Computer Science

Fifty-year Anniversary Reunion

Some old technical papers

John Backus's seminal paper on functional programming languages: Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs (pdf). Communications of the ACM, August 1978.
Dissertation abstract: Coordination of Computation in a Binary Tree of Processors: An Architectural Proposal (pdf). 1981.
Dissertation summary: Implanting FFP Trees in Binary Trees: An Architectural Proposal (pdf). 1981.
Patent based on dissertation: Syntactically self-structuring cellular computer (Patent 4,583,164. Filed 1981, issued 1986.)
Conference paper: A Graphics Facility Useful for Performance Monitoring on an NCUBE (pdf). 1988.
Conference paper: A Collection of NCUBE UNIX Utilities (pdf). 1988.
Patent based on parallel computing work at Shell Development Company: Seismic migration on multiprocessor computer (Patent 5,198,979. Filed 1989, issued 1993.)
Publications list (pdf)

John Backus

Wikipedia article about John W. Backus
IBM article about John W. Backus
Photo (circa 1978) of Fred Brooks (left) and John Backus (right) (copyright Dave Tolle). Backus won the Turing Award in 1977. Brooks won it in 1999.
List of all Turing Award winners
New York Times obituary of John Backus (March 20, 2007)

Email: DaveTolle@davetolle.com