Melvin Edward Conway is an American computer scientist, computer programmer, and

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who coined what is now known as

Conway's law Conway's law describes the link between communication structure of organizations and the systems they design. It is named after the computer scientist and programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967. His original wording was: The ...

: "Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." The

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remains relevant in modern

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and is still being referenced and investigated. Apart from the above, Conway is perhaps most famous for developing the concept of

coroutines Coroutines are computer program components that allow execution to be suspended and resumed, generalizing subroutines for cooperative multitasking. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative tasks, ...

. Conway coined the term ''coroutine'' in 1958 and he was the first to apply the concept to an assembly program. He later authored a seminal paper on the subject of coroutines, titled "Design of a Separable Transition-diagram Compiler", which included the first published explanation of the concept. In this paper, he proposed organizing a compiler as a set of coroutines, which allows using separate passes while debugging and then running a single pass compiler in production. Another famous paper is his 1958 proposal of an UNCOL, a Universal Computer Oriented Language, which attempted to provide a solution to economically produce compilers for new

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

s and computer architectures. Conway wrote an assembler for the Burroughs model 220 computer called SAVE. The name SAVE was not an acronym, but a feature: programmers lost fewer

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decks because they all had "SAVE" written on them. His work on Pascal compiler for Rockwell Semiconductor (an immediate-turnaround Pascal trainer for the Rockwell AIM-65) led to an arrangement between Apple and Think Technologies (where he served as a principal) under which the latter produced the original (1984) Mac Pascal and Apple II Instant Pascal. In the 1970s, he was involved with the

MUMPS MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), or M, is an imperative, high-level programming language with an integrated transaction processing key–value database. It was originally developed at Massachusetts Gen ...

(Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) medical programming language standard specification for the

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. He also wrote a reference book on MUMPS in 1983. Conway was granted a

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in 2001 on "Dataflow processing with events", concerned with programming using

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s. The patent expired in 2019. In 2002, Conway obtained a teacher license for high school math and physics in

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. He taught at Chelsea High School from 2002 to 2006. In 2024, Conway published an article calle
NEEDED: SYSTEMS THINKING IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS
which summarizes his view that in order to understand human systems, one must focus on networks first, rather than actors. He posits that this is the barrier to building systems that are in alignment with human needs at scale.

Education

* Ph.D. Mathematics,

Case Western Reserve University Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a Private university, private research university in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It was established in 1967 by a merger between Western Reserve University and the Case Institute of Technology. Case ...

(1961). Dissertation: "A Set-Theoretic Model For Logical Systems", Advisor: Raymond John Nelson * M.S. Physics,

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

* B.S. Physics,

Selected publications

* Conway, Melvin E. (July 1963)
"Design of a separable transition-diagram compiler"
''

Communications of the ACM ''Communications of the ACM'' (''CACM'') is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). History It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members. Articles are i ...

'', vol. 6, num. 7, pp. 396–408. doi: 10.1145/366663.366704 * Conway, Melvin E. (April 1968)
"How do Committees Invent?"
''

Datamation ''Datamation'' is a computer magazine that was published in print form in the United States between 1957 and 1998,

'', vol. 14, num. 4, pp. 28–31.

References

External links

melconway.com
Conway's personal home page
@conways_law
Conway's

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profile * {{DEFAULTSORT:Conway, Melvin American computer scientists Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Burroughs Corporation people