Ron Davis

Ron was born and raised in Alberta.  He started his working career as a janitor, but he wasn’t much good at it, so he gave it up and went into physics instead.  He earned an honors B.Sc. in physics at the University of Alberta.  While most young people have to leave home to go to university, it was the opposite for Ron.  He cycled 5 kilometres each way to high school but, since his father was a university professor, his home was across the street from the university.  For even greater luxury, he also had an office in the same building as the University’s Physics Department.

The reason for this exceptional privilege was that, early during these studies, Ron became among the very few people at that time who could program a computer.  The first machine on which he worked had vacuum tubes.  It had the equivalent of not quite 16KB of memory, on a large magnetic drum that turned at 3600 r.p.m. and sounded like a gas turbine.  To program it, one sat in front of a teletype machine, and typed the binary executable file.  They didn’t call it a “file”, though; they called it a “roll of paper tape”.

Ron went on to earn a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of British Columbia, and did two years of post-doctoral work at Oxford, England.  During this time, he also became proficient at

• sailing and
• sailplane flying,

• sky diving,
• power flying,
• machine tools, and
• welding.

• auto mechanics.

He has worked since 1970 at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.  Although he has stayed with the one employer, he has done a great variety of work for them.  His primary work there is in

• reactor physics analysis and
• reactor-related software development,

• mechanical engineering,
• machine vision,
• database design,
• medical research,
• political analysis, and
• cleaning the toilets.  (The janitors were on strike, and the professionals, being non-unionized at the time, had to scab for them.  He was complimented for his work in the ladies’ room, so maybe he gave up his first career too easily.)

With Ron’s primitive start in computing, either his skills must be hopelessly out of date, or he must be very good at keeping up.  In fact, at his day job, it is the younger programmers who permit their programming skills to become outdated, while Ron campaigns vigorously for modern programming techniques.  Probably this is because older programmers like Ron have seen many computing languages come and go, while the younger ones think they learned all they ever need to know in University.  He does much work on his own initiative to improve their awareness of modern programming techniques. 

He has developed new techniques for scientific and engineering programming.  One of them is the use of object-oriented methods for automatic dimensional analysis.  Instead of working with numbers, the programmer works with actual physical quantities.  Another is a way to use relational data structures within programs, as distinct from their present use in databases.  This will make variable subscripts as obsolete as GoTo statements, for essentially the same reasons.  He is writing a book about the use of these and other techniques to make programs simpler and more reliable.

Ron does his innovative work on programming techniques mostly on his own time at home, but his employer has materially recognized the results of his use of those techniques in his day job, and joins him in promoting their dissemination.

Ron has continued to develop a number of hobbies.  These include

• building construction,
• photography, including darkroom work before the digital revolution,
• music, including both performance and composition,
• amateur theater, including acting, directing, set and lighting design, and stage management,
• analog electronics, and
• dog training.
• Software development remains his favorite work.

Elfrieda is his second wife. With her, he has found tranquillity.

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