Douglas (Doug) Taylor Ross

Originator of the term CAD for computer-aided design and considered the father of Automatically Programmed Tools (APT), Ross was also the inventor of SADT, Structured Analysis and Design Technique. An American computer scientist pioneer, he was born in China, where his parents both worked as medical missionaries, and he grew up back in the States in Canandaigua, N.Y. He received a BS Cum Laude in Mathematics from Oberlin College in 1951, and an S.M. in Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1954. Afterwards he started, but didn't complete his PhD at MIT due to his pressing work as Head of MIT's Computer Applications Group.

In 1954 he started working at MIT, where he participated in the MIT Whirlwind (computer) project. In 1969, he founded SofTech, Inc., which was a software/consulting company and early supplier of Pascal compilers. He lectured at MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and was chairman emeritus.

He served as the company's President from 1969 to 1975, and afterwards became Chairman of the Board of Directors. During the 1970s, along with other contributors from SofTech, Inc., he helped develop SADT into the IDEF0 method for the Air Force's Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) program's IDEF suite of analysis and design methods. He was a member of the IEEE IDEF0 Working Group which produced the IEEE IDEF0 standard in 1998. The IEEE IDEF0 standard superseded FIPS PUB 183, which was retired in 2002.

Among his many honors were the Joseph Marie Jacquard Memorial Award from the Numerical Control Society in 1975, the Distinguished Contributions Award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in 1980, and the Honorary Engineer of the Year Award from the San Fernando Valley Engineers Council in 1981. At MIT, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science named the Douglas T. Ross Career Development Associate Professor of Software Development after him.

Ross wrote dozens of articles and reports, among which are: "Computer-aided design," in: Commun. ACM 4(5): pp. 235, 1961; "Toward Foundations for the Understanding of Type," in: Conference on Data: Abstraction, Definition and Structure 1976: pp. 63–65, 1976; and "The NATO Conferences from the Perspective of an Active Software Engineer," in: ICSE 1989: pp. 101–102, 1989.