Influencal persons

A small list of people that had great influence in the development of Computer Science and the ‘School of Wirth”.

niklaus_wirth bowles
Niklaus Wirth, very influencal with his work on structured programming. Designer of Pascal, Modula, Ceres system, Oberon, the Lilith computer, and Project Oberon FPGA 2013.
As a professor at the ETH in Zurich Switzerland he advanced our knowledge and capabilities with computers and their programming.
Kenneth Bowles, initiator of the UCSD Pascal and p-System work at UCSD. Which led to Apple Pascal on the Apple II and so on.
He had a large group of students working on a very practical Pascal compiler and operating system and in this way contributed to the huge success of Pascal in the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century.
hansen Edsger W. Dijkstra
Per Brinch Hansen, the driving force behind Concurrent Pascal and in general behind the advantages in concurrent programming. Also wrote some excellent books on Pascal and Pascal-like compilers and operating systems, e.g. Edison and Solo. Read his biography here. Per Brinch Hansen is a distinguished professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Syracuse University. Per died in 2007.  Edsger W. Dijkstra‘s fundamental contributions cover diverse areas of computing science, including compiler construction, operating systems, distributed systems, sequential and concurrent programming, programming paradigm and methodology, programming language research, program design, program development, program verification, software engineering principles, graph algorithms, and philosophical foundations of computer science and computer programming.  Several concepts and problems that are now standard in computer science were first identified by Dijkstra and/or bear names coined by him.“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability”
aHejlsberg gutknechtportrait
Anders Hejlsberg began writing programs for the Nascom microcomputer, including a Pascal compiler, later for CP/M and DOS, marketing it first as Compas Pascal, licensed to Borland, and integrated into an IDE to become the Turbo Pascal system. In Borland’s hands, Turbo Pascal became one of the most commercially successful Pascal compilers. Hejlsberg became Chief Engineer at Borland, where he developed Object Pascal further, and eventually produced the replacement for Turbo Pascal, Delphi. Prof. Gutknecht’s professional career in Computing started in 1968 in the Swissair real-time system programming group. Jürg Gutknecht joined Niklaus Wirth’s Lilith/ Modula research team in 1981. In 1985, after a sabbatical stay at the Xerox-PARC Research Laboratory in California, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the ETH and later full professor.  Together with Wirth, Gutknecht developed Modula-2 system software and created the Oberon programming language and system.
C.A.R. Hoare, British computer scientist and winner of the 1980 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for “his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages Jim Welsh, Queen’s University of Belfast. Known for books and articles and porting Pascal, Pascal Plus, on ICL 1900/2900 and A Model Implementation for Pascal.