John Edward Lancelot Peck (14 August 1918 – 6 November 2013) was the first permanent Head of Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Natal, South Africa, after which he received a Master of Science (M.Sc.)
As a result of this experience, he visited the University of Oklahoma to learn to program an IBM 650, another drum memory machine, which had an optimizing assembler named SOAP.
This led to an invitation to attend the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) congress as Canada's representative.
He was seen arriving at the computer centre's terminal room early morning each weekend on his old-fashioned solid bicycle, beating many graduate students who headed to the terminal room to use the Amdahl mainframe computer in less crowded morning hours.
That a professor of his status was sitting and typing at the terminal at each weekend gave some unspoken lessons to the future researchers.