Dave Dahm Obituary
Jim Burton
Died:
June 10, 2008
David Dahm, 71, of Woodway, passed away Tuesday, June 10, 2008.
A Requiem Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the 1962 Missal will be
celebrated 10 a.m. Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at St. Louis Catholic Church
with Father David Leibham as celebrant. Burial will follow in Fairview
Cemetery in Hubbard.
Rosary will be recited at 6 p.m., Tuesday, June 17, at OakCrest Funeral
Home, followed by visitation with his family.
David was born on Thanksgiving Day, November 16, 1936 in Texarkana,
Arkansas, but became a Texan soon after. He grew up in Dallas, and was
graduated valedictorian from Jesuit High School in 1954. He studied
mathematics at Rice University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1958. He
earned
a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1962. He worked for
Unisys
Corporation (formerly Burroughs) in Pasadena, Detroit, France, England, and
Mission Viejo until his recent retirement. He had lived in Waco for the
past
three years. Pancreatic cancer took him from his family much too soon, but
mercifully a stroke saved him from much of the expected suffering during
his
last days.
Dave Dahm was an extraordinary man, described by colleagues in the
computing
industry as "a genius" and "the most brilliant mind" they had ever known.
Operating systems for mainframes were his specialty, and he was the
troubleshooter that other programmers would turn to when they couldn't fix
flaws in their code. As Director of Software Research he designed the
pioneering B5000 compiler and operating systems, introducing generative
techniques to Data Base Management.
In 1986 he was made the very first Burroughs Fellow. He patented a number
of
software programs, such as one for the high speed emulation of arithmetic
operations. He also authored several papers published in industry journals
such as Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. His
interests were wide ranging, including the l-history of Revolutionary
France
and early 20th century France, topology, game theory, fractals, chaos
theory, and natural history and the development and refinement of the
theory
of evolution.
Over the years David and his wife Jackie opened their home and lives to
many
people. His quiet, stoic demeanor often masked a man who cared deeply for
others and was always willing to extend his generosity and guidance. He
followed politics with equal parts fervor and skepticism, loving to debate
issues of historical and current interest.
Travel was another passion of his. David and Jackie lived for extended
periods both in France and England, and visited Europe, the Soviet Union,
Japan, Korea, and China. Just this year he toured Machu Picchu, Peru with
other Rice alumni. He was an excellent cook, and his barbecue sauce may
never be adequately replicated. His smoked meats had to be tasted to be
believed. David M. Dahm will be sorely missed.
Edward Reid
interprocess locks first used (I believe) in DMSII and then in the MCP,
particularly in FIBSTACK. Famously, he didn't get them right the first
time. They worked for two CPUs, but the first installation of DMSII on a
3-CPU system crashed in a hurry. As Dijkstra had already pointed out,
parallel programming is *hard*. A Dahm Lock written in ALGOL is only about
half a dozen lines of code, but it took me over a decade to understand
fully how it worked and why.
About 20 years ago, I gave a CUBE talk in Miami on the subject of locks.
This was shortly before Unisys made Dahm locks available as primitives in
ALGOL, so knowing how to incorporate the code into certain kinds of
programs was important. Dave was in the audience, and I think he was amused
by my title: "Locks, Dahm Locks, and Statistics". He caught a typo in the
code I distributed. (And unfortunately, someone stole the notebook which I
had asked attendees to sign, so I didn't even have a chance to send out
corrections.)
Yes, Dave will be missed.
Ed
--
Art Works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org
Marc Wilson
<e0p1hljmjrb5.1pa9h1n6nozle$.d...@40tude.net>::
>About 20 years ago, I gave a CUBE talk in Miami on the subject of locks.
>This was shortly before Unisys made Dahm locks available as primitives in
>ALGOL, so knowing how to incorporate the code into certain kinds of
>programs was important. Dave was in the audience, and I think he was amused
>by my title: "Locks, Dahm Locks, and Statistics".
*grin*
--
Marc Wilson
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thatguythere
Scott Lurndal
>Dave was one of the most arrogant people I've ever met. A bright guy but very difficult to work with. I don't know much of his history at Unisys but he and jim burton were both responsible for introducing a security hole in the system software that anyone could use to steal usercodes and passwords. Management was aware of the issue but dave always intimitated anyone who confronted him or questioned his judgement or work and so it was never addressed. Fortunately I only had to work with him on a couple of projects but I'm still PO'd this was never fixed and incredulous of the descriptions of him on the web. That's not the guy I worked with. The guy I worked with was an obnoxious bully.
>
word? I worked with both individuals mentioned above (the latter
more than the former), and neither were 'arrogant' to me.
scott
