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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ken Bowles, a UC San Diego software engineer who helped popularize personal computers in the 1970s and '80s through advances that were exploited by such entrepreneurs as Apple's Steve Jobs, died on Aug. 15 in Solana Beach. He was 89.

His passing was announced by the university, which said that Bowles, an emeritus professor of computer science, had died peacefully.

Bowles was not well-known to the general public. But he was famous in computer science for helping researchers make the leap from huge, expensive mainframe computers to small "microcomputers," the forerunner of PCs.

He was driven by the desire to make it faster and easier for researchers and programmers to work on their own, and to develop software that could be used on many types of computers.

By 1968, Bowles found himself in the perfect spot to push his vision. He was appointed director of the university's computer center, just three years after joining the faculty.

University historians say Bowles taught his students to write and rewrite code on the world's first microprocessors, the chips that revolutionized the computer industry in the 1970s. They were soon writing programs expressly for microcomputers, bypassing mainframes.

Bowles and his team also adopted and modified Pascal, an early programming language that was opening up computer science. The modified version became known as UCSD Pascal and was widely used to teach people how to program.

[...] "The development of UCSD Pascal was a transformative event not just for UCSD but for all of computer science," according to a statement by Dean Tullsen, chair of the department of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego.

"It was arguably the first high-level programming system that both worked on small systems that schools, most businesses, and eventually individuals could afford, and was portable across many systems."

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