We are saddened to report that Robert S. Barton, emeritus professor of electrical engineering at the University of Utah from 1968 to 1973, passed away on January 28, 2009, in Portland, Oregon, at the age of 83. Professor Barton is widely known as the chief architect of the Burroughs B5000 and B1700 computers. He invented the first stack machine architecture and was a co-inventor of dataflow. He received the first ever Eckert-Mauchley Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) “for his outstanding contributions in basing the design of computing systems on the hierarchical nature of programs and their data.” He was also recognized as a Computer Pioneer Charter Recipient by IEEE for his work in language-directed architecture.
Some of Professor Barton’s students at the University of Utah included such computer science innovators as Alan Kay, whose inventions led to the design of the Apple MacIntosh; James Clark, founder of Netscape; John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems; Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios; Alan Ashton, co-founder of WordPerfect; and Duane Call, co-founder of Computer System Architects.