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Bruce Gilchrist (4 August 1930 Cf. Library of Congress, US Library of Congress author records for Bruce Gilchrist – 23 May 2015) is considered one of the notable figures in modern computing history.In that the Charles Babbage Institute of the University of Minnesota, computing histories, holds the letters and archives of Dr. Gilchrist. "CBI archival collections include the papers of prominent companies, individuals, professional associations as well as key government agencies."Cf. Wikipedia article on the Charles Babbage Institute which says it houses papers and archives of noteworthy computer pioneers: "In addition, CBI has collections of archival papers from many notable figures in computing"
In October 1948, after being awarded a State Scholarship, he started an accelerated applied mathematics degree course at Imperial College of Science and Technology of the University of London.
In 1951, he be able to attend a two-week course at Cambridge University given by Maurice Wilkes, the developer of the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC). Gilchrist recalls that "this was my first real exposure to computer programming, the problems of debugging, etc.".
In 1954, he married his first love Jean DeWolf Littlefield in Princeton, NJ. Bruce and Jean had three children: Ian, James, and Andrew.
He also worked in the area of computers at IAS. Gilchrist first collaborated with the engineer James H. Pomerene on bettering the performance of cathode ray tube memory (the Williams tube developed first at the University of Manchester in England), writing diagnostic programs which allowed the team to make necessary adjustments for speed and reliability.
Further collaborating with Pomerene and Y.K. Wong, they invented a fast adder which incorporated a speed up technique for asynchronous adders reducing the time for additive carry-overs to propagate. This design was actually later incorporated in one commercial computer, the Philco TRANSAC S-2000, introduced in 1957, the first commercial transistorized computer.Gilchrist, Bruce, "Remembering Some Early Computers, 1948-1960" , Columbia University EPIC, 2006, pp.7-9.
Gilchrist was married in Princeton in April 1954 and his eldest son, Ian, was born there in February 1956.
In 1955, John von Neumann left the Institute for Advanced Study to join the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and so, in the summer of 1956, the group Gilchrist had been working with, broke up.
Some time after, he also became involved with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was elected to its national Council in 1958. This volunteer work put him into contact with a wide variety of computer users across the United States.
In the spring of 1959, he was asked by Dr. Herman Goldstine, to join him at IBM Research as manager of the computing facility. So, Gilchrist joined IBM in 1959 where some years later he later became director of planning with its service bureau subsidiary, Service Bureau Corporation (SBC), from 1963 to 1965. From 1965 to 1968, he was a manager of IBM's Data Processing Division.
Gilchrist served as secretary (1960–1962) and vice president (1962–1964) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
In 1966 he was elected president of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) Charles Babbage Institute, "American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) Records, 1960-199: CBI 44" and later served as its executive director from 1968 to 1973.
He later became director of the Columbia University Computer Center at Columbia University in New York City from 1973 to 1985.da Cruz, Frank, "Columbia University Computing History: A Chronology of Computing at Columbia University", 2001-2010 He was also a member of the faculty of engineering at Columbia. He retired from Columbia in 1991.
Having moved to Chappaqua, New York in 1959, he continued to be active in civic affairs, holding various positions, such as being on the Chappaqua School Board, and the Northern Westchester Board of Cooperative Educational Services, among others. From 1986-1989 he was elected supervisor of the town of New Castle, New York. In 1989, his first wife Jean died. Social Security Administration; Washington D.C., USA; Social Security Death Index, Master File}
Gilchrist lived in Chappaqua from 1959 to 2008, after which he moved to Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, Bette.Brewster, Sara, "Fond Farewell Gathering for Gilchrist", New Castle Now, 18 January 2008 He died 23 May 2015. He is survived by his three sons Ian, James, and Andrew.
Gilchrist had five grandchildren with Littlefield: Ian (spouse Kelly Murphy), Juliann, Anthony(Archaeologist), Carson, and Griffin.
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