The Lawrence C. Brown papers contain technical reports, manuals, internal memos, clippings, and a small amount of software and photographic materials gathered over the course of Brown’s 32-year long career at International Business Machines (IBM). While the papers range in date from 1953 to 1993, the bulk of the materials are from 1955 to 1975.
About half of the collection pertains directly to Brown’s early work at IBM, where he developed programming languages such as PL/I, Fortran, and NPL. Most of these materials were produced during the 1950s and 1960s and include manuals, internal reports, and notes. There are also IBM internal design documents and memos, code listings, flowcharts, reports, and correspondence chronicling the development of Fortran and PL/I languages and compilers. Many of these reports about PL/I are from the IBM Hursley and IBM Vienna laboratories. This portion of the collection also contains notes from SHARE meetings, most of which concern the definition and standardization of the Fortran language.
The other half of the collection contains manuals, technical reports, and other printed materials from a range of companies and institutions. Examples of companies and topics represented in this part of the collection include Cray, Digital Equipment Corporation, Burroughs Corporation, the Illiac IV, Basic, and ALGOL. Items of particular note in this portion of the collection include materials published in the 1950s from Case University and Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory, including materials related to NORC. The papers also include about 8 linear inches of punch cards, as well as a small amount of 35mm slides.
Biographical/Historical Note
Lawrence (Larry) Conway Brown was a computer programmer and designer of programming languages. Brown was born July 24, 1939 in Ohio. He graduated from Case Institute of Technology in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics. He moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1965, where he worked for International Business Machines (IBM). Brown worked for IBM for 32 years, retiring in 1991. In addition to his work in computer programming, Brown was very involved in the community of Boulder, serving on the city planning board as well as the library commission. He died June 17, 2015 in Boulder at the age of 75.
Information about "how the mathematicians at Dahlgren [VA] are organized, what type of work they do, and a few examples of things that have been done here in the recent past."
Abstract includes "this routine is an automatic coding technique designed to minimize the time spent on the coding of problems for solution on NORC."
Additional title: NPG Report No. 1374
Describes "ordering the coding, converting it to machine language, making up and assembling subroutines, and facilitating segmentation."
Additional title: Technical Memorandum No. K-32/59
This is a revised version of the original NORC programming manual. At the time the original manual was written, NORC Memory consisted of 2000 words of Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) storage, which has subsequently been replaced by 20,000 words of magnetic core memory. In addition certain assembly, compiler, and service programs have been completed. --Foreword, p.ii
