Abstract
On 12 October 1931, Ole-Johan Dahl was born to the family of a ship captain in Mandal, the southernmost city of Norway. In 1952, three years after beginning his studies at the University of Oslo, he was introduced to computers at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (NDRE) where he fulfilled his military service obligation. Jan V. Garwick was responsible for the field of mathematical analysis and calculations, and Ole-Johan was placed in the “computing room” led by Garwick’s assistant, Kristen Nygaard. It is quite likely that, in this setting, Garwick, Nygaard and Dahl were the first in Norway to develop programs on “large” digital computers. In the years to come, NDRE cultivated a scientific collaboration with the pioneering computer group at the University of Manchester and the electronics company Ferranti. As a result of this tie, NDRE got the first version of Ferranti’s Mercury computer in 1957.
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References
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The Department’s page of tribute: http://www.ifi.uio.no/adminf/tribute.html with links to Ole-Johan’s and Kristen’s own homepages (Kristen’s is more rich on information). For Kristen there is a memorial page at http://www.ifi.uio.no/in_memoriam_kristen/ , See also http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2002_09/eulogy
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Owe, O., Krogdahl, S., Lyche, T. (2004). A Biography of Ole-Johan Dahl. In: Owe, O., Krogdahl, S., Lyche, T. (eds) From Object-Orientation to Formal Methods. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2635. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39993-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39993-3_1
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