IP: Sad news -- John Cocke

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

John Cocke dies yesterday afternoon after being in the hospital for several 
weeks and seeming to be on the mend.

Those of us who knew John will deeply miss him. He was influential in so 
many areas of computer science. I first met him when I visiting IBM to talk 
with the Stretch design team. At that time, the architecture group was 
housed in a vault at IBM (converted). Not that it was classified but that 
that was the only free space available. To get to them you rang a bell and 
the door then was opened. Anyway, John was so broad that almost anything 
you wanted to discuss he was happy to be an expert at .. from skiing to the 
Fortran compiler to floating point arithmetic to good food to risc 
architectures  to how telephone systems should have been built --  all 
accompanied in those old days by the chewed cigarette butts -- the mark 
John had been there (as well as the burn marks in our couch in California).

I especially remember stories (I saw the desk draws) about the un cashed 
paychecks and un-vouched expenses that drove IBM up the wall.

We will all miss John, a giant has left us and will be missed.

Dave

The brief bio from the Franklin Award given to John:

John Cocke earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering in 1946 
and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1953 - both from Duke University. Dr. John 
Cocke was with the IBM Research Division from 1956 to 1992. During that 
time he also served as a visiting professor for a year at MIT and for two 
years at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He has written 
21 journal papers, and holds 22 patents.

Honors and awards received:
From IBM in 1979: the Corporate Outstanding Award for the system 
architecture concepts of the 801 Minicomputer System - the first RISC machine;
from IBM in 1990: the John E. Bertram Award for Sustained Excellence.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National 
Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and 
Sciences. His many awards include the Turing Award from the Association for 
Computing Machinery (ACM), the Pioneer Award from the Computer Society of 
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In 1991, he 
received a National Medal of Technology, and in 1994 he was awarded a 
National Medal of Science.

Now therefore, for invention, development, and implementation of Reduced 
Instruction Set Computer architecture and program optimization technology, 
THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE AWARDS its CERTIFICATE OF MERIT to JOHN COCKE.


The citation for the Turing award

For significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the 
architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction 
set computers (RISC); for discovering and systematizing many fundamental 
transformations now used in optimizing compilers including reduction of 
operator strength, elimination of common subexpressions, register 
allocation, constant propagation, and dead code elimination.

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