I Met The Guy Who Invented The Pointer

I Met The Guy Who Invented The Pointer

I am so lucky as a Professor to be in contact with some of the most amazing researchers from around the World. I have wonderful emails from some of the great people who have been a core part of building our digital world. For example, a few years ago I met the person who edited many of the classic RFCs, and which now provide us with the foundation of our modern life … Jon Postel.

In 2000, I was just a Senior Lecturer, and my Professorship was a long way off. At the time we hosted an IEEE conference named ECBS (Electronic Computer-Based Systems). When it ran it was one of the coldest April weeks I think we have ever had, but we all had such a fun and stimulating time, and the experience helped us to understand how to run international conferences.

At the time I was teaching C++ and Pascal, and I was quite a shock to be introduced by Harold “Bud” Lawson as “The person who invented the pointer”.

Being introduced to the person who invented the pointer, was like meeting the person who invented the transistor, as I taught and wrote about software development.

Having taught C and C++, everything used to go well, until we got to pointers, and then it became a whole lot more difficult. It was such a fundamental concept, but many students really struggled with the way that C fused high-level programming with low-level concepts. The freedom that C gave us — with its usage of pointers — is still alive and kicking, and probably more relevant now than it was back then. Unfortunately this flexiablity has led to many security problems, and developers often didn’t allocate enought memory for their data. The infamous malloc function was one problem area, and where an attacker would often try to overflow the allocated buffer and write into areas which were used for other purposes.

Recently Bud received the INCOSE 2016 Systems Engineering Pioneer Award in Edinburgh for:

“For a career dedicated to advancing the unification of systems and software engineering. He has been a major influence in the advancement of software engineering, systems engineering, the harmonization of the two, and the extension of systems engineering to broader areas of application.”

It was people like Bud who turned Software Engineering into a proper scientific discipline. I am so lucky to meet inspirational people like Bud, and that he has received the recognition he deserves.

After an illness, Bud passed away in 2019.