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Crawford, Perry O., Jr.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The , Jan 11, 2007
Crawford, Perry O., Jr.
Of Glendale. died at 89 on December 13th, 2006 after a brief illness. Born August 9, 1917 in Medford, OR, he graduated MIT in 1939. He spent his career at IBM. Last year he moved to the Laurel Oaks community in Glendale to be near his Wisconsin children. Beloved husband of the late Marguerite (Peggy) Murtagh he is survived by his children Perry (Jeanne) Crawford III (owner of Crawford Tree & Landscape) of Brown Deer, WI; Elisabeth (George Wilson) Crawford; Susan (Daniel) Seidman; Constance (Gary) Holdmann of Milwaukee, WI; and Ann (Steven Bailey) Crawford. His father's name is carried on to the next generation by Perry Crawford IV of Chicago, IL . After all those daughters he is survived by 13 grandsons and 5 granddaughters. There will be a memorial service at Evangel Assembly of God at 9920 W. Good Hope Rd., Milwaukee on Sunday, Jan. 14, 2007 from 2 to 5 PM with prayers and memories at 3:30 PM.
2. IBMers I Remember, #3 in Series: Perry Crawford
I have known many, some quite well, of the second, post-1950 generation of computer pioneers. I have known two, one quite well, of the pre-1950 pioneers: Maurice Wilkes and Perry Crawford. Maurice Wilkes is well known. I met him twice and the second time, in the 1970s, had a lengthy discussion with him. At this time he was enthusiastic about graphics. I have also read his autobio, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer. It is very good.
Perry Crawford is less well known, but he is a major figure. He started in computing in the mid-1930s while a student at MIT. For a time in the late 1930s and early and mid-1940s he was director at MIT of what would now be called the computer center. He is sometimes credited, in a similar fashion to John Atanasoff, of having built a digital computer before Eckert and Mauchly. He was a close associate of Jay Forrester and is credited with convincing him to change the focus of Whirlwind from analog to digital. He went to work for IBM about 1949.
My association with Perry was while I was working for Walt Schaffer in the Rochester post office. Perry heard about our work and was himself working on a similar activity at Yorktown. He was retired on the job and was working alone on whatever his fancy dictated. He contacted me and invited himself to Rochester for what turned out to be the first of several visits. On these visits I was his host, and we told each other about what we were doing. Though I did not find Perry's work useful, I referenced it in the half-dozen or so papers I wrote about our project.
We became good friends and spent a fair amount of time together (1979-1982 - I had no contact with him after I left Rochester). He visited me at my home in Rochester a couple of times and introduced me to the Gin Martini. He drank only Gin Martinis, and a fair number. I do not think I had ever drunk a Gin Martini prior to that time. I got Uncle Jedley to show me how to make them and, during my association with Perry, drank only Gin Martinis. Joe LaSarge switched me for a time onto Margaritas. I later switched back to Gin Martinis, and it was and is my drink of choice through the 1990s and into the 3rd Millennium. I think of Perry whilst drinking them.
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IBM. Systems Journal. follows the practice of using the peers of authors ... Perry Crawford. Flaviu I. Cristian. Ian Cuthill. Rudy J. Cypser ...
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| D.uring the week of August 23, 1948, the IBM conducted a Scientific Computation Forum, ... Perry Crawford, Jr., ONR, BOQ, Sands Point, Port Washington, ...
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| "High speed computing machines--a survey," PERRY CRAWFORD, Research and De- velopment ... "Theodolite reductions on the IBM relay calculators," MARK LOTKIN ...
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More IBMers I remember: Huck Finn, Steve (Red) Dunwell, Bill Vermilion
These are fairly disparate individuals. What they have in common, apart from working for IBM and intersecting with me, is that they were all well-read, and I enjoyed my work with them.
Dunwell and Vermilion are both dead. Bill was about my age but died from a heart attack circa 1976. Steve was older and died circa 1994 in his 70s after retiring from IBM. I lost track of Huck before I left RTP, though he probably continued to work for IBM into the 1990s
"Huck" was Finn's nickname. I do not recall his real first name, though it may have been Tom. He was never resident in RTP (Research Triangle Park) but spent some time there in the late 1960s working with me on various things. I do not know much about his background. He had a large library, was independently wealthy, and worked for IBM because he enjoyed it. I think he was a couple of years younger than I. He was about my height, of slight build, possessed a full beard -- at that time, the only IBMer I knew other than myself to have one -- and dressed extremely well. He was sharp, appeared to work in marketing, and seemed to come and go pretty much as he pleased.
I know only two good stories about Huck, though I am sure there are many more. Story number one is short: Huck was the only IBMer in history to get an OCA (Outstanding Contribution Award) for killing a project. It was one of the early replacements planned for DOS (Disk Operating System).
Story number two is associated with story number one. In order for the project to be killed, its demise had to be approved by the MRC (Management Review Committee – sometimes called the MC). For many years, the MRC was the final court of review for any major decision in IBM and was composed of a dozen or more top executives. (By definition, an executive in IBM received stock options, a top executive was on the MRC.) Huck put together a polished flip chart presentation on why the project should be killed and presented it to the MRC. He told me that it was a good presentation, that everyone paid close attention, but that nobody said anything while he was talking -- which made him quite nervous since presentations in IBM were normally interactive. When he finished, there was dead silence. Finally, Manny Piore said, "Young man, do you know that you are the first person with a beard to make a presentation to the MRC?"
I think that Huck spent the rest of his career in IBM reviewing that incident in his mind.
I always think of Huck and Steve (when I knew Steve it was no longer appropriate to call him "Red") together, though to the best of my knowledge the three of us were never in the same room. There is just something that brings them together in my mind. Perhaps it was because both had large private libraries. Huck’s was general. Steve’s was mostly books on cryptography, many quite valuable. I sometimes wonder where his library is now. Steve and I never worked together. We just worked on similar things (he in Poughkeepsie, I in RTP) and used to visit back and forth to exchange ideas and opinions. Steve was big (not fat), happy, and nice to know.
I first got to know Steve in 1965. This was after he had received his famous apology from Watson and made an IBM Fellow. We visited back and forth until I left for Zurich. I never saw him again. (To refresh your memory, Steve was the project manager on STRETCH (the IBM 7030 -- IBM's first crack at an assembly line super computer), and when it turned out to be much slower than expected, everyone was publicly humiliated. (The programming manager, Don Furth, was reassigned as country SE (System Engineering) Manager in Australia. Many years later he and I were on the Ascension Day Taskforce together (along with Bill Vermilion, Glenn Henry, and a number of others), and I literally (not figuratively) drank him under the table on Slivovitz (he and I worked together a number of times subsequently, but I could never talk him in to having some more Slivovitz). Everybody else on the taskforce stopped drinking and watched (as did everyone else in the bar, including the bartender). Later (about 3:00 AM) at our hotel, Bill Vermilion and I drank some $40 white wine and ate fresh strawberries flown in from Israel.) When it turned out that everyone had done a pretty good job, and that without the STRETCH technology S/360 would not have been possible, Watson apologized to Steve (supposedly the only time that Watson issued a public apology) and made him an IBM Fellow -- this was in 1964.)
I do not know too much about Steve that was not in his obit (Winter 1994 Annals). He worked with Friedman on Magic (see The Man Who Broke Purple, The Story of Magic, and The Emperor’s Codes), was the project manager on STRETCH, and as an IBM Fellow (Fellows could do anything they wanted for five years, then if their fellowship was renewed, they could continue for another five years, and so on) was the father of the famous RETAIN system (the first really useful debug/fix database -- developed by FED (the Field Engineering Division)). Steve thought Field Engineers the backbone of IBM.
My wife and I were going somewhere by airplane one time, circa 1968, and it turned out that Steve was on the plane too. We chatted for a couple of hours. I think that Steve was one of only two IBMers my wife ever met she liked (Karl Kuemmerle was the other – more about him in the DCC Note).
| Soon after joining IBM, Dunwell designed and built a machine that sorted marked cards. With this machine, he demonstrated to IBM management the power of ...
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Bill was one of the smartest and most interesting and likable guys I knew in IBM. We met on Jack Palmer's microcode standards taskforce. Though we never worked or lived in geographical proximity, thereafter we visited back and forth regularly, and whenever either of us needed help, one would call on the other. On first encounter, Bill came across as square, but as one got to know him better, he started to appear more interesting.
Bill was about my height, small boned, and plump. He had pale hair, fair skin, and was the son of a New Hampshire (Vermont?) Congregational minister. He was into computational linguistics just about before anybody and went to Finland to work on his doctorate. There, he talked IBM Finland into giving him free time on one of their in-house 1401s to use in conjunction with his work on the odder of the two Finish languages. After some little while, IBM Finland talked him into going to work for them (after Bill's death, by chance I met a couple of Finish IBMers at SICOB in Paris -- we had an excellent dinner one evening and told each other Bill Vermilion stories).
Later, when the 360 was in deep shit, Bill was loaned by IBM Finland to IBM Domestic to give a helping hand. He worked in Poughkeepsie (under various development division names) and in Mohansic and Yorktown (in both the Advanced System Development Division and the Research Division) for over six years on assignment from IBM Finland (with all the allowances and such entailed) before IBM finally by force majeure transferred him into IBM Domestic -- the Research Division.
The most interesting story he told me was about his work on the taskforce that investigated why the S/3 looked like the S/3 and not like a S/360. I will save that story for the Rochester Note.
One of the things I liked most about Bill was that he almost liked the three articles (I always refer to them as the L’s) Pete Huyck and I wrote for Datamation (he did not live to see D&M -- into every life some rain must fall). Everyone, apart from Bill and one of my Rochester buddies, Rich Demers, the founder of RPDS (the Rochester Philosophical and Drinking Society), I have ever talked to, including my best friends, who have read the L’s (and a surprising number of people have), either disliked them or hated them. The first editor at Datamation, who accepted the first two, must have liked them, but he got fired. The second editor, who accepted the third article, wrote me and Pete telling us never to send anymore articles to the magazine. Anyway, Bill said that he would not have signed his name to the articles but that they were kind of interesting (he had a couple of nasty comments about diction but so did everybody). (Bill Batchelor, my good buddy in Rochester who was the IBM project manager on SAGE, read D&M twice (he was in the hospital at the time and had nothing else to do) and said that he disliked it more on second reading than on the first. Frank Corr, the subtlest of the subtle at the DCC, confined himself to saying that he could not make out what D&M was about.)
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