartz and Victor Berman as first authors. Mike and others joined the team later and moved development to MTS at the University of Michigan Computing Center.

Contents

  1. 1 Michael T. Alexander (Mike, MTA.)
  2. 2 Bruce Arden
  3. 3 Eric M. Aupperle
  4. 4 Alan Ballard
  5. 5 Elizabeth Barraclough
  6. 6 Robert C. F. Bartels (Bob, RCFB)
  7. 7 Dale Bent
  8. 8 Jeff Berryman 
  9. 9 James F. Blinn (Jim)
  10. 10 Donald W. Boettner (Don, DWB.)
  11. 11 Ken Bowler
  12. 12 Steve Burling (SRB.)
  13. 13 Viktors Berstis
  14. 14 John Campbell
  15. 15 Grant Crawford
  16. 16 Garance A. Drosehn
  17. 17 Karen Dymond
  18. 18 Gavin Eadie (Gav, W267)
  19. 19 Allen R. Emery (Al)
  20. 20 Charles F. Engle (Charlie, CFE.)
  21. 21 Aaron Finerman
  22. 22 Jon Finke
  23. 23 David S. Flower (Dave)
  24. 24 Alvin G. Fowler (Al)
  25. 25 Gerald F. Gabel (Gerry)
  26. 26  Robert Gallagher (Bob)
  27. 27 Bernard Galler (Bernie)
  28. 28 Scott Gerstenberger (WSG.)
  29. 29 Andrew C. Goodrich (Andy)
  30. 30 Suzanne D. Goodrich (Suzy)
  31. 31 Ron Hall
  32. 32 James A. Hamilton (Jim)
  33. 33 Michael Hayward
  34. 34 Leonard Harding (Len)
  35. 35 George R. Helffrich (W170)
  36. 36 James O. Henriksen (Jim)
  37. 37 Bertram Herzog (Bert)
  38. 38 John Hogg
  39. 39 Robert L. Husak (Bob)
  40. 40 William N. Joy (Bill)
  41. 41 James M. Kennedy (Jim)
  42. 42 James E. Knox (Jim)
  43. 43 Carl E. Landwehr
  44. 44 Gail H. Lift
  45. 45 John Lindley
  46. 46 Peter Madderom (Pete)
  47. 47 David L. Mills (Dave)
  48. 48 Charles G. Moore III (Kip)
  49. 49 James L. Moss (Jim)
  50. 50 Roland G. Noel (Rolly)
  51. 51 Jeffrey Ogden (Jeff, W163)
  52. 52 Ewan S. Page
  53. 53 Gary Pirkola
  54. 54 Don Porter
  55. 55 Martin Raim (Marty)
  56. 56 Shirine M. Repucci (Sherri)
  57. 57 Alan Rubens (Al)
  58. 58 John Sanguinetti
  59. 59 Ralph Sayle
  60. 60 Patrick Sherry (Pat)
  61. 61 Ron Srodawa
  62. 62 James J. Sterken (Jim, W164)
  63. 63 Elizabeth A. Sweet (Liz, EAS)
  64. 64 Dave Twyver
  65. 65 Thomas Valerio (Tom, W237)
  66. 66 Douglas Wade (Doug)
  67. 67 Bill Webb
  68. 68 Mark Weiser
  69. 69 Franklin H. Westervelt (Frank)
  70. 70 Paul Whaley 
  71. 71 Harry Whitfield
  72. 72 Mary Ann Wilkes
  73. 73 Howard B. Young
  74. 74 Karl L. Zinn

Bruce Arden

Bruce Arden's photograph

Bruce Arden started his computing career in 1950 with the wiring and programming of IBM's hybrid (mechanical and electronic) Card Programmed Computer/Calculator at the Allison Division of General Motors. Next he spent a short period as a programmer for computations being done at the University of Michigan's Willow Run Laboratory using the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer. He then became a Research Associate at the University of Michigan's Statistical Research Laboratory and later Associate Director of the University's Computing Center after its establishment in 1959. While at Michigan he co-authored two compilers, GAT[1] for the IBM 650 and MAD[2] for the IBM 704/709/7090, was involved in the design of the architecture and negotiations with IBM over the virtual memory features that would be included in what became the IBM S/360 Model 67 computer, and in the initial design of the Michigan Terminal System (MTS). He completed the doctoral program in Electrical Engineering in 1965 and was subsequently a professor in, and ultimately Chairman of, the Computer and Communication Sciences department at Michigan. In 1973 he accepted a professorship at Princeton University where he chaired the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In 1986 he went to the University of Rochester as its Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science where he later served as the Vice Provost for Telecommunications and Computing.

Eric M. Aupperle

Photograph of Eric Aupperle
  • Eric joined the U-M faculty in 1963 as an assistant research engineer and as a lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
  • In 1968 Eric was hired as a senior engineer and began the search for hardware with which to connect the computers at U-M, MSU, and WSU in what was to become the Michigan Education Research Information Triad or MERIT.
  • In 1974 he became the second director of MERIT (a position that was eventually changed to President).
  • Eric was the Director and later President of the Merit Network, an Associate Director of the U-M Computing Center, and interim Director of Network Systems within U-M's Information Technology Division.
  • From 1987 through 1995 he was the principal investigator for the NSFNET Project, a partnership between Merit, IBM, MCI, the State of Michigan, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Advanced Network and Services (ANS) joined the partnership a few years later. NSFNET was the precursor to today's Internet.
  • In 2001 he retired as President of Merit after 27 years.
  • In 2003 Eric was named Alumni Medal Recipient by the Alumni Society of U-M's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
  • In 2008 Eric received the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Southeastern Michigan (SEM) section’s Outstanding Engineer of the Year Award for technical achievements and the Third Millennium Medal for long-term service and contributions. The annual Outstanding Engineer Award was presented to Aupperle for his service to IEEE/SEM (he held eight regional officer positions in the organization since he became a member in 1955) and his contributions to the development of today’s Internet.. The Third Millennium Medal is a one-time award for the year 2000 that honors a select group of IEEE members for their “outstanding contributions to their respective areas of activity.”
  • Eric passed away April 30, 2015 at his home in Ann Arbor.

Alan Ballard

Photograph of Alan Ballard
Alan Ballard worked at the UBC Computing Centre (later known as Computing Services) from 1975 to 1993, mostly in the Systems Group. During that time he participated (with Paul Whaley and Mark Fox) in the development of the Plus systems programming language, and implemented the CLParser command line parser, the CDUpdate source file update utility, and the *Forum conferencing program. He also worked on changes to the MTS Command Language and the implementation of MTS Internet Support. He left UBC in 1993 when the Computing Centre stopped doing significant MTS development. He worked as a freelance developer until 1996 when he joined PeopleSoft (now Oracle). In 2006 he moved to Salesforce.com, Inc. He retired on 29 April 2016. Alan lives in Vancouver.

Elizabeth Barraclough

Elizabeth Barraclough's photograph
Elizabeth Barraclough was appointed a computer operator in Newcastle University’s Computing Laboratory in 1957 where she was a mathematics graduate working hands-on with FERDINAND, a Ferranti Pegasus computer, one of the earliest commercially-available mainframe computers in the world. In 1967 she was appointed Computer Manager for NUMAC – the Northumbrian Universities’ Multiple Access Computer, which had its hub at Newcastle. NUMAC installed an IBM S/360-67 mainframe which ran MTS. In the 1980 she became Executive Director of the Computing Laboratory.
  • Founder of Newcastle University's Computing Service, was made an Honorary Fellow of the University on October 9, 2006, 8 pages, PDF/A, 281KB  MTS Archive
  • Barraclough, E.D., Medlars On-line Search Formulation and Indexing Technical Report Series, B. Shaw (ed), Computing Laboratory, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, No. 34 (June 1972), 170 pp.

Robert C. F. Bartels (Bob, RCFB)

Robert C. F. Bartels photograph

Robert C. F. Bartels was appointed the first Director of the newly established University of Michigan Computing Center in 1959, a position which he held until his retirement. As Director he did a remarkable job of fostering an environment in which the Center grew to prominence as one of the best in the academic world. That he did so in spite of severe budgetary restrictions and many conflicting demands for computing services attests to his great skill as an administrator. In 1972 Professor Bartels received a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in recognition of excellence in teaching, research, and public service. Professor Bartels retired from active faculty status on June 30, 1978 and was named Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Director Emeritus of the Computing Center.

Dale Bent

Photograph of Dale Bent
Dale was a regular user of computing services as a Professor in the Business Admin Faculty at the University of Alberta and a member of the Computer User's Representatives Committee (CURC, pronounced "curse"). He became an Associate Director of the Computing Centre when it was part of the Computer Science Department and in 1971 he became the first Director of the Department of Computing Services, when it was split off from Computer Science in 1971.

Read the entire story about how UQV started to run MTS and got the first Amdahl 470V/6 in Canada as told by Dale, Gerry Gabel, and John Stasiuk in the discussion section, it is much more entertaining than the short summary here.

Dale is a semi-retired Professor of Business living in Departure Bay on Vancouver Island. He teaches online for Athabasca University. Prior to retiring, in addition to his work at the University of Alberta, Dale was with the University of Western Ontario and Victoria University of Wellington.
  • From the biography of Norman H. Nie on Wikipedia: Together with two young  [Stanford University] computer scientists, C. Hadlai (“Tex”) Hull and Dale Bent, Norman Nie invented a computer software package called the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

Jeff Berryman 

Photograph of Jeff Berryman
Jeff Berryman studied Physics at the University of Wisconsin until 1968 when he was drafted into the U.S. Army. From 1968 to 1970 he was an enlisted guy working as a systems programmer on a rather odd M-I-S system in the Pentagon. He left the army and moved to Vancouver in 1970.

Jeff worked at the UBC Computing Centre from 1970 to 1988. Most of that time was spent in the Systems Group, working on the various parts of MTS. From the late 70's on, he was active in the MTS community, working with various people at the other sites on a number of MTS evolutionary issues. He became something of a futurist and change advocate, thinking up interesting ways to change MTS. Some of these ideas found their way into implementation. Others just created a lot of enjoyable conversation.

In 1994, Jeff became a full-time audio guy after being a part-time one since 1966. He went to work full-time for the concert sound company, Jason Sound, that he helped found in 1974, while working on MTS at UBC as his day job. In 1999, Jason Sound moved to Toronto and Jeff moved with it. He now works with Electro-Voice and its parent company, Robert Bosch GmbH. He currently (November 2012) lives roughly 100 miles northwest of Toronto, next to a hamlet named Eugenia (pop ~300).
  • "The Paging Game", by Jeff Berryman, University of British Columbia, c. 1974
    • Reprinted in parts one and two of a three part "Paging" article in the U-M Computing Center Newsletter, Vol. 4 No. 7 (19 June 1974), pages 2-6, PDF  Hathi Trust
    • Also available on Wikisource and the MTS Archive.

James F. Blinn (Jim)

Photograph of Jim Blinn
In 1970, Jim received his bachelor's degree in physics and communications science, and later a master's degree in engineering from the University of Michigan. In 1978 he received a Ph.D. in computer science from the College of Engineering at the University of Utah. He first became widely known for his work as a computer graphics expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), particularly his work on the pre-encounter animations for the Voyager project, his work on the Carl Sagan Cosmos documentary series and the research of the Blinn–Phong shading model. 

Jim has received numerious awards for his computer graphics work, including: the NASA Exceptional Service medal for the Voyager Fly-by animation (1983), the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (1983), the IEEE Outstanding Contribution Award for Jim Blinn's corner (1989), a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of and to allow continuation of his work in educational animation (1991), a Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Parsons School of Design for contributions to computer graphics (1995), and the Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics (1999).

  • Modifications to the SEL Executive System (for the DEC 339 Computer Display Terminal), James H. Jackson and James F. Blinn, CONCOMP Memorandum 25, University of Michigan, February 1970
  • An Implementation of the Queue Analyzer System (QAS) on the IBM 360/67, L.S. Randall, I.S. Uppal, G.A. McClain, J.F. Blinn, CONCOMP Technical Report 22, University of Michigan, May 1970, PDF  Deep Blue
  • SELCIR: Systems Engineering Laboratory Circuit-Drawing Program, James F. Blinn, CONCOMP Technical Report 24, University of Michigan, July 1970  Deep Blue
  • Blinn, James F. and Fronczak, Edward J., "Internal Design of the University of Michigan Audio Response System for the Generation of Segmental Phonemes from Text", Proceedings of the International Computer Symposium 1975, pp. 404-10, Vol. 1, August 1975.
  • Blinn, James, and Goodrich, Andrew, "The Internal Design of the IG Routines, an Interactive Graphics System for a Large Timesharing Environment", SIGGRAPH, Proceedings, pp. 229-234, 1976.

Donald W. Boettner (Don, DWB.)

Don Boettner's photograph
"There have been many contributors to MTS, but the credit for molding its original structure is shared by Michael T. Alexander and Donald W. Boettner ...". ["A Faster Cratchit", UM Research News, January 1976, page 15]

Don was drawn to computers at an early age: In the winter semester of 1960, he took a computer course. He didn't realize at the time that it was a graduate-level course, and of the hundred or so people taking it, he was the only sophomore. But he did well and was offered a job with the Computing Center at the end of the semester. He was a temporary student employee operator and was the only staff member on Monday nights. He became a regular employee after graduation. He has worked for the same unit during his entire time here, but the unit changed its name "as required by fashion and politics," he says: the Computing Center, then ITD, ITD Research Systems and ITCS. Don is retired and lives in Ann Arbor.

JCO: I know that Don and Mike were the first MTS developers. I've always assumed, but I'm not sure if anyone actually told me, that Mike mostly did UMMPS and Don mostly did the command language. Is that fair? MTA: Yes, that's correct. MTA: Don installed HASP. JCO: Don wrote GOM (Good Old MAD) and with some help from Jim Sterken wrote the MTS Macro Processor.

Ken Bowler

Photograph of Ken Bowler sitting at a 3270 display in the UBC machine room
Ken Bowler was a *major* systems programmer for UBC. He was hired about 1974 to work on the Virtual Machine, FakeOS, etc., but then did a lot of work on the Resource Manager. He left UBC in 1983 and headed back east to Nortel. He and Ron Hall developed $SWAT, a CLS that allowed the powerful SDS debugging capabilities to be applied to the inner workings of the MTS system.

Ken passed away in February 2017. His obituary is available here.

Steve Burling (SRB.)

photograph of Steve Burling
Steve first used MTS as an undergraduate in a FORTRAN programming class at UM back in 1974 or 1975. After finishing up his degree at Cornell and learning to write PL/C and APL on Cornell's CMS system, he moved back to Ann Arbor and got a job doing database work in the Admissions Office at U-M's School of Public Health where he discovered ILIR:MICRO. He took the MTS Counselor's exam on a whim, and was offered a job at the Computing Center, half-time counseling and half-time programming.

At the Computing Center he worked on *IG, the integrated graphics routines, then the $EDIT command, and eventually the MTS job program itself. After a brief fling at management, he rewrote many of MTS' built-in commands as Plus CLSs (Command
Language Subsystems), a process started by Alan Ballard from UBC while on an extended sabbatical at UM. During the first part of 1983, he spent three months at UBC, learning about the Resource Manager, and returned to UM to do did much
of the initial work to get the RM running there.

In early 2000, Steve joined ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the social science data archive. In January 2012 he retired from ICPSR and the U-M.

Viktors Berstis

In the mid-1970s Viktors rewrote the MTS Editor Command Language Subsystem and, among other things, introduced the Visual command. He and Andy Goodrich were roommates.

Viktors Berstis is a Senior Software Engineer at IBM and an IBM Master Inventor with over 150 US patents. He started programming computers in 1965 and his experience at IBM includes architecting the System/38 - AS/400, designing and developing various compilers, research on high-level automated integrated circuit design while at the TJ Watson Research Center, and OS/2. Currently he is the technical lead and scientist for World Community Grid, where he also helps researchers exploit grid computing in their projects. With degrees from the University of Michigan, he is a senior member of the IEEE. His hobbies include playing the piano, designing and building all sorts of electronic gadgets, 3D stereoscopic photography, radio controlled airplanes, cosmology and exploiting solar energy.

John Campbell

Photograph of John Campbell
John Campbell was "one of the originals" at UBC who worked on the "we've ordered a S/360-67, but don't know what to do with it" team who uncovered MTS. He was never an MTS Systems Programmer, but worked for the UBC Library for a couple of decades.

Grant Crawford

Photograph of Grant Crawford
Lead the Textform Group at the University of Alberta. Associate Director, Acting Director 1986-87, University Computing Services, University of Alberta.

Garance A. Drosehn

Photograph of Garance Drosehn
Garance started out as Gary Robert Drosehn, a student at RPI in 1975. At the time, RPI had a 360/67 mainframe which was extremely overloaded, and running OS/MVT (for batch-job processing) and Alpha (for time-sharing). Almost all computing was done on OS/MVT, which is to say: using punch-cards. The RPI student chapter of the ACM and had a public meeting with the Provost of RPI at the time, and "impressed" upon him that the students were really really unhappy with the state of computing. Garance was one of the students who spoke at that meeting. That meeting, combined with other events, convinced the administration that they needed to improve computer facilities. This included shopping around for a new operating system, and there was a committee to evaluate various candidates. Garance was one of two student representatives on that committee. The committee selected MTS as the new operating system to use and by the fall semester of 1976, MTS was running on the mainframe for the first part of each day, and then later in the day it would switch back to OS/MVT.
In fall 1977 or spring, 1978 Garance audited a graduate-level systems programming course taught by Wilson Dillaway. Brian Eliot was in the same class. In the summer of 1978 Garance was going to leave RPI, but Wilson offered both Garance and Brian jobs as "student systems programmers". Garance went on to have a one-year stint as a "Junior systems programmer", and then was hired as an official "systems programmer". He worked on the OPERATOR job program, the MTS job program, the 3270 and 3420 (tape) DSRs, and several CLS's including the program management facility  ($PMF from Jim Hansen@UM), $MAKE, $PEEK, and the software management macros.
Garance is still at RPI (2012).

Karen Dymond

Karen Dymond's photograph

Karen came to U-M in 1964 as a keypunch operator responsible for data entry and billing at University Hospital. She later joined the staff at the Computing Center and stayed there through several name changes for over 30 years—transitioning from keypunch operator to supervisor to manager of office operations. You can see Karen at work in the films Basic Operation of the IBM 29 Card Punch (1967) and Advanced Use of the IBM 29 Card Punch (1968).

Gavin Eadie (Gav, W267)

Photograph of Gavin Eadie via Ralph Sayle
Gavin first encountered MTS when he started his professional career at Durham University in the north of England. He'd been a PhD student at Leicester University in the X-Ray Astronomy Group, writing mini-computer (PDP-8) code in support of the Ariel 5 satellite -- telecomm software to receive orbital data dumps via the tracking station in Quito, Goddard (NASA) and Appleton (UK), and scientific 'quick-look' software. When the time came to find employment he jumped ship from astronomy to computers and landed in Durham.

In 1976 he visited Ann Arbor for the third MTS Workshop and in 1979 he emigrated to the States and began working 50/50 for the Merit Network and the U-M Computing Center in Ann Arbor. After a little while in that role, he was given an opportunity to work on the Mailnet project -- a scheme to transfer email between computer systems at several universities. At that time, the Mailnet mechanism involved each university in turn making a data phone call to MIT (the hub) to drop off and pick up email messages. In addition to the communications work for Mailnet, he wrote the MTS SMTP gateway (in Plus) which was put into use between MTS sites. After that project, he started and lead a group within the Computing Center to provide "microcomputer" support to the U-M campus. During the 80's he wrote the driver for 8" floppy disks -- MTS could $Mount one like a tape. He wrote InfoX, a Mac GUI server for MTS that used Apple's MacWorkStation protocols. He is retired and still lives in Ann Arbor.

Allen R. Emery (Al)

Photograph of Al Emery
Al Emery was a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan's Dearborn campus where he was involved in establishing the campus' Chemistry Department. As part of that work, Al wanted the chemistry students to have experience with computing and how it could be used to further chemical research. And that lead to a contact with Robert Bartels and the computing facilities on U-M's Ann Arbor campus. That relationship grew and Al spent a sabbatical year working at the Computing Center in Ann Arbor. And that lead to positions as a Research Assistant, Assistant Director, Associate Director, Acting Director, and Deputy Director at the Computing Center. Some of Al's earliest work at the CC was software support for the IBM 2703 and Memorex 1270 communications controllers and support for remote batch stations (RJE). Al managed the Computing Center's operations and business office staffs, played leading roles in the design and construction of the "new" Computing Center Building on the U-M's North Campus (CNTR), in the creation of the North University Building (NUBS) and Michigan Union (UNYN) remote batch stations and public terminal sites, and in the acquisition of a series of new or upgraded computers that replaced the Center's IBM S/360-67: an IBM S/370/168, an Amdahl 470V/6, 470V/6-II, 470V/7, 470V/8, and an Amdahl 5860.

Al is a lifelong fan of Michigan football. Since 1952 in his time as a student in Ann Arbor and a faculty member in Dearborn and Ann Arbor he only missed one home football game. Al learned that Bob Bartels had been approached by Paul Schudel, an assistant to U-M's football coach, Bo Schembechler about using a computer to process detailed statistical information from football games. Dr. Bartels had turned him down, but Al followed up and ended up writing a program that ran on MTS that was used by the football program for 10 or 12 years starting in the fall of 1977.

Al is retired and lives in Ann Arbor.

Charles F. Engle (Charlie, CFE.)

Charles F. Engle's photograph
As a graduate student at U-M, Charlie took a computer programming course in the early 1960s, which led to a job at the Computing Center. He received a degree in 1966 and was offered a regular appointment at the Computing Center the following spring. He has worked for the Center ever since, through a series of name changes (CC, ITD-Research Systems, ITCS, ITS). He worked on accounting and billing for MTS, *PROJECTMANAGEMENT, $Accounting, and *SORT. In connection with MTS, he worked on a project that did the state-wide vote tabulation for the news media during three election years in the early 1970s. Through the Computing Center, he served in various positions with the Amdahl Users Group.

At the end of December 2012 Charles retired from Information Technology Services (ITS) after more than 50 years of service at U-M.

Aaron Finerman

Aaron Finerman's photograph
Aaron Finerman joined the University of Michigan in 1978 as the second director of the Computing Center and professor of computer and communication sciences in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. In 1979, he received the additional appointment of professor of electrical and computer engineering (now known as electrical engineering and computer science) in the College of Engineering. On 31 July 1986 Finerman stepped down as Director of the Computing Center. During his eight years as Director, the U-M Computing Center experienced rapid and sustained growth in its large computational, networking, and microcomputer-based capabilities, the staff grew to 200, and the annual budget increased from just over $3 million to approximately $12 million. Finerman continued his faculty position and was appointed special associate to the Vice Provost for Information Technology. In March 1990 he was appointed Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director Emeritus of the Computing Center. From 1989 to 1994 he was distinguished visiting professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Florida Atlantic University. Aaron passed away on 5 April 1994.

Finerman entered the field of computing in 1954 while a graduate student at MIT, where he used the Whirlwind computer. He worked in the Scientific Computing Group of Republic Aviation Corporation in 1956 and 1957 and managed Republic's Digital Computing and Data Processing Division from 1957 to 1961. He joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he was professor of engineering and director of the Computing Center from 1961 to 1969, professor of computer science from 1969 to 1977, and chairman of the Computer Science Department from 1975 to 1977. He had a long association with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology serving as senior post-doctoral fellow from 1968 to 1969; manager, Office of Computing and Information Services from 1971 to 1973; and distinguished visiting scientist from 1990 to 1994.

Finerman was active in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) from 1957, and during that time served as the chairman of the editorial board, association treasurer, and council member. He also served as chairman of the Long Island Chapter, and chair of the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). He served as the editor-in-chief of Computing Reviews from 1963 to 1967 and again from 1987 to 1994. In 1981 he received the ACM Distinguished Service Award. In 1983, in recognition of his outstanding service to professional societies, to computer science education, and to computer center management, Professor Finerman was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1994 he was elected an ACM Fellow.

As the representative of ACM, Finerman was active in the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) for 10 years commencing in 1974, serving as a board member, member of the executive committee, and chair of the AFIPS publications committee. During this period he proposed, and was instrumental in obtaining approval of the AFIPS Board for the establishment of, the Annals of the History of Computing.

Jon Finke

Jon attended his first MTS workshop in 1980 as a "student serf". He went to work at RPI for real in 82 or so, helping with communications work, where he fell into bad company and the FEP project, which morphed into working on or with UBCNet, DSPs and the message multiplexor. Since then he moved into developing Oracle based application for managing Unix user, hosts, etc. He occasionally runs into some former UBCNet folks at the LISA conference.

David S. Flower (Dave)

Photograph of Dave Flower standing next to a Teletype and a PDP-8
Dave worked at the University of Michigan's language laboratory and ran the U-M Computing Center's Electronics Shop ("the Shop") for many years. He built and repaired the U-M's Data Concentrators and Remote Data Concentrators (RDCs), Merit's Primary Communications Computers (PCPs) and Secondary Communications Computers (SCPs), and more modems than you can imagine. He liked the Detroit Tigers and disliked black sticky tape and Stroh's beer.

He retired in 1992 after 26 years at the U-M. Dave died in April 2008 at the age of 78.

Alvin G. Fowler (Al)

Photograph of Al Fowler
Al served as Director of the UBC Computing Centre from 1981. Under his practical direction the Computing Center rapidly expanded. In 1985 he was seconded from the Computing Centre to successfully organize and implement a new telecommunications system for UBC. In 1986 he joined the Industry Liaison Office as Manager of Intellectual Properties, where his dynamic vision, practical knowledge, and broad interpersonal skills helped make the UILO one of the best in Canada. Al served as a member of the Canadian Information Processing Society from 1965 and was National President in 1981/82. He was a member of the Association of Professional Engineers of BC, a founding member of the Vancouver Enterprise Forum, and UBC Research Enterprises Inc.’s first President. Al also helped to establish many new UBC spin-off companies in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island, and served on the board of directors in several of these companies. Al was a generous colleague and friend whose life contributed to the moral and social life of the University as well as its intellectual community. Al passed away in February 1999 after a brief battle with cancer.

Gerald F. Gabel (Gerry)

Gerry Gabel joined the Computing Science Department at the University of Alberta in February 1967 as a programmer, a few months before the IBM 360/67 arrived. His initial responsibilities were to prepare for the 360/67 and it's IBM operating system TSS. When the 360/67 arrived and TSS didn't, Gerry started to look at CP/CMS and U of A implemented this systems for a few years running it during the day and OS/360 at night. He was also interested in APL and installed a DOS/APL system which ran for a limited number of hours each day. Computing Science started teaching programming in the late 60s and Gerry, along with John Stasiuk and Henry Ewascehko, developed the Student Oriented Batch Facility (SOBF) which gave students five minute turn around on FORTRAN programs.  Gerry continued to work on CP/CMS and APL and, along with Daryl Webster, developed a virtual 3705 so that APL could run under CP allowing more hours for interactive systems to use the growing number of remote terminals on campus such as the IBM 2741 and TTY CRTs.

In 1970, the Computing Centre separated from Computing Science and the Department of Computing Services was formed.  Shortly after, Gerry was promoted to the Manager of Operations and Systems Programming.  His attention turned to resolving the awkward and inefficient operation of multiple systems (CP/CMS, APL, OS/360) on the 360/67. At that time UBC, was running MTS and it became obvious to Gerry that this was the best system for the online computing needs of the University.  He promoted MTS and convinced the senior management of the University to adopt MTS. On January 1st, 1971, MTS went into full production as the general purpose time-sharing system on campus. 

Around this time Gerry convinced the IBM SHARE Users Group to establish a SHARE MTS Project, perhaps the first SHARE supported non-IBM operating system group, and acted as it's chairman for several years. Later Gerry was involved in the selection of DEC PDP 11/45s as font end communications processors (FECP) to support the online computing environment on and off campus which was growing 30% per year.

To satisfy this growing demand for online computing, Gerry lead a comprehensive selection process including a simulated online benchmark of an IBM 370 and an Amdahl 470/V6. In the summer of 1975, UQV installed the first Amdahl computer in Canada (serial No. P5) supporting up to 200 terminals under MTS.

In August 1977, Gerry left Computing Services to move to Victoria and help set up a provincial government computing and telecommunications company serving the British Columbia public sector. He worked there for 20 years, retiring as the Vice President of Telecommunications in 1996. On the wall of his home office is a treasured plaque presented to him when he left U of A which contains an IBM 2314 disk platter engraved with his major accomplishments while at UQV:

    1) DOS/APL  1967
    2) MTS  1970
    3) FECP 1972
    4) 470/V6  1975

 Robert Gallagher (Bob)

Photograph of Bob Gallagher
Robert Gallagher, Director at RPI 1984-1995.

Bernard Galler (Bernie)

Bernie Galler's photograph

As a pioneer in the field of computer science, Professor Galler helped shape this discipline at the University of Michigan and beyond.

He joined the mathematics department at the University of Michigan in 1955 where he taught the first programming course in 1956 using an IBM 704. He helped Bruce Arden and Bob Graham develop the compiler for MAD, the Michigan Algorithm Decoder, in 1959. In the early 1960s, he was active in the development of the new Communication Sciences Program, and in 1966, he became associate director of the Computing Center. His association with the Computing Center continued through 1991, during a period of tremendous growth and change in the areas of computer science and computing services. He was involved in the design of the architecture and negotiations with IBM over the virtual memory features that would be included in what became the IBM S/360 Model 67 computer, and in the initial design of the Michigan Terminal System (MTS). He became a charter member of the new Department of Computer and Communication Sciences (CCS) in 1966 and served as chair of the department from 1973-75. One of his classes designed and developed the initial version of the realtime course scheduling program CRISP (Computer Registration Involving Student Participation) which allowed students to register for courses without waiting in long lines. U-M used the CRISP application for over fifteen years. In 1984, Professor Galler was instrumental in negotiating the merger of the CCS Department and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

From 1968 to 1970, Prof. Galler was the President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was the founding editor of the journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (1979-87). He was also the President of the Software Patent Institute (1992). For fifteen years, he served as an expert witness in numerous important legal cases around the country involving computer software issues.

Professor Galler retired from active faculty status on May 31, 1994 and was named professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science, following 38 years of service at the University of Michigan.

Scott Gerstenberger (WSG.)

W. Scott Gerstenberger's photograph

Scott's first job at U-M was as an engineer working on radar systems at the Willow Run Labs. At the Computing Center he worked with Dave Mills, Jack DiGiuseppe, and Dave Flower on Data Concentrator support. The Data Concentrator DSR (PDP8RTN) was somewhat loosely based it on the 1050 DSR which I think Don Boettner had written. But the 1050 routines used PCIs for processing input which made the DC code quite different. Dave Mills, Jack, Scott, and others all worked on RAMP.  Scott also worked a on the graphics version of RAMP that was developed for the CONCOMP project. The fundamental parts of RAMP were the same in both versions, but each system supported a different set of I/O hardware, e.g., the 360 channel interface, the 338 display, a hard drive disk, paper tape hardware, all kinds of serial communications devices, the Grafacon (sp?) tablet, etc. The PDP8RTN development paralleled, but lagged somewhat behind the PDP8/360 channel interface hardware development and support in RAMP, both done by Dave Mills. Scott also worked the tape routines (DSR) building upon earlier work by Jay Jonekait, *MOUNT, $MOUNT, the Merit Network (MNET) DSR, *DEDIT, *SURVEY, and many other programs. Scott, together with Gary Pirkola, became an Associate Director of the Computing Center when Aaron Finderman, the Center's second Director felt that there needed to be a little more management structure than had existed under Bob Bartels. Scott managed the Data Communications and Systems groups. He is (mostly) retired and lives in Ann Arbor.

Andrew C. Goodrich (Andy)

Photograph of Andy Goodrich via Ralph Sayle
Grew up in Ann Arbor and worked at U-M's Willow Run Labs before joining the U-M Computing Center as a Systems Research Programmer. Worked with Jim Blinn to add 3D support to *IG (Integrated Graphics). Wrote the Disk Manager (DMGR). Added SNOBOL4-like patterns to the MTS Editor. Returned to UM as an Associate Director managing the Systems Group.

Suzanne D. Goodrich (Suzy)

Photograph of Suzan D. Goodrich c. 1955
From page 6 of the U-M Computing Center Newsletter, Volume 1, Number 1, 7 January 1971:

Suzy Goodrich (M.S., Mathematics, University of Michigan) comes to the Center from the CONCOMP Project, where she was responsible for developing IBM System/360 symbol manipulation programs and for modifying the multiprogramming system (RAMP) to permit the use of these programs on the PDP-338 remote display terminal. She has also served as research mathematician at Conductron Corporation, performing radar cross-section analysis, and as a Research Associate at the University's High Altitude Engineering Laboratory. Her new duties include becoming familiar with the FORTRAN I/O routines at the Center, working on a new FORTRAN User's Guide, and maintaining the display file routines for the PDP-8/338.

Suzanne passed away on 1 October 2014 at the University of Michigan hospital in Ann Arbor. A copy of her obituary is available in the discussion section of this web site.

Ron Hall

Photograph of Ron Hall
Ron joined the UBC Computing Centre in 1967as a programmer working in the numerical analysis and statistical areas, immediately after receiving an undergraduate degree from UBC. His work at the UBC Computing Center and later appellations spanned more than 30 years, a timeframe that completely enveloped the reign and wane of MTS at UBC. He wended his way through much of the spectrum of computing service areas, as well transitions in and out of management positions, serving as manager of the Systems Group on two occasions. In the relatively early days of MTS, Ron was the project manger as well as one of the developers for the IF (Interactive FORTRAN) Project, a major success in provision of scientific computing support for the MTS user community that was unparalleled, not only at that time, but for many years to follow. A paper on IF was presented at the 1973 SHARE conference in Miami. Ron also did system maintenance and development work on MTS components, and related applications such as SDS and the MTS Editor. Work in these areas led to development (with Ken Bowler) of the SWAT CLS, a unique tool that allowed the powerful SDS debugging capabilities to be applied to the inner workings of the MTS system. During the wind-down period of MTS, Ron moved on to other endeavors, the most significant being project manager for development of the UBC Interchange system, a system that delivered cost-recovered packaged Internet services to faculty, staff, students, and external customers beginning in 1994, and which rapidly grew to service over 40,000 accounts. The software (Interacc/Tracc-II) that was developed in-house to support this service remains in production today (2005), more than a decade later. However, it is unlikely that its service duration will match the three-decade persistence of MTS at UBC.
  • Hall, Ronald H., University of British Columbia. "IF: An Interactive Fortran Compiler," in Proceedings of SHARE 41, Miami, FL, Vol. I, pp. 212-218, August 15, 1973.

James A. Hamilton (Jim)

Photograph of Jim Hamilton
Jim supported the Paging Device Processor (PDP), the Operator console job, and the 3270 DSR. He developed the Big Job Parameter Modification subroutine, BJPMOD, a table driven routine that set the parameters that controlled the Big Job mechanism that UMMPS uses to avoid thrashing when there were too many "big jobs" demanding virtual memory pages. He upgraded MTS line files so that they could be larger than 255 pages and lines could be longer than 255 characters in length. Jim went on to be one of the primary developers for the Apollo Domain operating system and used some of the concepts from the MTS 3270 DSR in its window support. From Apollo he went to On Technology, Avid Technology, and finally the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He retired in 2008 and lives in California.

Michael Hayward

Photograph of Michael Hayward
Michael Hayward was the author of Full Screen Message ($FSM), a breakthrough for MTS e-mail users, allowing the use of, well, full screen messaging.

Leonard Harding (Len)

Photograph of Len Harding, c. 2004
Len supervised the 7090 operators at U-M's Computing Center (Don Boettner worked for Len). On MTS he maintained the the FORTRAN I/O library, the elementary function library, the numerical analysis subroutine library, and was a member of the Computing Center's management committee (Committee A).

George R. Helffrich (W170)

George was responsible for the file routines, the daily and weekly file save, file restore, and related utility programs. He was heavily involved in the conversion from the VAM2 to the VAMX disk format. Together with Jeff Ogden he was responsible for the MTS job program. He was also responsible for APL\360, the stand-alone program to generate an object deck for the system tables (DECKGEN), *MACGEN, and the MTS storage allocation routines (STOR).

For a time in 1976 and 1977 George lived at the now famous house at 810 Sylvan Street in Ann Arbor.

George moved on from the Computing Center to study geology. He earned his PhD from Northwestern University, became a Professor of Seismology in the Geology Department at the University of Bristol in the UK, and is now (2014) doing research in Tokyo. He still does some programming.

James O. Henriksen (Jim)

Photograph of Jim Henriksen
  • Scarcity of resources as an advantage  MTS Archive
  • Computing Center Philosophy, a comment (2012) and a paper (2006), 21 pages, PDF.  MTS Archive
ACG: Worked with Ken Dejong wrote the link editor in PL/I, maintained the PL/C compiler, maintained GPSS, wrote GPSS/H (contrary to rumor the H in GPSS/H didn't stand for Henriksen, it was an indication of the size or quality of the program in a fashion similar to IBM's FORTRAN G and H compilers, although Jim was not unaware or unhappy that it also matched his initial).
JCO: Jim also hired and managed the Computing Center Counselors (aka consultants).
JS: Jim supported XPL. This was a "compiler-generating system" for writing compilers, written by McKeeman at Stanford. It was a one-pass compiler written in itself and was very slick. The parser generator pre-dated yacc/lex by at least 7 or 8 years (it was published in 1968). This was used for CCS 575 (Compiler Construction), for which Jim was one of the first TAs, if not the first. I think Jim also supported Simscript. [JCO: He did.]

Jim Henriksen is the president of Wolverine Software, which he founded in January, 1976. Jim has presented many Winter Simulation Conference papers. He was one of four joint keynote speakers at the 25th anniversary conference. He has served as business chair and general chair. For a period of five years in the early 80s, Jim taught at the Northern Virginia extension campus of Virginia Tech. Jim’s major interests are the construction of compilers and run-time support for discrete-event simulation and animation. He has had partial or total responsibility for developing eight compilers and five generations of animation software. Jim was named a "Titan of Simulation" at the 2006 Winter Simulation Conference.

In 2013 an interview with Jim was included as one of the initial video oral histories of computer simulation pioneers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) at the Computer Simulation Archive of the North Carolina State University Libraries. In the first part of his individual interview Jim describes what it was like to work at the U-M Computing Center in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The link to the Computer Simulation Archive is http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/computer-simulation/ and the link to Jim's interview is http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/computer-simulation/videos/james-o-henriksen-interviewed-by-richard-e-nance-henriksen. The interview is an hour and 10 minutes in length and includes two discussions of the U-M Computing Center from 4:55 to 10:11 and from 58:06 to 1:00:26.

Bertram Herzog (Bert)

Photograph of Bert Herzog
Bert Herzog was born on 28 February 1929 in Offenburg near Baden, Germany. He was relocated by the Kindertransport to the UK during World War II then later emigrated to the US where he obtained his bachelor’s (1949) and master’s (1955) degrees from Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) and took his PhD in engineering mechanics from the University of Michigan in 1961. After serving as an assistant professor (1961) at the University of Michigan, he worked briefly for the Ford Motor Company as manager for technological innovation (1963–1965), then returned to the University of Michigan, where he became associate professor (1965) and professor of industrial engineering (1968) and associate director for the ARPA sponsored ConComp Project at U-M's academic Computing Center, which experimented in the conversational uses of computers and developments in networking technology. He was the first director of the Merit Computer Network (1969-1974).

Following Michigan, he became professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the Computer Center at the University of Colorado (1976–1981). He then founded Herzog Associates in Boulder (1981–1987), was vice president and cofounder of Unicad Inc., and served as vice president of Computer Graphics Consultants (1985–1986). He became director of the Center
for Information Technology Integration (CITI) and Research Systems (RS) within the Information Technology Division (ITD) at the University of Michigan (1987–1992) and was an adjunct professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan in 1992. He served as chief operating officer for the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics, Providence, Rhode Island (1999–2003).

Bert's interest in computer graphics began in 1963 when he met Steve Coons, who was a professor in mechanical engineering a MIT. In the 1970s he was co-chair of the SIGGRAPH Graphics Standards Committee, where he worked to develop the "Core System" technical standard. He helped create the SIGGRAPH Technical Award Program, which he chaired for 14 years and the coveted Coons Award, widely recognized as the premiere computer graphics award, in memory of his friend and mentor. Bert played a significant role, as an editorial board member, in launching IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and guiding it through its early formative years. He served on the editorial board of CG&A from its founding in 1981 to 2002, and he was its editor in chief from 1995 to1999. In 2002, he received the SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award.

Bert passed away at his home in Tucson, Arizona on 11 July 2008 after a series of illnesses going back several years. Friends and colleagues remember this computer graphics pioneer as someone who guided, mentored, and inspired them to achieve the best in themselves.

John Hogg

Photograph of John Hogg
John Hogg worked as a systems programmer at the UBC Computing Centre (later IT Services) from 1966 to 1993. His association with MTS began in 1968 when he and Peter Madderom were sent to UM to make a technical evaluation of MTS. John and Peter were promptly converted into MTS zealots by the denizens of the dusty basement of the UM Computing Center (NUBS). John and Peter returned to UBC and persuaded the rest of the Computing Centre that MTS was a fine system and exactly what we needed to serve the UBC campus. This was not a difficult task. The rest, as they say, was history. In 1993 he moved, but just across campus to work in the Dean's office of Applied Science. In 1997 he left the University to be a partner in Discovery Software, which is a small software company in Abbotsford, BC.

Robert L. Husak (Bob)

Photograph of Bob Husak
Bob worked for the Merit Network, the UMnet group at the U-M Computing Center, and the U-M's Industrial Technology Institute (ITI). He maintained Merit's original PDP-11 based hardware, designed and implemented new high speed line adapters (MM-16), a new PDP-11 to S/370 channel interface, and other hardware used by Merit and U-M.  While he focused more on hardware than software, he helped to develop and maintain MINOS, Merit's network operating system for the DEC PDP-11, helped add interactive terminal (Hermes) and X.25 support to the network, and was heavily involved in the creation and deployment of LSI-11 based Secondary Communications Processors (SCPs) at U-M and throughout Michigan.He was a member of the ANSI X.3S37 and IEEE 802.4 national standards committees.

Bob was killed in a motorcycle accident in April 1985.

William N. Joy (Bill)

Photograph of Bill Joy

While a U-M undergraduate student, Bill worked for Gary Pirkola at the U-M Computing Center doing performance benchmarks of the MTS file routines.

Bill played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while a graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of the vi text editor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and served as its chief scientist until 2003.

Discussion: "Outliers–The Story of Success", "the Dream of a Lifetime", and no MTS charges.

James M. Kennedy (Jim)

Photograph of Jim Kennedy
After more than a decade working with Atomic Energy of Canada, Dr. Kennedy joined UBC in January 1966 as the Director of the Computing Centre, a position he held until June 1980. In addition, he became a professor in the Department of Computer Science in 1968 and served on the University of British Columbia Senate from 1969 to 1975 as a Representative of Joint Faculties. From 1980 to 1984, he served as Vice-President of University Services. As well as a valuable member of the UBC community, Dr. Kennedy was a founding member of the Canadian Information Processing Society, He served as an officer of the Canadian Mathematical Association, the Canadian Association of Physicists and the Canadian Applied Mathematics Association; and as a board member of Vancouver Community College and the Management Advisory Council of BC Colleges and Provincial Institutes. He passed away in 2004.

James E. Knox (Jim)

Photograph of Jim Knox
Jim held a bachelor’s degree from U-M’s School of Natural Resources, a master's degree from U-M's School of Public Health (MPH), and studied in U-M's PhD program in Urban and Regional Planning. He was invited to teach at Harvard University after he and a fellow graduate co-authored a paper on the first computer-oriented graphical geographic information system (GIS). Jim stayed in Ann Arbor and worked for the University of Michigan for more than 30 years. He served as a long-term counselor (later called consultants) at the U-M Computing Center and eventually, together with Bob Blue, managed the group. He served as a post-master and ombudsman on the university's User Advocate team, helping educate the U-M community about proper use of Information Technology, protecting users against abuse, and handling IT abuse complaints. He was the first director of the Adaptive Technology Computing Site, where he provided adaptive and ergonomic computing hardware, software and workstations for students, faculty and staff with disabilities. The James Edward Knox Center, an adaptive computing site, in the Shapiro Undergraduate Library at U-M is named for Jim.
 
Jim passed away on July 4, 2010. He was 66.

Carl E. Landwehr

Photograph of Carl E. Landwehr
Carl Landwehr worked at the U-M Computing Center and the Merit network in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He wrote the initial MNET Device Support Routine (DSR) as well as portions of the MTS interface on the Merit PDP-11 based "communications computers". After receiving his PhD from Michigan, Carl went on to become a computer security pioneer working at the Naval Research Laboratory in the second half of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as a research program officer for computer security at the National Science Foundation (over two separate tenures) and IARPA where he served as a Division Chief. In 2013 he was named an IEEE Fellow.

Wilipedia article

A link to http://www.landwehr.org/

Photo: 2004

More information in the discussion section of this web site.

Papers:

Gail H. Lift

Photograph of Gail Lift
Gail has worked for the U-M Computing Center and the organizations that followed it for almost 40 years. She supported plotting, the FORMAT and TEXTFORM text processing programs, typesetters, statistics and billing, rebate processing, *DITTO, *LABEL, and command statistics.

In 2012 Gail still works for Information Technology Services (ITS) and is approaching her 40th anniversary as a U-M staff member.

John Lindley

Photograph of John Lindley (lower right) with Iain Stinson, Lesle Beddie, and Jackie Bettess in October 2004
John Lindley (lower right) with Iain Stinson,
Lesle Beddie, and Jackie Bettess
in October 2004
John Lindley studied Mathematics at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge University. He worked at the Atomic Energy Authority at Risley (1959) and the computer services department at Salford Royal College of Advanced Technology (1962). John was appointed head of Computer Services at Teesside Polytechnic (1978), Director of the Academic Computer Service at Durham University (1981), and Director of Information Services at the new Durham
University Queens campus at Stockton (October 1994). He was also a a tutor at Hadfield College and a member of The Royal Society of
Arts.

John passed away after a short illness on 26 June 2013. His obituary is available in the September to November issue of the Memo, a newsletter of the Middlesbrough and Eston Methodist Church.

Peter Madderom (Pete)

Photograph of Peter Madderom via Ralph Sayle
Pete worked as a systems programmer at the UBC Computing Centre. He and John Hogg were sent to UM to make a technical evaluation of MTS. They were promptly converted into MTS zealots and returned to UBC to persuade the rest of the Computing Centre that MTS was a fine system and exactly what we needed to serve the UBC campus.

He developed the MTS S/360 and S/370 Virtual Machine.

David L. Mills (Dave)

Photograph of Dave Mills
Dave Mills worked at the UM Computing Center in the late 1960s and early 1970s where he developed the DEC PDP-8 based Data Concentrator and what was almost certainly the first non-IBM implementation of a S/360 control unit to I/O channel interface.

After Dave left UM he went on to do many important things related to satellite and data communication and what would become today's Internet. Among his work is the design of the Network Time Protocol (NTP). NTP is used by pretty much every computer in the world that is connected to the Internet. Dave also developed the Fuzzball router, the first modern router on the Internet.They were DEC LSI-11 computers loaded with the Fuzzball software. Six Fuzzball routers provided the routing backbone of the first 56 kbit/s NSFnet.

He was the chairman of the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force (GADS) and the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force. He invented the Exterior Gateway Protocol (1984), inspired the author of ping for BSD (1983), and had the first FTP implementation. He authored numerous RFCs.

Mills is an amateur radio operator, callsign W3HCF

In 1999 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2002, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). In 2008 Dave was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "contributions to Internet timekeeping and the development of the Network Time Protocol". In 2013 Dave received the IEEE Internet Award “For significant leadership and sustained contributions in the research, development, standardization, and deployment of quality time synchronization capabilities for the Internet.”

Dr. Mills is an emeritus professor at the University of Delaware, where he was a full professor from 1986 to 2008. He also currently holds an adjunct appointment at Delaware so that he can continue to teach. In December 2011 the University of Delaware named a 5000 processor high performance computing cluster "Mills" in honor of Dave.

Charles G. Moore III (Kip)

photograph of Kip Moore
While he was a graduate student at UM in late 1966 and early 1967, Kip Moore did the initial file system implementation for MTS which included line files. Kip's implementation was influenced by his time as an undergraduate at Dartmouth and he told Andy Goodrich that he implemented line files as the architecture of the file system because that was how he thought file systems worked given his experience with Dartmouth Basic.

Kip received his BA in Mathematics from Dartmouth College (1965), an MA and a PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan. From 1972 to 1975, he served as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. From 1975 to 1981, he served as an executive of Automatic Data Processing. From 1981 through 1993 he served as General Partner of Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a New York-based venture capital firm making investments in information processing and health care companies. Kip founded Little Diamond Island Enterprises in 1993 focusing on software, computer services and data communications to make early-stage investments in technology companies. He serves as Director of Speranza Systems, Inc.

James L. Moss (Jim)

Photograph of Jim Moss
Jim Moss, Director at RPI from 1973 to 1984 (the period when MTS was installed). He went from RPI to be Director of Computer Services at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., the position from which he retired. Jim passed away in June 2005.

Roland G. Noel (Rolly)

Photograph of Rolly Noel
Born and raised here in the Edmonton area Rolly started working at the University of Alberta (UQV) in September 1967 with the "Department of Data Processing" as a COBOL programmer. In October 1971 he joined Computing Services as a Senior Analyst in the Systems programming Group. His first task was work on the IBM 2703 Telecommunications Controller connecting the IBM 2741 Terminal (a Selectric Typewriter adapted to be a terminal). His next task was to evaluate Telecommunications equipment for the MTS system and recommend what would provide the best terminal support for the UQV. It was decided that the University would invest in the DEC PDP 11/45 and install Gandalf PACX units and Gandalf LDS 105/125's these were used to provide the ASCII support on campus. Rolly was assigned the task of programming the PDP 11/45. With the end of the MTS era at UQV, Rolly moved to the Network Operations group and was involved in developing the campus FDDI network and Internet access.

Jeffrey Ogden (Jeff, W163)

Photograph of Jeff Ogden via Ralph Sayle
Jeff first used MTS as a undergraduate student at the University of Michigan in 1969. While finishing his undergraduate degree in the early 1970s he worked as a temporary student employee using MTS for various U-M departments. He worked for the University of Michigan Computing Center for 13 years as an MTS consultant (called counselors in those old days), supported the unsupported software (UNSP), was the liaison between the Computing Center and the Merit Network, an MTS developer (U-M used the title Systems Research Programmer), manager, and administrator. He maintained the 3270 DSR, the Operator Console Job, BJPMOD (Big Job Parameter Modification) subroutine, and, together with George Helffrich, the MTS job program and was heavily involved in performance monitoring and tuning, hardware evaluation, benchmarking, upgrades, and hardware and software troubleshooting. He played leading roles in installing a second MTS system (UB) at U-M and giving all U-M students, faculty, and staff routine access to MTS using "request accounts", creating networked microcomputer based public sites throughout the U-M campus, and in the microcomputer sales program at U-M. He worked for another 12 years at the Merit Network as the Associate Director for MichNet, the statewide Internet network serving Michigan's colleges and universities, community colleges, K-12 schools, libraries, hospitals and clinics, state and local government, other non-profits, and even a few for-profit businesses. He is retired and still lives in Ann Arbor.

Ewan S. Page

Photograph of Ewan Page, c. 1978
Ewan Page was a research student in the Statistics Laboratory at Cambridge from 1951-54. Durham University at King's College Newcastle created a Computing Laboratory and appointed Dr. Ewan S. Page as its first director in January 1957. In 1963 King's College became the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and in 1992 the Computing Laboratory became the Department of Computing Science (responsible for teaching and research) and the University Computing Service (responsible for the provision of computing services, consultation and guidance to academic and research staff throughout the University)." As Director he built up the Computing Laboratory at the University of Newcastle. He was a member of the Computer Board. He became a pro-Vice Chancellor at Newcastle and later stepped in to serve acting Vice Chancellor. In 1978 he became the Vice Chancellor at Reading University.

Gary Pirkola

Photograph of Gary Pirkola
Gary initially worked part time for the U-M Computing Center as a counselor from  summer/66 to summer/67 while a grad student, but didn't start working for the center full time untill the summer of 1967. He took over support of the file system from Kip Moore, presumably because Kip needed to get serious about finishing his PhD. He added support for sequential files and data cell support and support for really shared files. Gary, together with Scott Gerstenberger, became an Associate Director of the Computing Center when Aaron Finderman, the Center's second Director felt that there needed to be a little more management structure than had existed under Bob Bartels. Gary managed the applications software support, user services, and publications groups. Gary is retired and lives in Saline, a few miles south of Ann Arbor.

Don Porter

Photograph of Don Porter
Programming manager at RPI.

Martin Raim (Marty)

Photograph of Marty Raim
Marty wrote *SDS, the Symbolic Debugging System, and *CONFLIP, and ported *WATFOR, and *ASMG. He lived in the house at 810 Sylvan Street in Ann Arbor from August 1968 to sometime in 1970. He has worked for the Xerox Corporation, Borland Software Corporation, Stanford Research Institute, National Semiconductor, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. He retired from the software business, is a writer of mostly short creative non-fiction, and lives in France.

Shirine M. Repucci (Sherri)

Sherri Repucci served as Coordinator of MichNet recruitment for the Merit Network, and wrote a Master's thesis at Eastern Michigan University, entitled Women's Role in the Development of the Internet and the Social Movement They Propelled. The collection at U-M's Bentley Historical Library includes tape recordings and typed transcripts of interviews with staff from Merit Network, and National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), as well as Repucci's Master's thesis.

Alan Rubens (Al)

Photograph of Al Rubens
Al worked for the Merit Network and the Communications Group at the U-M Computing Center. He developed and maintained MINOS, Merit's network operating system for the DEC PDP-11, added interactive terminal (Hermes), X.25, and later Telnet support to the network, and was heavily involved in the creation and deployment of LSI-11 based Secondary Communications Processors (SCPs) at U-M and throughout Michigan.

John Sanguinetti

Photograph of John Sanguinetti
John holds a PhD in computer and communication sciences from the University of Michigan, 1977. At the Computing Center he supported Fortran-H, his first introduction to a large-scale program. He also took over XPL from Jim Henriksen, and added separately compiled program units (procedures). He installed the security gateway that was written at Wayne State and changed it to use the monitor call instruction of the 370. When John went to work for Amdahl, he was told that the paper he wrote about it for a Sigmetrics workshop gave them serious heartburn, since the monitor instruction was implemented in macro-code on the 580, and was particularly slow. He added support to the PDP for the Intel and STC solid state storage devices, around 1981, and did a fair bit of data collection and analysis and even wrote a paper. He also served as Associate Director for Operating Systems Support.

After working for the U-M Computing Center, DEC, the U-M Computing Center (again), Amdahl, ELXSI, Ardent, and NeXT computer manufacturers, he founded Chronologic Simulation in 1991 and was president until 1995. John was the principal architect of the Verilog Compiled Simulator (VCS), and was a major contributor to the resurgence in the use of the Verilog hardware design language (HDL) in the design community. He served on the Open Verilog International Board of Directors from 1992 to 1995 and was a major contributor to the working group which drafted the specification for the IEEE 1364 Verilog standard. After Chronologic, he co-founded CynApps™, Inc., in 1997. It merged with Chronology™ Corporation in 2000 to form Forte Design Systems.

In 2005 John received the U-M Alumni Society Merit Award in Computer Science and Engineering. In 2011 he was named an ACM Fellow for contributions to hardware simulation.

Ralph Sayle

Photograph of Ralph Sayle
Ralph started working at UBC's Computing Centre as a computer operator on an IBM 7040 machine in 1968. Four months later UBC got MTS and the great adventure began. His work included writing the MTS side of the UBC Front End processor, working on Resource Manager routines including a new MSG, various DSPs (including spooling), plus the DSPDSR, a cunning interface between the world of MTS and the coding convention world of the Subtasking Monitor, and the AkRoutines in 1980, a table driven approach to system accounting. In 1993 he was "traded" to UBC's Applied Science faculty and in 2003 he retired.

Patrick Sherry (Pat)

Photograph of Pat Sherry
Pat started as a student counselor/consultant at U-M and whet on to be a regular Computing Center staff member. He supported the loader, UMLOAD, wrote *OBJUTIL, added support for the Xerox 9700 printer, and was involved in Unix support as the U-M Computing Center started to get into that business. He joined Jim Sterken and others at TextSet/Arbortext/PTC where he still works (2012).

Ron Srodawa

photo of Ron Srodawa
Ron earned his Bachelor of Science degree (Magna cum Laude, 1965) from the University of Detroit, a Master of Arts degree from The University of Michigan (Mathematics, 1966) and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer and Communications Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1972.

At the University of Michigan he was involved in the early days of the development of the Michigan Terminal System. He wrote the MTS loader (UMLOAD), which Mike Alexander remembers as remarkable because it (i) fit in one page of memory and (ii) was location independent, you could put it anywhere and call it and it would work, there was nothing in it that had to be relocated when it was moved to a new location. He also worked on the development of the MAD/I compiler as part of the ARPA funded CONCOMP project at U-M.

He was appointed an instructor at Wayne State University in 1971 (while completing his doctorate) in Mathematics, later becoming an Assistant Professor and playing a critical role in building the department by serving as acting Department Chair. He moved to Oakland University as Associate Professor of Engineering and Computer Science in 1982. His professional life included academic research, teaching bachelor, and doctoral students and consulting for Ford Motor Company.

Ron died on 1 January 2014 of complications of Alzheimer's disease. Ron's obituary is available here.

James J. Sterken (Jim, W164)

Jim Sterken's photograph

Jim started work for the Computing Center as a student counselor and later became a regular full-time programmer. He ported the SPIRES database system to MTS and wrote $Message to which Gavin Eadie and Jim added remote mail support. He helped Don Boettner with the MTS Macro Processor. Jim and Steve Burling wrote the $Log command.

Jim, with two other former U-M Computing Center staff members, founded Textset, Inc. which became Arbortext, Inc., a leading software development firm specializing in technical publishing products including SGML and XML tools. Jim is retired and lives in Ann Arbor.
  • 1993 letter from James J. Duderstadt, President of the University of Michigan, thanking Jim Sterken for his original work developing the MTS Message System, 1 page, PDF, 377KB  MTS Archive

Elizabeth A. Sweet (Liz, EAS)

Liz came to the U-M Computing Center in 1971 as a student Input/Output (I/O) clerk, handing out job printouts to MTS users. In 1975, after earning her BA in English and Masters in Library Science from U-M, she was hired as the U-M Computing Center Librarian.  She also worked in the CC Publications Group as a writer and editor. In 1979 she became the MTS Distribution manager, maintaining the database of all MTS components used to generate the distribution of MTS to other sites. In 1987, when the Center combined MTS and microcomputer consulting, she became manager of the Information Technology Division Consulting Services. The next year that group established U-M's IT help desk (4-HELP). In 1997 Liz became Director of the User Advocate group and ITCS Security Services. She is retired and lives in Ann Arbor with her husband Scott Gerstenberger (yes, that guy).

Dave Twyver

Photograph of Dave Twyver
Dave arrived at UBC in the summer of 1968 just as his past 7044 expertise was about to be obsoleted by the new 360/67. His first assignment was to write a DSR for the 2260 Display Stations to make them emulate card punch machines (which seemed to him like a really dumb idea). After intense study of the 2741 DSR (TSFO) and after weeks mastering the subtleties of device interrupts, re-entrant code, and page faults due to misuse of the TRT instruction, he produced a DSR more befitting a revolutionary interactive time sharing system like MTS. When the improved 3270 display stations came along a couple of years later, all of the card punch heritage was able to be expunged. Major portions of this 3270 DSR code were subsequently pirated by frustrated users of the TSS and VM operating systems for the 360/67 and its successors. Some of Dave's other contributions to MTS included a DSR for the Adage Graphics computer, an emulator for the DEC PDP-8 and a DSR to interface PDP-8s to MTS. He also adapted and integrated an interpreter for the APL language into MTS, which was a deciding factor in convincing the University of Alberta to adopt MTS (at least for a while...).

Dave spent his last couple of years at UBC developing a campus computer network. He left UBC in 1974 to join Northern Telecom (now Nortel) where he spent 22 years working in its Networking and Wireless businesses around the world. Then in 2002, after several years investing in and managing (with very mixed results!) start-up companies in the satellite and terrestrial broadband wireless access areas, Dave retired to Vancouver Island within sight of UBC (on a clear day) across the Strait of Georgia.

Thomas Valerio (Tom, W237)

Photograph of Tom Valerio
Tom was a System Research Programmer at the U-M Computing Center from November 1981 through 2000. He rewrote the Symbolic Debugging System (SDS), implemented problem state 31-bit address support for MTS, its CLSs, and user programs, and was present when they turned out the lights on MTS at U-M in 1996. He worked to get MTS to run under S/370 emulators such as FLEX-ES. Tom did more than anyone to preserve the 1996 MTS system at U-M, making it possible to run MTS under Hercules and other emulators today.

Douglas Wade (Doug)

A 28 year old Doug Wade, c. 1983
First exposed to MTS as an SFU student (1973-1979). Worked as a computer operator at SFU (1979-1981). Jumped to UBC in 1981 and until 2011 worked in computer operations, network operations, and finally as a senior support analyst. Spent his MTS years in awe of the UBC Systems group (Allan Ballard, Paul Whaley, Ralph Sayle, John Hogg, Ron Hall, etc. etc.) who always took pity on him, put up with his pestering and answered all of his questions.

Bill Webb

Photograph of Bill Webb
Bill Webb mainly worked for the Biosciences Data Center at UBC which was funded by the Institute of Animal Resource Ecology, the Zoology, and the Botany departments. The Data Centre had one of the first Unix systems on the UBC campus running on a PDP-11/45 which was connected to MTS via a synchronous line (SYN6) via a PDP-8 running a copy of the computing centre's PDP-8 operating system heavily modified for local use. He also worked for the UBC Computing Centre part-time for a year or so in the 1980s. He wrote *FMT (*FORMAT to some). There was both an MTS and a Unix version. He took over LINK:EDIT (which became  *LINKEDIT) after its first developer left.  He wrote a library of string manipulation functions that allowed you to do a lot of system utilities (such as WEBB:BATCH and WEBB:EDIT) in FORTRAN (this was in FORTRAN IV, not FORTRAN 77 which wasn't yet available). Other programs developed were WEBB:BATCH that added extra features over *Batch, WEBB:EDIT which was like $EDIT but offered extra features, WEBB:MTS which added Unix-style * file pattern matching, e.g. $DESTROY *.O, a utility so that MTS *FS tapes could be read on Unix systems, and various others. He moved to the States in 1984 to work for IBM in Palo Alto. He is back in Pentictin, BC now (2012).

Mark Weiser

Photograph of Mark Weiser
Mark Weiser was a counselor (aka consultant) at the University of Michigan Computing Center while he was a graduate student in Computer and Communication Sciences in the mid to late 1970s.

From "Remembering Mark Weiser, July 23, 1952–April 27, 1999", in IEEE Personal Communications, February 2000: 

On April 27, the world of computing and information technology lost one of its most beloved and admired figures. Mark Weiser, Chief Technologist at Xerox PARC, died after a short illness.

Mark Weiser was born on July 23, 1952 in Chicago, Illinois. While in his 20s he worked for or founded several computer companies. He studied Computer and Communication Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, receiving an M.A. in 1977 and Ph.D. in 1979.

After completing his Ph.D., Mark joined the Computer Science department at the University of Maryland, College Park. He taught at College Park for the next twelve years. In 1987, he joined Xerox PARC as a research scientist; the following year, he was made head of the Computer Science Laboratory. He directed the Laboratory until 1994, when he founded a third company; two years later, he returned to Xerox PARC as its Chief Technology Officer at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a position he held until his death. In addition to conducting his own research, he helped develop initiatives to commercialize inventions at PARC.

Mark was best known for his contributions to the field of mobile computing. He was often referred to as the father of "ubiquitous computing". He coined that term in 1988 to describe a future in which PCs will be replaced with invisible computers embedded in everyday objects. He believed that this will lead to an era of "calm technology," in which technology, rather than panicking us, will help us focus on what is really important to us.

Other research interests included garbage collection, operating systems and user interface design. Mark, who held several U.S. and foreign patents, wrote or co-wrote more than 75 technical publications on such subjects as the psychology of programming, program slicing, operating systems, programming environments, garbage collection and technological ethics. He taught graduate and undergraduate courses on human factors, systems, and programming. He was a popular speaker at scientific symposia and conferences, and a frequent subject of media interviews.

In addition to his work in computer science, Mark was the drummer with rock band Severe Tire Damage, the first band to perform live on the Internet. He was married with two children.

Franklin H. Westervelt (Frank)

Photograph of Frank Westervelt
Frank Westervelt was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan and an Associate Director at the U-M Computing Center where from 1965 to 1970 he was Project Director for the ARPA sponsored CONCOMP (Research in Conversational Use of Computers) Project. When IBM's Time-Sharing System (TSS) operating system was not available, the CONCOMP project supported the initial development of MTS and the original PDP-8 Data Concentrator with its interface to an IBM S/360 Input/Output channel, the first such interface to be built outside of IBM. The CONCOMP project obtained the IBM S/360 Model 50 which, among other things, was used to develop MTS before the arrival of the Model 67. It also developed the IBM 7772 based Audio Response Unit (ARU) as an I/O device for use with MTS, the MAD/I compiler, mini-computer based graphics terminals, and the Set-Theoretic Data Structure model that was later used in ILIR:MICRO. Frank also served as a representative to the state-wide Michigan Inter-university Committee on Information Systems (MICIS) and was involved in establishing the MERIT Computer Network.

Frank served Wayne State University from 1971-1982 as Director of the Computing Service Center, from 1982-2000 as professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he was Associate Chair and Undergraduate Officer from 1990-1994 and Chair from 1995-2000. He started interactive distance learning within ECE organizing, designing, and developing electronics classrooms and writing software to ease development of electronic presentations. He obtained the contract to develop and deliver the first ECE Course (ECE 562) to ECCE Master’s Program students at Ford Motor Company by Distance Learning methods. In honor of his services Ford Motor Company presented him with the 1993 Customer driven Quality Award as a Member of Ford/Wayne State University Interactive Distance Education Program Team the only award given by Ford to a university faculty member in 1993.

Frank passed away on 29 July 2015 at his home in Ann Arbor.

Paul Whaley 

Photograph of Paul Whaley via Ralph Sayle
Paul was a member of the systems group at UBC. With Alan Ballard he designed and wrote the UBC Plus systems programming language and compiler. He developed the $PEEK CLS.

Harry Whitfield

Photograph of Harry Whitfield
Harry Whitfield lead the Edinburgh Multi-Access Project (EMAP) which developed the Edinburgh Multi-Access System (EMAS) for the ICL 4/75 computer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He became Director of the Computing Laboratory, Director of NUMAC and Professor (Head) of Computing and Data Processing at the University of Newcastle in January 1980. He held the first two positions until 1992 when the Computing Laboratory was split and Elizabeth Barraclough became the Director of the University Computing Service.

He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University.

Mary Ann Wilkes

From page 6 of the U-M Computing Center Newsletter, Volume 1, Number 1, 7 January 1971:

Mary Ann Wilkes is head of the newly established Office of Documentation and Communication with responsibility for editing the CCNewses, CCMemos, Computing Center Newsletter, and the MTS manuals, and for assisting the authors with the final stages of documentation and publication. Her main purpose in all of these duties will be to assist the staff in its task of communicating to the user information that will facilitate his use of the University's computing resources. She was previously an assistant editor at ORA, and an administrative associate on the CONCOMP Project and on the MERIT Computer Network.

Howard B. Young

Howard Young's photograph
Howard started as a computer operator for the IBM S/360-67 mainframe computer and became a programmer at U-M's Computing Center (CC), Information Technology Division (ITD), and Information Technology Central Services (ITCS). At the CC in the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked with Chuck Gray to support IBM's TSS/360 and OS/360 operating systems. Under MTS he maintained the IBM operating system emulation programs *FAKEOS and *VSS, HASPLOG, cataloged magnetic tapes, the device support routines for magnetic and paper tapes, plotting for statistical program SAS, among many others. He developed the MTS time conversion routines and the *Autostart program. He worked on the U-M's Online Directory (UMOD), which was called X.500 at that time. He was known for pacing up and down the halls when he was thinking about a challenging problem and for making the occasional wry comment in meetings. Howard loved softball and was wonderful at drawing and sketching.

Howard passed away on July 2, 2011. He was 61.

Karl L. Zinn

Karl Zinn's photograph
Karl L. Zinn, a specialist in computer-assisted instruction, joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1963 as a research associate with the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT). Promoted to research scientist in 1969, Zinn was instrumental in establishing the MERIT computer network and developing CONFER, the first computer-based conferencing systems on campus.
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