David Hartley

David Fielding Hartley FBCS (born 14 September 1937) is a computer scientist and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He was Director of the University of Cambridge Computing Service from 1970–1994, Chief Executive of United Kingdom Joint Academic Network (JANET) 1994–1997, and Executive Director of Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) 1997–2002. He is now much involved with the National Museum of Computing. He was involved in the development of the programming language CPL, whose influence can be traced on to C, and C++. He was president of the British Computer Society from 1999 to 2000 and chairman of the Computer Conservation Society from 2007 to 2011. Student years Dr Hartley became an undergraduate at Clare College, University of Cambridge in 1956. He read Mathematics for the first two years and studied Numerical Analysis and Automatic Computing in his third year, graduating BA in 1959. He then became a research student of computer science, developing the first programming language "Autocode", and its compiler for the EDSAC 2 computer, for which he was awarded a PhD degree in 1963. His thesis was entitled "Automatic Programming for Digital Computers". Software development As a member of the staff of Cambridge University's Mathematical Laboratory, he was joint author, with David Barron, John Buxton, Eric Nixon, and Christopher Strachey, of the early high-level programming language CPL. which was subsequently developed into BCPL which in turn influenced B and C.