鲍勃·埃文斯(Bob O. Evans) ，IBM大型机先驱人物。
Bob Overton Evans (August 19, 1927 — September 2, 2004), also known as "Boe" Evans, was a computer pioneer and corporate executive at IBM (International Business Machines). He led the groundbreaking development of compatible computers that changed the industry.
Early life and education
Evans was born in Grand Island, Nebraska. In 1951, after earning an engineering degree from Iowa State University, he joined IBM as a junior engineer.
Career
In the early 1960s, Evans persuaded IBM’s chairman, Thomas J. Watson Jr., to discontinue the company’s development of a hodgepodge of incompatible computers and instead to embark on the development of a single product line of general-purpose, compatible computers. Until then, researchers thought that the fields of scientific computing and commercial data processing each required their own type of special-purpose computer. Compatibility would ensure that the same software could run on any model of the product line, avoiding a re-programming of software.
Evans had overall responsibility for the hardware and software development of what was announced on April 7, 1964, as the IBM System/360 product line, with six models (later gradually expanded to 18 models[1]) and a performance range factor of 50. IBM – in 1964 a company with an annual revenue of $3.2 billion – invested more than $5 billion[2] in engineering, factories and equipment to develop and manufacture System/360, opening five plants and hiring 60,000 employees. In the lead article about System/360 in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, April 1964, only Evans was acknowledged by name, in these words: “The scope of the compatibility objective and of the whole System/360 undertaking was largely due to B. O. Evans, Data Systems Division Vice President–Development.”
After a stint as president of IBM’s Federal Systems Division, in 1969 Evans was named president of IBM’s Systems Development Division (SDD). He was responsible for the development of what was announced on June 30, 1970 as the IBM System/370 product line, initially with three models, later gradually expanded to 17 models[4]. The hardware was supported by four main operating systems. Any application that had run on System/360 could run on System/370. Equally important, where most of the processing on System/360 had been batch-oriented, with only the beginnings of interactive processing, new features of the System/370 opened the door to explosive growth in online transaction processing.
SDD and a successor, the Systems Communications Division, also with Evans as its president, developed a communications architecture and a set of architecture-compliant communication product lines that were announced in 1974 under the banner of Systems Network Architecture (SNA). In today’s ocean of the Internet Protocol, there still are thousands of SNA islands in productive existence.
Evans was also responsible for IBM’s Future Systems (FS) project. The project was terminated in 1975, in part because of anticipated software incompatibilities between FS and 360/370. On another front, IBM each year was doubling its shipments of online workstations, a market segment it had created around the IBM 3270 display system. Competition was starting to do better, and IBM began to lose market share in one of its "own" segments.
In 1977 IBM named Evans senior vice president for engineering, programming, and technology. He left IBM in 1984. From 1981 until 1995, Evans was chief scientific advisor to the government in Taiwan. From 1984 on, he was partner of Hambrecht & Quist, and managing partner of Technology Strategies and Alliances. The latter company merged and became Rocket Ventures, of which he was a partner.
Evans died in Hillsborough, Calif., on September 2, 2004.
Legacy and honors
In a White House ceremony in 1985, Bob Evans and his colleagues, Fred Brooks (responsible for System/360 architecture and design) and Eric Bloch (responsible for System/360 technology) received the National Medal of Technology “for their contributions to […] the IBM System/360, a computer system and technologies which revolutionized the data processing industry.”
In 1970, Evans was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
In 1991, he received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Computer Pioneer Award, for the development of compatible computers.
In 2004, Evans was inducted into the Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, “for excellence in management of computer systems, hardware, and software development projects, including the IBM System/360, which revolutionized the computer industry.”
During the 1960s, Bob Evans led the team that developed the IBM System/360, an entirely new approach to mainframe computing. The System/360 was the first total family of compatible computers and the first that enabled different applications to run on the same system simultaneously. Prior to the introduction of the 360, each computer was a unique system built to a specific customer's order with no continuity from design to design.
Development of the System/360 became known as the "bet the company" gamble. Developed at a cost of $5 billion (more than $40 billion in current dollars) and at a time when IBM's revenue was only $3.2 billion, the System/360 was the largest privately financed commercial project undertaken to that time.
The architecture introduced by Evans and his team four decades ago is still in use in IBM mainframes.
President Ronald Reagan honored Evans with the National Medal of Technology in 1985 in recognition of his work on the System/360. In 1991, he was presented with a Computer Pioneer Award from the Computing Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
Bob Evans died at the age of 77 on September 2, 2004.
The following is the text of an IBM biography published in April 1984.
Bob O. Evans is IBM vice president, engineering, programming and technology.
Mr. Evans joined IBM in 1951 as a junior engineer in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he took part in the development of IBM's first large-scale computers. After various assignments in computer development, he was promoted in 1962 to vice president, development, for the Data Systems Division which included overall management responsibility for development of IBM System/360.
In January 1965, he was named president of the Federal Systems Division which develops advanced products for the national interest. In October 1969, Mr. Evans was promoted to president of the Systems Development Division, responsible for the definition, architecture, and systems management of IBM's principal computer product lines, and was elected an IBM vice president in June 1972. He was appointed president of the System Communications Division in May 1975, responsible for designing, developing and manufacturing of terminal and computer communications related products. He was named to his present post in April 1977, responsible for coordinating the effectiveness of IBM's worldwide engineering, programming and technology activities.
Left to right: Mr. Bob O. Evans - chair, 2003 Charles Stark Draper Prize Committee, Drs. Bradford W. Parkinson & Ivan A. Getting - recipients of the 2003 Draper Prize, Dr. Wm. A. Wulf - NAE President, and Mr. Vincent Vitto - President and CEO, The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc.
In addition, since 1974 Mr. Evans has been a member of the Partner's and Executive Committee of Satellite Business Systems, a partnership involving Aetna, Comsat General and IBM. He is responsible for coordinating IBM' s involvement in this communications satellite-based company.
Mr. Evans received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Iowa State University in 1949 and had done graduate work at Syracuse University. In June 1971, he was awarded Iowa State's Professional Achievement Citation in Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), served on the Defense Science Board, is a member of the Board of Trustees of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a member of the MIT Visiting Committee for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a public member of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, a member of the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library and a consultant to the Premier of the Republic of China.
