The Mark Halpern papers contain technical papers and reports, conference proceedings, manuals, and periodicals written and collected during Halpern’s career as a computer programmer at IBM’s Programming Research Department, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, and Tymshare, Inc. Some of the earliest materials in the collection coincide with Halpern’s start at IBM in 1957, just after the release of Fortran and span the following decades until 1990. The bulk of the collection is comprised of technical papers, reports, and manuals related to specific programming languages and compilers: Fortran, ALGOL, SIMSCRIPT, Lisp 1.5, JOVIAL , and many others are represented. A smaller amount of material covers hardware and software technologies and products from Tandem Computers, Inc. and various IBM computers, including the IBM System/360 and IBM 7090. Also of interest are conference proceedings spanning the 1960s from IBM Programming Symposia, Association for Computing Machinery annual meetings, a RAND Computer Symposium, and the National Winter Convention on Military Electronics.
Biographical/Historical Note
Mark Halpern was born on March 1, 1931 in New York, New York. He received a BA from City College of New York in 1951 and went on to pursue a PhD in English Language and Literature at Columbia University. However, in 1957, Halpern left his doctoral program at Columbia to begin work for IBM as a computer programmer. This transition occurred just months after IBM’s Programming Research Department announced the release of Fortran, and much of Halpern’s training and work at IBM involved working with this new programming language. In 1961, Halpern left IBM and began working at the Palo Alto Research Laboratories of Lockheed Missiles and Space Company (LMSC) as the Head of Programming Application Research. During his time at LCSC, Halpern made significant progress on XPOP, a macroprocessor-based programming system.
In 1967, Halpern was invited to speak at a conference held internally by IBM and was subsequently re-hired by the company as part of its Assembler Language Department and Mission in San Jose, California. After two years in this position, Halpern resigned from IBM for a second time in December of 1969 and worked in a number of brief jobs including developing software for Fairchild Camera & Instruments and working for Crocker National Bank in Data Processing & Systems Administration.
In 1972, Halpern started working at Tymshare, Inc., a company that provided public time-shared computer networking. Halpern stayed at Tymshare for almost six years working on the development of a "SuperFORTRAN" compiler with its vendor, the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). In 1978, Halpern left Tymshare for a job as compiler-department manager with the Western Development Center (WDC) of Datapoint. Halpern’s last job programming and managing software development started in 1983 with a company called Dialogue Systems (later renamed Enhansys).
After this job, Halpern shifted his career to technical writing, starting in 1987 as a technical writer for Tandem Computers, Inc. Since then, Halpern has devoted his career to writing and publishing works on various topics relating to technology and linguistics including two books, Binding Time: Six Studies in Programming Technology and Milieu (Ablex Publishers, 1990) and Language & Human Nature (Regent Press, 2006).
Includes overview of the structure of the compiler, many details of the FORTRAN systems tape, and the record structure of the compiler intermediate tape. Section 3 is reprint of Backus et al. 1957.
Included in this folder is the October 1964 issue of Automatic Programming Information, which features an article by Halpern. This folder also includes loose articles and two issues of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.
