Mr. Nicholas Arthur Rawlings

Nick Rawlings started work at Perkin-Elmer in Wilton, CT, in June of ’61, just months before entering Williams College. His career plan quickly changed from optics to computing under Bob Bernard, as Nick learned to program an LGP-30, then an RPC4000, and in ’65, an SDS9300 and a 930. Bob had migrated from an employee to a consultant by then*, and Nick was Manager of Systems Programming. Together they developed for Perkin-Elmer (PE) a 9300-to-930 timesharing system based on the Dartmouth GE235-to-Datanet30 model. The success of that project led them to uncover CP-67/CMS as a follow-on, in late ’67, but PE was not interested, so Bob decided to form his own company: Computer Software Systems. By the summer of ’68, CSS grew to over a dozen, including Nick as #9, as they wrote and rewrote both CP and CMS, until selling their first CPU second in December of ’68. Nick stayed with CSS for the next 28 years, holding a variety of positions and contributing toward the success of several technologies, including the symbolic debuggers and the 4GL NOMAD.