In my rather lengthy career, I've had the opportunity to work with some incredible people. As someone who started programming in the early 1970s, and joined IBM in 1974, I found myself in the midst of both the pioneers of the beginning of the post-war boom in computer technology, as well as up and comers of my and later generations.

While I've already blogged about a few of these people, like "Big Dave" Thomas I thought it might be interesting to start an occasional series of articles about people I've met, worked with, been influence by, and perhaps influenced myself over the years.

One of those who influenced me in the formative years of my career was John Cocke. I can honestly say that I had absolutely no influence on him. His name may not be well known to many programmers these days, but we owe an immense debt to his intelligence and imagination.

I might have run into John for the first time in the summer of 1973 during my internship at IBM before my senior year in college. I was working in White Plains NY, for a divisional headquarters department, but part of that job involved trips up to the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, NY, to use the IBM 360 Model 91 which was there. This was IBM's biggest, most powerful computer at the time, and there were very few of them outside of IBM and places like NASA. It might have been somewhat later after I'd become a full-time IBMer a few miles north of Watson, up the Taconic State Parkway in Yorktown Heights at the Advanced Systems Development Division, which served as a kind of organizational bridge between Research and the Systems Development Division in Poughkeepsie where the IBM mainframes were developed and built.

T.J. Watson is an impressive piece of architecture, an arc which sweeps out what was a quarter of a circle then (it's been expanded since). The front of the three story building is all window, with a wide corridor. The offices are set inside along radial aisles.

To get a good perspective on John Cocke and his personality, you might want to have a look at this retrospective by some of his friends, made a few years before his retirement. As mentioned in the video, John would almost never be in his office, he'd wander those corridors and strike up conversations with folks. He would often be seen in his tan raincoat, probably a London Fog, with its shabby hem, always with a cigarette in his fingers. One of the reasons I say that he influenced me, was because like Alan Kay wrote about me, John Cocke was the least IBM-like IBMer who I ever saw.

So who, you might be asking, particularly if you didn't take the time to watch that video, was this John Cocke. His New York Times obituary gives some insight. He started with IBM in 1956, and worked on the IBM 7030 a.k.a. Stretch computer, which was IBM's first transistorized computer, and the world's fastest computer from it's debut in 1961 until the CDC 6600 eclipsed it in 1964.

But Mr. Cocke was not just a hardware guy, he became an expert on optimizing compilers. And that led to one of my fondest memories of him. I was in the halls of Watson one day when Cocke was holding forth, and said that he had patched the IBM FORTRAN compiler to accept a half dozen or more ways of spelling the reserved word CONTINUE, because "no program I wrote was going to tell me that I didn't know how to spell!" I can still hear him saying it in his soft southern accent, which I'd always thought was Virginian, until I just today found that he was a native of Charlotte.

He is probably best known as the father of Reduced Instruction Set Computers (or RISC architectures). His compiler work along with other IBMers like Fran Allen (who features prominently in that video, and became the first woman to gain the A.C.M Turing award a couple of years ago), and others, made him an expert on optimization and parallelization, and the realization that a machine which had simpler instructions making it easier for the compiler to produce optimized sequences, could be faster than a machine with complex instructions and addressing modes.

John Cocke died at the age 77 in 2002.

T.J. Watson was a hotbed of some of the people I want to write about in this series of articles, some of them are in that video, some aren't. I'll have to see who I get moved to write about next, and when.