Donald B. Gillies - Later Career

Later Career

In the late 1960s, Gillies became concerned that students were not getting direct access to computers any more. He lobbied UIUC to adopt the 1968 WATFOR one-pass FORTRAN compiler / runtime system from the University of Waterloo in Ontario. This was a fast-turnaround IDE for batch-based mainframe computers. At the time it was common practice to submit a job (card deck) and pick up the results the next day. The WATFOR compiler could compile, link, and run a short program in the compiler's memory space in a few seconds. This compiler allowed the university to offer underclass programming courses not only to computer scientists but also to business majors and to other non-specialists.

In 1969, Gillies received a preprint of Wirth's "Pascal User Manual and Report" and launched a project to build the first Pascal compiler written in North America. Ian Stocks was one of the graduate students who worked on this fast-turnaround 2-pass compiler, and the compiler (for the Digital Equipment PDP-11 minicomputer) was completed in the early 1970s. This work was part of the "PDP-11 Playpen" project which focused on getting graduate students direct access to low-cost computer hardware, such as the PDP-11/23, where the Pascal compiler ran.

Two years later at the urging of his graduate student, Greg Chesson, Gillies became in 1974 the first licensee for the UNIX operating system from Bell Labs. Chesson went on to be the third person to edit the Unix kernel and was the eighth hire at Silicon Graphics Inc..