Seems strange that somebody aged only 34 can win an award for sustained technical excellence, but IBM’s John Cocke is the first recipient of the John E Bertram Award for Sustained Technical Excellence at IBM’s annual bash at which it recognises the technical excellence of key employees, held in San Diego this week: in making the $100,000 award, chairman John Akers said that Cocke had the rare ability to look for and combine the strengths of hardware and software, and to optimise the design of both; he was cited for his contributions to large systems architecture and the design and theory of optimising compilers, as well as pivotal contributions to the development of Reduced Instruction Set Computers, and was also involved with the Stretch computer, the engineering verification engine for logic simulation, pipelining and the superscalar architecture for RS/6000.
