Cambridge Scientific Center

The IBM Cambridge Scientific Center was a corporate research laboratory established in February 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Situated at 545 Technology Square (Tech Square), in the same building as MIT's Project MAC,[1] it was later renamed the IBM Scientific Center.[2] It is most notable for creating the CP-40 and the control program portions of CP/CMS, a virtual machine operating system developed for the IBM System/360-67.

History

The IBM Data Processing Division (DPD) sponsored five Scientific Center research groups in the United States and some others around the world to work with selected universities on a variety of customer-related projects.[3]

The IBM Research Division in Yorktown Heights, NY was a separate laboratory organization at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center that tended more to "pure" research topics. The DPD Scientific Centers in the late 1960s were located in Palo Alto, California, Houston, Texas, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Grenoble, France. The IBM Time-Life Programming Center in Manhattan, New York worked with the scientific centers but had a slightly different reporting line.

Established by Norm Rasmussen, the Cambridge Scientific Center worked with computing groups at both MIT and Harvard, in the same building as Project MAC and the IBM Boston Programming Center (BPC). Additional joint projects involved the MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the outskirts of Boston and Brown University in Providence, RI.

The scientific center in 1969 had three main departments: Computer Graphics under Craig Johnson, Operations Research under John Harmon, and Operating Systems under Richard (Rip) Parmelee.

In December 1975 Richard MacKinnon became director of the center, succeeding Dr. William Timlake who, in turn, had succeeded Rasmussen. As the third director, MacKinnon was to serve as its longest-tenured director.

Selected publications

R. J. Adair, R. U. Bayles, L. W. Comeau, and R. J. Creasy, "A Virtual Machine System for the 360/40," IBM Corporation, Cambridge Scientific Center, Report No. 320-2007 (May 1966).

R. A. Meyer and L. H. Seawright, "A Virtual Machine Timesharing System," IBM Systems Journal 9, No.3, 199-218 (1970).

R. P. Parmelee, T. L. Peterson, C. C. Tillman, and D. J. Hatfield, "Virtual Storage and Virtual Machine Concepts," IBM Systems Journal 11, No.2, 99-130 (1972).

E. C. Hendricks and T. C. Hartmann, "Evolution of a Virtual Machine Subsystem," IBM Systems Journal 18, No.1, 111-142 (1979).

L. H. Holley, R. P. Parmelee, C. A. Salisbury, and D. N. Saul, "VM/370 Asymmetric Multiprocessing," IBM Systems Journal 18, No.1, 47-70 (1979).

L. H. Seawright and R. A. MacKinnon, "VM/370 - A Study of Multiplicity and Usefulness,"

See also

• IBM Research