Early Career
Gillies then went to England for two years to work for the NRDC (National Research Development Corporation) and worked with an early Pegasus computer there. This was done at a time when the U.S. government was drafting young people of all kinds - including Canadians - into service in the Korean War. When Gillies returned to the USA in 1956 he received a 1-A draft status which persisted until he was age 36. Upon returning to the USA, Gillies married Alice E. Dunkle and began a job as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In early October 1957 just hours after launch of Sputnik I, the UIUC Astronomy Department rigged an ad-hoc interferometer to measure signals from the satellite. The launch — by the Soviet Military — caused a widespread panic across the United States. Gillies and Dr Jim Snyder programmed the ILLIAC I computer to calculate the satellite orbit from this data in under two days. The subsequent report of the ephemeris (orbit) and later publication in the journal Nature helped to dispel some of the fear created by the Sputnik launch by the Soviet Union. It also lent credance to the (likely false) idea that the Sputnik launch was part of an organized effort to dominate space.
Gillies wrote 3 patents in the late 1950s. One of them laid out all the details of how to implement a base register for relocation in computers — before it had been done. He considered these patents as kind of a joke, and assigned the rights of the patents to IBM, without taking fees for this service. This kept the ideas from being patented by others which would have hindered progress in the computer industry.
Starting in 1958, Gillies designed the 3-stage pipeline control of the ILLIAC II supercomputer at the University of Illinois. The control circuitry consisted of advanced control, delayed control, and interplay. This work was in the public domain, and competed with the Stretch computer system design from IBM that is often credited with inventing pipelining. This work was presented in a 1962 Michigan conference on computer design, "On the design of a very high speed computer" by Gillies.
During check-out of the ILLIAC II computer, Gillies found 3 new Mersenne primes, and published them in a paper, "Three new Mersenne primes and a statistical theory." The checkout algorithm was designed to exercise every aspect of the ILLIAC II computer. Gillies also wanted to draw attention to this new computer design in the field of mathematics. His new Mersenne primes were reported in the Guinness Book of World Records, and the largest one was immortalized on all mail sent from the Postal Annex at the Math department of the University of Illinois.
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