Richard W. Conway
[20] He grew up in that state and attended Whitefish Bay High School in the Milwaukee County village of that name.
[24] He had a very early exposure to computing via attending a noncredit seminar on the IBM Card-Programmed Electronic Calculator that was given by Robert J. Walker and J. Barkley Rosser of the Cornell mathematics department.
[18] He received his Ph.D. degree in 1958, under the supervision of Andrew Schultz Jr.;[18] his thesis was entitled "An Experimental Investigation of Scheduling for Single-Stage Production".
[29] Taking advantage of a sabbatical in 1961, Conway worked at the RAND Corporation, where he had access to an IBM 704 computer and was one of the first programmers to use the simulation language SIMSCRIPT, which Markowitz was the designer of.
[34][19] Its translation into Russian in 1975 has been credited with helping to spur a wave of research into scheduling theory in the Soviet Union.
[11] The new department was shared between the Arts and Engineering schools,[18] and was funded by a large initial grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
[27] Besides his focus on the academic aspects of computing, Conway was also involved in planning for the administrative electronic data processing capacities at Cornell.
[36] Besides the political battles endemic to pulling multiple university entities into a coordinated plan,[22] a major challenge came when the IBM System/360 Model 67 with TSS/360 time-sharing that the university had committed to had to be withdrawn prior to delivery due to poor performance; Conway led the effort to adapt the replacement IBM System/360 Model 65, which lacked the timesharing feature, to Cornell's need for flexible and speedy handling of batch job submissions.
[35] Conway later referred his time as head of computing services as "two really painful years" that was the least favorite part of his career.
[38] It was loosely related to both FORTRAN and ALGOL but far simpler and smaller, and due to being designed for the era of punched cards and slow job turnarounds, the CORC compiler made every attempt to bypass or correct errors in the submitted code.
[38] This was followed by CUPL (for Cornell University Programming Language), which had similar aims and incorporated various refinements, improvements, and environmental capabilities.
[22] It led to a dozen or so textbooks modeled after it, authored or co-authored by Conway,[42] all of which were oriented towards teaching programming but using a variety of different languages and dialects.
Simulations were built by the user instantiating and connecting graphical icons representing real-world factory elements such as workstations, conveyor belts, and receiving areas.
[49] The XCELL tool was made commercially available via an Ithaca-based firm called Express Software Products, Inc.[47] There was also an educational version.
[51] At that point he became, in the words of a biographical assessment written for the journal Production and Operations Management, "one of very few people to receive a varsity letter, a PhD, and an endowed chair, all from Cornell.
[13] This was an immersion program in which for a full semester students took only this one course; at least half the time was spent at various corporate manufacturing sites, especially those of Corning Inc., and the other in class.
[42] Despite initial reluctance of the business school faculty toward the immersion idea,[42] it was successful and became an innovative educational model within the college.
[2] Upon his death, the Conway-Walker Lecture Series within the Department of Computer Science was co-named (joining Robert J. Walker) to commemorate his contributions.
