Melvin Conway

Melvin Conway

Melvin Edward Conway was an early computer scientist, computer programmer, and hacker who coined what's now known as Conway's Law: "Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

Apart from the above, Conway is perhaps most famous for his seminal paper on coroutines. and for his exposition of UNCOL in 1958.

Conway wrote an assembler for the Burroughs model 220 computer called SAVE. The name SAVE was not an acronym, but a feature: programmers lost fewer punched card decks because they all had "SAVE" written on them.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he was involved with the MUMPS medical computer language and system language standard specification for the National Bureau of Standards. He also wrote a reference book on MUMPS.