David W. Barron

He married his wife, Valerie. They had two children: Nik and Jacky.

Barron's work with Henry Rishbeth on radio wave propagation was pioneering in furthering the understanding of how radio waves were reflected at the ionospheric boundary.

Barron began his academic career in Cambridge University where he took a PhD in the Cavendish Laboratory. His research involved very early work in computer applications and he was a user of the original EDSAC computer, the world's first stored-program electronic computer to go into general service.

After his PhD he joined the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory and contributed to the development of the EDSAC 2 computer. In the early 1960s, he was leader of software development in the Titan project, a joint effort with Ferranti Ltd to develop a reduced version of the Atlas computer. In this role he led the Cambridge efforts to develop the Titan Supervisor (a multi-programming operating system) and CPL (Combined Programming Language). The Titan Supervisor led in due course to the Cambridge Multiple-Access System which provided a pioneering time-sharing service to a large user community in Cambridge and was also later employed in the Cambridge-based Computer Aided Design Centre. The CPL project broke new ground in language design and application generality, and the resulting defining paper was written by the original development team. CPL was notable for leading to BCPL and hence B and then C programming language.

Barron left Cambridge in 1967 to take up a chair of computer science at the University of Southampton where he remained until his retirement in 2000. As a computer scientist, he contributed to many fields as computer science developed into a discipline of its own. At Southampton he continued his almost unique abilities in writing and lecturing. In 2009, on the 60th anniversary of the completion of the Cambridge EDSAC computer, he delivered a seminal lecture on what was involved in programming this pioneering machine in the 1950s.

He was one of the founding editors of Software: Practice and Experience, and served as the editor from 1971 for over 30 years.

Barron is the author of many texts that explained the emerging subject to generations of students and researchers.

With others he published, in 1967, the manual for Titan Autocode programming.

In subsequent years Barron wrote texts on

Recursive Programming (1968), Assemblers and Loaders (1969), Operating Systems (1971 and 1984), Programming Languages (1977), Pascal Implementation (1981), Advanced Programming (1984), Text Processing and Typesetting (1987) and

Scripting Languages (2000).

On his personal web page Barron modestly described himself as "old-fashioned scholar, relic of the past".

{{Reflist|refs=

{{cite book |title=Who's who of British scientists |author-first=John |author-last=Grant |date=1971 |isbn=978-0-58211464-7 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Vws5AAAAIAAJ&q=%22Barron,+David+William%22+AND+%221935%22 |access-date=2012-01-11}}

{{cite web |title=Professor David Barron |series=In Memory and Celebration |publisher=University of Southampton |date=2012-01-02 |url=http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/dwb/ |access-date=2012-01-11 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200310112135/http://blog.soton.ac.uk/dwb/ |archive-date=2020-03-10}}

{{cite magazine |title=David Barron, 1935–2012 |magazine=Times Higher Education |issn=0049-3929 |publisher=TES Global |date=2012-02-02 |url=http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=418863 |access-date=2012-02-03 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200310112721/https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/people/obituaries/david-barron-1935-2012/418863.article?sectioncode=26&storycode=418863 |archive-date=2020-03-10}}

{{cite thesis |degree=PhD |author-first=David "Dave" Charles |author-last=De Roure |author-link=David Charles De Roure |title=A lisp environment for modelling distributed systems (quasi parallel lisp) |publisher=University of Southampton |date=1990 |id=Order number AAIDX94677 |url=http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=918769}} (261 pages)

{{cite journal |author-first1=Henry |author-last1=Rishbeth |author-first2=David William |author-last2=Barron |author-link2=David W. Barron |date=1960 |title=Equilibrium electron distributions in the ionospheric F2 layer |journal=Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics |volume=18 |issue=2–3 |pages=234–252 |doi=10.1016/0021-9169(60)90095-7 |bibcode=1960JATP...18..234R}}

{{cite journal |title=The 'Waveguide mode' theory of radio wave propagation when the ionosphere is not sharply bounded |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |date=1959 |journal=Philosophical Magazine |volume=4 |issue=45 |pages=1068–1081 |doi=10.1080/14786435908238287 |bibcode=1959PMag....4.1068B}}

{{cite journal |title=The main features of CPL |author-first1=David William |author-last1=Barron |author-link1=David W. Barron |author-first2=John N. |author-last2=Buxton |author-first3=David Fielding |author-last3=Hartley |author-link3=David Fielding Hartley |author-first4=Eric |author-last4=Nixon |author-first5=Christopher S. |author-last5=Strachey |author-link5=Christopher S. Strachey |journal=The Computer Journal |volume=6 |issue=2 |pages=134–143 |date=1963 |doi=10.1093/comjnl/6.2.134 |doi-access=free }}

{{cite journal |title=EDSAC: A Programmer Remembers |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |journal=The Computer Journal |date=2010}}

{{cite web |title=Software: Practice and Experience |issn=1097-024X |publisher=Wiley |doi=10.1002/(ISSN)1097-024X |url=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-024X |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160328225203/http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-024X |archive-date=2016-03-28}}

{{cite book |title=Titan Autocode programming manual |author-first1=David William |author-last1=Barron |author-link1=David W. Barron |display-authors=etal |publisher=University Mathematical Laboratory, University of Cambridge |location=Cambridge, UK |date=1967 |edition=3 |oclc=459308 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3VwgAQAAIAAJ |access-date=2020-03-10}} (108 pages)

{{cite book |title=Recursive techniques in programming |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |editor-first=Stanley |editor-last=Gill |editor-link=Stanley Gill |series=Macdonald Computer Monographs |date=1968 |orig-year=1967 |edition=1 |publisher=Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. |publication-place=London, UK |location=Cambridge, UK |sbn=356-02201-3 |bibcode=1970rtp..book.....B}} (viii+64 pages)

{{cite book |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |editor-first=J. John |editor-last=Floretin |title=Assemblers and Loaders |date=1978 |orig-year=1971, 1969 |edition=3 |publisher=Elsevier North-Holland Inc. |series=Computer Monographs |publication-place=New York, USA |location=University of Southampton, Southampton, UK |isbn=0-444-19462-2 |lccn=78-19961}} (xii+100 pages)

{{cite book |title=Computer operating systems |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |date=1971 |edition=1 |publisher=Chapman and Hall}}

{{cite book |title=Computer operating systems: for micros, minis, and mainframes |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |date=1984 |edition=2 |publisher=Chapman and Hall}}

{{cite book |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |date=1977 |title=An introduction to the study of programming languages |publisher=Cambridge University Press}}

{{cite book |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |date=1981-04-07 |title=PASCAL - The Language and its Implementation |publisher=Wiley |edition=1 |isbn=0-47127835-1 |series=Wiley Series in Computing |volume=23}} (312 pages)

{{cite book |author-first1=David William |author-last1=Barron |author-link1=David W. Barron |author-first2=Judith "Judy" Mary |author-last2=Bishop |date=1984 |title=Advanced Programming: A Practical Course |series=Wiley series in computing |publisher=John Wiley & Sons Ltd |edition=1 |isbn=0-47190521-6}} (277 pages)

{{cite book |author-first1=David William |author-last1=Barron |author-link1=David W. Barron |author-first2=Michael "Mike" J. |author-last2=Rees |date=1987 |title=Text processing and typesetting with Unix |series=International Computer Science Series |publisher=Addison-Wesley |edition=1 |isbn=0-20114219-8}} (464 pages)

{{cite book |title=The world of scripting languages |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |date=July 2000 |series=Worldwide Series in Computer Science |publisher=Wiley |edition=1 |isbn=978-0-471-99886-0}} (506 pages)

{{cite web |title=David Barron |author-first=David William |author-last=Barron |author-link=David W. Barron |format=personal web page |publisher=School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton |date=2010 |url=http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/dwb/ |access-date=2010-06-17 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120306062252/http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/dwb/ |archive-date=2012-03-06}}

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Category:English computer scientists

Category:Fellows of the British Computer Society

Category:Academics of the University of Southampton

Category:1935 births

Category:2012 deaths