Robert Stanley "Bob" Barton (February 13, 1925 – January 28, 2009) was the chief architect of the Burroughs B5000 and other computers such as the B1700, a co-inventor of dataflow architecture, and an influential professor at the University of Utah.

In 1958, he studied Irving Copi and Jan Łukasiewicz's work on symbolic logic and Polish notation,[3] and considered its application to arithmetic expression processing on a computer.

[3] He managed a system programming group in 1959 which developed a compiler named BALGOL for the language ALGOL 58 on the Burroughs 220 computer.

After an assignment in Australia in 1963 for Control Data Corporation, he returned in 1965 to join the Computer Science staff of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Utah where, from 1968 to 1973,[5] his colleagues included David C. Evans, Ivan Sutherland, and Thomas Stockham.

Other Utah students that he influenced included: Alan Kay, James H. Clark cofounder of Silicon Graphics, John Warnock, cofounder of Adobe Systems, Ed Catmull of Pixar, Henri Gouraud (Gouraud shading) and Bui Tuong Phong (Phong shading).