Massachusetts Computer Associates

{{Short description|Programming language software company}}

Massachusetts Computer Associates (originally just Computer Associates), also known as COMPASS, was a software company founded by Thomas Edward Cheatham Jr. and based in Wakefield, Massachusetts from approximately 1961 to 1991, focusing primarily on programming language design and implementation, especially source-to-source transformation.David B. Loveman, "Program Improvement by Source-to-Source Transformation", Journal of the ACM 24:1:121–145 (January 1977) It was acquired in the late 1960s by Applied Data Research.

Many well-known computer scientist were employed by, or consulted for, COMPASS at some point in their careers, including Michael J. Fischer, Stephen Warshall, Robert W. Floyd, and Leslie Lamport.{{cite web|website=Microsoft Research Blog|title=Leslie Lamport Receives Turing Award|url=https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/leslie-lamport-receives-turing-award/|date=March 18, 2014}} Some of the systems they worked on include AMBIT/GCarlos Christensen, Michael S. Wolfberg, Michael J. Fischer, "A Report on AMBIT/G", Massachusetts Computer Associates Inc., 1971 and IVTRAN, a Fortran compiler for the ILLIAC IV.Robert E Millstein, "Compiler Design for the ILLIAC IV", Massachusetts Computer Associates Inc., 1973

Leslie Lamport wrote his influential "Time, Clocks" paper while he was at COMPASS.{{Cite journal | last1 = Lamport | first1 = L. |author-link1=Leslie Lamport| title = Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system | doi = 10.1145/359545.359563 | journal = Communications of the ACM | volume = 21 | issue = 7 | pages = 558–565| year = 1978 | s2cid = 215822405 | url=http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf}}

The original vectorizing compiler for the ILLIAC IV was written at COMPASS"Supercomputer cruises at 80 million operations a second", Popular Science June 1979, p. [https://books.google.com/books?id=fAEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA89 p. 89] with contributions by Lamport, who worked there part-time.Dennis Shasha, Cathy Lazere, Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists, p. 125

Robert Floyd's Treesort algorithm was published while Floyd was at COMPASS.Robert W. Floyd, "Algorithm 113: Treesort", Communications of the ACM 5:8:434 (August 1962)