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Douglas McGregor [Herald, The (Scotland)](Herald, The (Scotland) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Computer scientist. Born: April 14, 1939; Died: October 4, 2014 Douglas McGregor, who has died at the age of 75, was a pioneer of computer science, a gifted and popular university academic and a former head of the computer science department at Strathclyde University, Glasgow. Born in Aberdeen, he attended Robert Gordon's College and Aberdeen University, where he met his wife, Myrtle, in the chemistry class. They married shortly after graduation and his first work was with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) at Dounreay, followed after two years by doctoral research at Glasgow University in X-ray crystallography. Along with fellow student Ken Muir, he wrote a computer system to solve crystal structures that was used for a decade and accelerated the process from months into days. It incorporated ideas that were novel at the time but subsequently became standard in all crystallographic labs. This led him to switch from chemistry to computer science and after his PhD, he spent a further three years with UKAEA at Culham laboratory, Oxfordshire. In 1972, he joined the newly formed computer science department at Strathclyde University. He was to form a close working partnership with the head of department, Andrew Colin, an engineer, and entered the field in an era when a single computer was a vast, air-conditioned, multi-million pound device and its users had to wait for days to receive the results of their programs, contained on punched cards. At this stage, academics in the emerging discipline were developing the subject as they went, with new programming languages appearing at a bewildering rate: Mercury autocode, FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol 60 were just a few. Like many of his contemporaries, he was frustrated by this protracted process and the quest for solutions to make it swifter and more efficient became central to his life's work. He and his colleagues created their own version of MULTICS, an American system that enabled users to have direct access to a computer and to file, edit and submit their programs online. Another key challenge was that different operating systems would produce different results for programs, even when they were written in a standard computer language; Professor McGregor's answer was a significant breakthrough. With his colleagues, he designed a new language, STAB 1, which was highly distinctive for its time in its ability to return identical answers for a program no matter what computer was used - and was a precursor of widely-used software that does the same job today. In 1977, at the age of 38, he developed Hodgkin Lymphoma and endured fierce chemotherapy for several years while continuing to work. To prove he was well again he twice ran the Glasgow Marathon. This was the first of several major illnesses he overcame with cheerful optimism and courage over almost four decades. In this he was an inspiration to all who knew him. He was prominent in organising the department's annual study weekends, in which staff and students would gather in a picturesque Scottish location, such as Arran or the Trossachs. Talks by invited speakers from the computing industry would be followed by hillwalking and, in the evening, accomplished performances by Professor McGregor on the clarinet. Several of his students stayed on to carry out research under his guidance; many went on to become distinguished academics or industry leaders and he himself would eventually become head of department. By the late 1990s, he was working on systems designed to accommodate moving images in low-capacity channels, foreshadowing the technology seen in today's smartphones. He oversaw increasing specialisation in database development, a field in which he worked during a sabbatical in the late 1970s in Silicon Valley, California. Commercial opportunities for computer technology grew as the 20th century drew to a close and in 1999, Strathclyde spun out a company, Essential Viewing Systems, to commercialise video compression technology, with applications in securing and public safety, developed by a team led by Professor McGregor and Dr Richard Fryer. The company was sold to Digital Barriers for pound(s)4.85 million 12 years later. Another company, Deductive Systems, was previously formed to commercialise the work of the Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems group, led by Professor McGregor. Its project included the development of an associative memory system known as FACT and the creation of chips to implement this system. He was a very happy man who lived life to the full. Above all, he was devoted to his family, sailing with them on Loch Lomond and travelling extensively with the family caravan. Despite a recurrence of Hodgkin Lymphoma in 1998, he continued to work until he was forced to retire in 2002 after a major stroke that left him unable to walk, talk or write. Against all odds, he recovered and became active in the Centre For Lifelong Learning at Strathclyde. Now unable to play the clarinet, he learned to play the flute instead, performing in the Traditional Music club at Strathclyde and in a second group at St Andrew's In The Square. He is survived by Myrtle, daughter Esther, son John, five grandchildren, a brother and sister. (c) 2014 ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved. |