U.S.Navy

In October 1952, to meet his Korean War Military Service obligations Jack joined the U.S. Navy as a Naval Air Cadet and became a night ASW Carrier Pilot in Squadron VS 39.

M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory

He returned from the Navy to M.I.T. in October of 1956 as a Research Engineer at the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory and joined the staff of the Advanced Computer Research Group. During that time, he wrote an on-line operating system for the first transistor computer, called, the "TX-0" ⁴ , which had just been built by the research group.

In 1957 he wrote its operating system ⁵ , "The TX-0 Direct Input Utility System" which was oriented toward serving programmers and engineers who wanted to write and debug their programs from the console.

This console use of computers was not popular at the time. After a year of fine tuning the system, Jack gave a talk about his work at a computer staff meeting at the Universtity of Toronto and in the middle of the talk, he was asked to leave by Prof. Gotlieb who was an avid "Batch Processing" believer and considered the concept of "On Line Programming and Debugging at a console" to be ludicrous.

The TX-0 desk/console had an on line input/output typewriter, a display scope with a light pen, an analog to digital conversion input device, a prototype Xerox laser printer and a core memory of 65,536 18 bit words of storage. Jack's operating system also provided debugging aids, which included a flow chart display routine with logical interrupt switches controlled by toggle switches from the console panel .

During this period he also worked with a team of researchers from his group and the M.I.T. Research Laboratory of Electronics on a project that was attempting to develop a pattern recognition algorithm to recognize the “Sleeping Spindle” waveform, which appears in EEG brain wave recordings. Jack’s contribution was the development of a moving window display program on the TX-0 that simulated a laboratory oscilloscope that provided the researchers with the ability to scan, view and save the brain data along with information generated by the computer to indicate what the algorithm had “recognized” as sleeping spindles. The results were reported in a Lincoln Lab report in 1957 and in the IRA transactions on Bio Medical Electronics in 1962. ⁶

In 1958 the group took on the task of building a workstation called, “The Lincoln Writer" ⁷ that would be the on-line work station for the group's new computer, the "TX-2" which was almost completed.

Jack was assigned the job of logical designer and Robert L. Savell was the engineer. During the workstation's development he wrote a program called, “The Scopewriter” to simulate a scientific oriented typewriter. It was one of the first on-line text and graphic editors with with 200(light dot)keybuttons,and displayed a complete set of ascii characters, a rich set of scientific and greek symbols as well as some special symbols for producing circuit diagrams and charts; all of which were designed and drawn full scale on the CRT and then reuduced to character size on-line using the TX-0 light pen (designed and built by Ben Gurley).

Jack also was part of the team that designed the instruction set for the TX-2 computer and wrote its first symbolic assembly program called the Mark II Conversion Program. ⁸

He retired from the Lincoln Laboratory staff in October of 1959 to co-found one of the early consulting/software houses, called, Charles W. Adams Associates Incorporated.

⁴ A Functional Description of the TX-0 Computer, John T. Gilmore Jr. and H. Phillip Peterson M.I.T. Linclon Laboratory Memorandum 6M-4789 November 10, 1956

⁵ TX-0 Direct Input Utility System, John T. Gilmore Jr. M.I.T. Linclon Laboratory Memorandum 6M-5097April 10, 1957

⁶ Computer Techniques for The Study of Patterns in The Electroencephalogram, Belmont Farley, L.S Frishkopf, W.A. Clark, John T. Gilmore Jr. M.I.T. Linclon Laboratory Technical Report No. 165 November 6, 1957 IRE Transactions on Bio Medical Electronics January, 1962 Computer Techniques for the Study of Patterns in the Electroencephalogram. B.G.Farley, L.S Frishkopf, W.A.Clark, Jr. and J.T. Gilmore Jr.

⁷ The Lincoln Writer, John T. Gilmore Jr., Robert L. Savell M.I.T. Linclon Laboratory Group Report 51-8, October 6, 1959

⁸ Programming Language for Mark II Conversion Program, John T Gilmore Jr. M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory Group Report 51-1, Feb 3 1959, Reissued July 30 1959 Lexikon History of Computing Individuals: Computer Pioneers, Scientists, Entrepreneurs

http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/01HISTORYCD-Individuals.htm

Charles W. Adams Associates Inc. and Keydata Corporation

In October of 1959 he co-founded one of the early consulting/software houses, Charles W. Adams Associates Inc. (later called Keydata Corporation) as Vice President and then in 1967, as President. The firm specialized in On-Line in Real Time computer applications and later on line computer application services. Five major accomplishments there include:

1. The development of an electronic drafting machine graphics system called the "EDM" on the PDP-1 in 1961 designed and implemented by an Adams Assocists team headed by Jack for Itek Corporation. It was reported on in Time Magazine in March 2, 1962 under "Technology: ..... to beat the language barrier between man and machine, ITEK has, in effect hitched the digital computer to the draftsman's stylus. With a photoelectric light pen, the operator can formulate engineering problem's graphically (instead of reducing them to equations ....". Itek marketed it as the EDM machine and it was later sold by Itek to Control Data. It was marketed as "The CDC Digigraphics System" and aircraft firms like Lockheed and Martin Marietta were early customers. ⁹

A similar system was developed for the Air Force by Adams Associates. That project was reported by Jack in a Digital Equipment Decus meeting in November of 1963 at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. ¹⁰ In 1989, Jack was acknowledged as a computer graphics pioneer along with five others at a SIGGRAPH conference in Boston in a special session on early graphics projects. ¹¹

2. The automation of an oil refinery using display equipment and light pens as part of the control processing computer system in 1964.

3. The development of the first commercial time-sharing system, called Keydata in 1965. ¹²



4. The development of the original INSTINET stock trading system on the Keydata system starting in the late 1960's. It is still going strong on its own system now. (It traded 31.5 billion U.S. equity shares recently in one quarter alone).

5. The development of an early intelligent database system on the Keydata system, called PAR, designed by Jack for the planning, analysis and reporting of financial information in 1973 ¹³ . It was based on set theory and enabled users, on line, to create subsets from the chart of accounts, as well as other already defined subsets. This provided the ability to create accounting "trees" and analyses such as profits by products, regions, etc. Keydata was the first user and it helped management to analyze the company in a much more efficient and effective manner.

⁹ The March 2, 1962 issue of Time on page 74 under Technology was titled "Breaking the Language Barrier". The article referred to the Itek's EDM Electronic Drafting Machine and the language barrier between man and the computer.

¹⁰ A version of the EDM was also done for the Air Force and reported in a Digital Equipment Decus Meeting at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory titled, The Digigraphic Display Program for the DX-1 Computer System, November 1963 by John T. Gilmore Jr.

¹¹ SIGGRAPH 89 Panel Proceedings, Special Session, Retrospectives I and II: The Early Years in Computer Graphics at MIT, Lincoln Lab and Harvard Chair, Jan Hurst. EJH Associates, Moderator, Michael S. Mahoney, Princeton University, Retrospectives I: Speakers, Norman H. Taylor, Androx, Inc., Douglas T. Ross, SofTech, Inc., Robert M Fano, MIT Retrospectives II Speakers, John T. Gilmore, Digital Equipment Corporation, Lawrence G. Roberts, NetExpress, Inc. Robin Forest, University of East Anglia, UK. (Jack's paper is on pages 39 through 55. He and the other speakers were acknowledged as computer graphics pioneers.

¹² Keydata Corporation was one of the first companies in the time-sharing business in the 1960's. It was the brainchild of Charles Adams, an entrepreneur who had founded "Adams Associates" who are best remembered as the authors of computer equipment surveys during this period. Keydata was located in Technology Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where project MAC, the seminal venture sponsored by MIT which saw the developmemt of MULTICS one of the earliest time sharing software systems. UNIX is a derivative of MULTICS. In addition, IBM's Scientific Development center was located in Technology Square and this R&D center developed the first IBM virtual memory system computer. This was initially installed on a modified IBM 360/40 computer with the informal name of the "Cambridge box." Later IBM used modernized technology for the 360/67 and, today, all modern computers use "virtual memory." The coincident location of the nexus of time sharing and virtual memory developers in Cambridge resulted in a heady climate of information technology state-of-the-art knowledge sharing which Keydata profited by, although its UNIVAC computer architecture permitted only software-based implementations. At the time, the fashion was the idea that computer power would be made available on a network connection of a "dumb" terminal to a "smart" main-frame computer utilily, sharing mammoth computer power with thousands, if not millions, of users. Keydata used a UNIVAC 490 computer to provide commercial applications such as inventory management and accounting applications on a network basis to slow Teletype-based terminals in customer locations and replaced in-house computers and other services with its highly customized parameter-driven distribution and manufacturing applications. Other seminal services were initially implemented on this service, such as Instinet, a stock trading service now owned by Reuters which trades large block transactions on US securities markets, and a very early network inventory network application for Shell Oil company. At its peak, Keydata had hundreds of customers on-line but was never able to compete with emerging micro-computer applications which took over the market, at first, with copies of Keydata developed applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keydata_Corporation
¹³ http://news.com.com/The+man+who+made+PCs+useful+-+page+2/2009-1082_3-233609-2.html

Digital Equipment Corporation:

In 1974, he was hired by Digital Equipment as a consultant to initiate the design of their Word Processing System and then joined them in various managerial and technical roles in their Office Automation efforts. He designed Digital's Gold Key Word Processing user interface in 1975 and became Product Group Manager for Word Processing Systems. Later, he served as Technical Manager for the Engineering Group which produced Digital’s Electronic Mail and All-in-One Office Automation System. His last assignment was Director of Comparative Analysis at which time he intiated the use of vectors in Decision Analysis ¹⁴ before his retirement in 1992 to return to the consulting field.

¹⁴ A Quantitative Comparative Analysis Technique for Benchmarking Product Functionality and Customer Requirements" DSS-91 Information Technology for Executives and Managers Eleventh International Conference on Decision Support Systems Manhattan Beach, California June 3-5 1991

Comparative Visual Assessments Inc.

His primary interest today is encouraging senior managers to embrace the use of vectors in their analyses for more effective and efficient decision making.

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