Mr. Paul R. McJones

Paul McJones is interested in the history of computer software, particularly from a scientific and engineering point of view: the evolution of algorithms, abstractions, systems, languages, applications, etc. He is currently involved in collecting and preserving source code, design documentation, user documentation, etc., of historic software. As a founding member of the Software Preservation Group at the Computer History Museum, he has assembled several collections including the original IBM 704 Fortran/Fortran II compiler from the team led by John Backus (it is now possible to rebuild this compiler from assembly language and to execute it on a simulator). His past projects include editing the oral history of the 1995 SQL Reunion (of veterans of System R and other pioneering relational database systems). In addition to these activities, he has been employed in software research and development since 1967, including early timesharing and programming language work at U.C. Berkeley, functional programming and transaction processing at IBM Research, personal distributed computing at Xerox, Tandem, and DEC, and enterprise software at two startups. He's currently employed by Adobe Systems Incorporated, where he's writing a book on programming as mathematics with Alexander Stepanov.