Gerrit Anne "Gerry" Blaauw (17 July 1924 – 21 March 2018) was a Dutch computer scientist, known as one of the principal designers of the

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

System/360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. System/360 was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applicati ...

line of computers, together with

Fred Brooks Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing development of IBM's System/360 family of mainframe computers and the ...

Gene Amdahl Gene Myron Amdahl (November 16, 1922 – November 10, 2015) was an American computer architect and high-tech entrepreneur, chiefly known for his work on mainframe computers at IBM and later his own companies, especially Amdahl Corporation. ...

, and others."Gerrit Blaauw"
in ''Unsung Heroes in Dutch Computing History'', a website created for the IEEE Computer Society's Web Programming Competition (CHC61), 2007

Biography

Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Blaauw received his BA from the

Delft University of Technology The Delft University of Technology (TU Delft; ) is the oldest and largest Dutch public university, public Institute of technology, technical university, located in Delft, Netherlands. It specializes in engineering, technology, computing, design, a ...

in 1946. In 1947, Blaauw won an exclusive scholarship funded by IBM Chief Executive Officer

Thomas J. Watson Thomas John Watson Sr. (February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956) was an American businessman who was the chairman and CEO of IBM. He oversaw the company's growth into an international force from 1914 to 1956. Watson developed IBM's management sty ...

. After an initial year at

Lafayette College Lafayette College is a private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Easton, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1826 by James Madison Porter and other citizens in Easton, the college first held classes in 18 ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania, officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes region, Great Lakes regions o ...

, Blaauw studied at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. He received his MA in 1949 and his PhD in 1952 under supervision of

Howard Aiken Howard Hathaway Aiken (March 8, 1900 – March 14, 1973) was an American physicist and a list of pioneers in computer science, pioneer in computing. He was the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I, the United States' first C ...

, inventor of the early Mark I computer. At Harvard, he worked on design of the Mark III and Mark IV computers. Blaauw met

while he was working for IBM and visited Harvard, where Fred Brooks was then a graduate student. After graduation in 1952, Blaauw returned to the Netherlands where he worked at the Mathematical Centre on the second ARRA computer. In 1955 he returned to the United States to work at IBM's

Poughkeepsie Poughkeepsie ( ) is a city within the Town of Poughkeepsie, New York. It is the county seat of Dutchess County, with a 2020 census population of 31,577. Poughkeepsie is in the Hudson River Valley region, midway between the core of the New ...

labs where he worked with Brooks on a number of projects: * He was a designer on the

IBM 7030 STRETCH The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964."Designed by Seymour Cray, the CDC 6600 was almost three tim ...

project. * He worked on the ill-fated

IBM 8000 The IBM 8000 series was a proposed transistor-based successor to the IBM 7000 series. Important engineers on the project included Fred Brooks and Gerry Blaauw. The project plan for the 8000 series was presented by Fred Brooks in January 1961. ...

series, and in particular designed a paging system for the IBM 8106 in the 1960-1961 period. * He was a key engineer on the IBM

project, announced in 1964. Among other contributions, Blaauw made the successful case for an

8-bit In computer architecture, 8-bit integers or other data units are those that are 8 bits wide (1 octet). Also, 8-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) architectures are those that are based on registers or data bu ...

(as opposed to 6-bit) computer architecture. Blaauw also designed a revolutionary address translation system, the "Blaauw Box", which was removed from the original

design, but was later used in IBM's unsuccessful proposal to MIT's

Project MAC Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in ...

. Subsequently, Dynamic Address Translation (DAT) hardware of a somewhat different design was incorporated in the important IBM System/360-67 computer."Program and Addressing Structure in a Time-Sharing Environment"
B. W. Arden, B. A. Galler, T. C. O'Brien, F. H. Westervelt, ''Journal of the ACM'', v.13 n.1, p.1-16, Jan. 1966 As implemented on the Model 67, DAT hardware allowed the implementation of some of the first practical paged

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a ver ...

systems – perhaps the first to be commercially successful. The Model 67 was being used in commercial applications by 1968. The earlier Ferranti Atlas Computer was a seminal platform for paging research, but suffered from well-studied performance issues such as thrashing. Virtual memory address translation capabilities similar to those on the S/360-67 were subsequently included in all models of the

IBM System/370 The IBM System/370 (S/370) is a range of IBM mainframe computers announced as the successors to the IBM System/360, System/360 family on June 30, 1970. The series mostly maintains backward compatibility with the S/360, allowing an easy migrati ...

computer line that followed. After leaving IBM, Blaauw became a computer science professor in the Netherlands. He retired in 1989 as professor emeritus with Universiteit Twente. In 1982 he was elected member of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (, KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. In addition to various advisory a ...

. In 1997 he co-authored ''Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution'' with Brooks.''Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution''
Gerrit A. Blaauw and Frederick P. Brooks, Addison-Wesley Professional, 1264 pp., February 1997, Blaauw died in Utrecht. Blaauw was a devout Christian who gave particular attention, especially after retirement, to the relationship of science and faith, a topic he explored in a booklet available in English, Dutch and Spanish.

Selected publications

* Blaauw, Gerrit A. ''Digital system implementation.'' Prentice Hall PTR, 1976. * Blaauw, Gerrit A., and Frederick P. Brooks Jr. ''Computer architecture: concepts and evolution.'' Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 1997. * Blaauw, Gerrit A. ''Scripture and Science: An Unexpected Harmony.'' 2014
Published online
(archived 2018) Selected articles * Brooks, Frederick P., Gerrit A. Blaauw, and Wilfried Buchholz. "Processing data in bits and pieces." ''IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers'' 2 (1959): 118-124. * * Blaauw, Gerrit A., and Frederick P. Brooks Jr. "The structure of SYSTEM/360: Part I—Outline of the logical structure." IBM Systems Journal 3.2 (1964): 119-135. Patents * Amdahl, Gene M., et al. "Data processing system." U.S. Patent No. 3,400,371. 3 Sep. 1968.

References

External links

Gerrit Blaauw
, unsung heroes in Dutch computing history.
DIESREDE BLAAUW: BESCHRIJVEN EN BEGRIJPEN
26 November 1976 (in Dutch) {{DEFAULTSORT:Blaauw, Gerrit Dutch computer scientists 20th-century Dutch inventors 1924 births 2018 deaths IBM employees Harvard University alumni Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Academic staff of the University of Twente Scientists from The Hague 20th-century Dutch scientists VM (operating system)

Biography

Selected publications

References

Further reading

External links