Gerrit Blaauw

Gerrit Anne Blaauw (1924 to 2018) was a Dutch computer scientist, known as one of the principal designers of the IBM System/360 line of computers, together with Fred Brooks and Gene Amdahl. Born in The Hague, he studied at Delft University of Technology and at Harvard, where he took his doctorate in 1952 under Howard Aiken and worked on the Mark III and Mark IV computers. He worked at the Mathematical Centre in the Netherlands on the second ARRA computer, then from 1955 at IBM's Poughkeepsie laboratories, where he was a designer on the IBM 7030 Stretch project and a key engineer on System/360, making the successful case for an 8-bit architecture. He later became a professor at the University of Twente, retiring in 1989, and co-authored Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution with Brooks in 1997.