Douglas T. Ross

Douglas Taylor "Doug" Ross (21 December 1929 – 31 January 2007) was an American computer scientist pioneer, and chairman of SofTech, Inc.[1] He is most famous for originating the term CAD for computer-aided design, and is considered to be the father of Automatically Programmed Tools (APT), a programming language to drive numerical control in manufacturing.

Ross was born in China, where his parents both worked as medical missionaries, and he then grew up in the United States in Canandaigua, New York.

In 1969, Ross founded SofTech, Inc., which began as an early supplier of custom compilers for the United States Department of Defense (DoD) for the languages Ada and Pascal.

Many consider him to be the father of Automatically Programmed Tools (APT), the language that drives numerical control in manufacturing.

It had ball-and-disk integrators and arms used to hand trace strip chart curves of radar noise data.

This initiated Ross's entry to the Servo Lab with a summer job in June 1952 in the field of airborne fire-control system evaluation and power density spectra analyses.

[6][7] In 1957 the last of Ross's original three research assistants, Sam Matsa,[8][9] left for IBM to develop AUTOPROMT, a three-dimensional APT derivative, and later (1967) co-founded, with Andy Van Dam, the ACM SICGRAPH.

At the conclusion of APT I, Ross and John Francis Reintjes were interviewed for MIT science reporter television by Robert S. Woodbury.

Early industry practitioners of computer aided drafting and manufacturing visited MIT in formal exchanges of the developing technologies.

[22] Post Assembly revisions of Jay Wright Forrester's famous Dynamo feedback-modeling, System Dynamics simulation language were written in AED-0, Ross's extended version of ALGOL 60 and used into the 1980s.

SofTech's compiling, dynamic loading, and linking tools helped make the p-System a powerful development environment.

UCSD p-System was used on IBM Personal Computer, Apple II, and other Zilog Z80, MOS Technology 6502, Motorola 68000 based machines.

In the 1980s, he minimized his role at SofTech to concentrate on developing Plex[31] into a wide-ranging pseudophilosophy touching on epistemology, ontology, and philosophy of science.

[32] Ross wrote a wealth of material on Plex,[31] delivering lectures at conferences and holding an abortive seminar at MIT in 1984.

[32] However, he was unable to find the audience he believed Plex deserved, and by the late 1980s he considered it an "intolerable burden of responsibility"[31] to be its sole proponent and prophet.