J. Halcombe "Hal" Laning Jr. (February 14, 1920, in

Kansas City The Kansas City metropolitan area is a bi-state metropolitan area anchored by Kansas City, Missouri. Its 14 counties straddle the border between the U.S. states of Missouri (9 counties) and Kansas (5 counties). With and a population of more t ...

, Missouri – May 29, 2012) was a

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computer pioneer who in 1952 invented an algebraic compiler called George (also known as the Laning and Zierler system after the authors of the published paper) that ran on the MIT

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, the first real-time computer. Laning designed George to be an easier-to-use alternative to

assembly language In computing, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence bet ...

for entering mathematical equations into a computer. He later became a key contributor to the 1960s race to the Moon, with pioneering work on space-based guidance systems for the Apollo Moon missions. From 1955 to 1980, he was deputy associate director of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. In 1956 he published the book ''Random Processes in Automatic Control'' (McGraw-Hill Series on Control System Engineering), with Richard Battin as a coauthor. In collaboration with Phil Hankins and Charlie Werner of MIT, he initiated work on MAC (MIT Algebraic Compiler), an algebraic programming language for the IBM 650, which was completed by early spring of 1958.

Career

Laning received his PhD from MIT in 1947 with a dissertation titled "Mathematical Theory of Lubrication-Type Flow". His undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering (1940) was also from MIT. He was elected to the

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in 1983 for his work in

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, particularly his "unique pioneering achievements in missile guidance and computer science—the Q-guidance system for

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and

Polaris Polaris is a star in the northern circumpolar constellation of Ursa Minor. It is designated α Ursae Minoris (Latinisation of names, Latinized to ''Alpha Ursae Minoris'') and is commonly called the North Star or Pole Star. With an ...

issilesand George". He was also an honorary member of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

. Laning features prominently in the third episode of the

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's documentary miniseries titled '' Moon Machines'' which aired in June 2008.

Apollo Program

He later worked in the MIT Draper Lab, with Richard H. Battin, to develop a scheme for doing onboard navigation on the

Apollo program The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the United States human spaceflight program led by NASA, which Moon landing, landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969. Apollo followed Project Mercury that put the first Americans in sp ...

's command/service module

guidance system A guidance system is a virtual or physical device, or a group of devices implementing a controlling the movement of a ship, aircraft, missile, rocket, satellite, or any other moving object. Guidance is the process of calculating the changes in pos ...

. He designed the Executive and Waitlist operating system for the LGC (Lunar Module Guidance Computer) in the mid 1960s; he built it up from scratch with no examples to guide him, and the design is still valid. The allocation of functions among a sensible number of asynchronous processes, under control of a rate and priority-driven preemptive executive, still represents the state of the art in real-time GN&C computers for spacecraft. His design saved the Apollo 11 landing mission when the rendezvous radar interface program began using more register core sets and "Vector Accumulator" areas than were physically available in memory, causing the infamous 1201 and 1202 errors. Had it not been for Laning's design the landing would have been aborted for lack of a stable guidance computer.

References

External links

A portrait of J. Halcombe Laning, taken in 1997
{{DEFAULTSORT:Laning, J. Halcombe NASA people MIT School of Engineering alumni 1920 births Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering 2012 deaths