Jack Goldberg was responsible for the early, innovative design of computer prototypes and software that led to the rigor and reliability of today’s computers. The computer sciences group he headed in 1966 would become SRI’s Computer Sciences Laboratory, which has achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the most noted labs in computer science.
Jack Goldberg arrived at SRI in 1951, in time to begin work on SRI’s first large project, ERMA. The challenge was to build a special computer for the Bank of America to handle all the usual banking functions, but focusing on the rapidly growing check-processing operations. Jack Goldberg’s major role in ERMA was logic design, a craft that was emerging along with the origin of computers themselves. Jack Goldberg, Bart Cox, and Bill Kautz were responsible for the logic design of the world’s first banking computer. Having struggled with this task, they realized that computer design lacked a scientific underpinning. Within the newly formed Computer Techniques Lab (CTL), Jack Goldberg and Bill Kautz concentrated on how best to use the unreliable parts, including early transistors, to design and build computers.
By 1969, Jack Goldberg was Manager of the Computer Sciences Group. Under his leadership, the group continued to focus on the question of fault tolerance: how to ensure that the computer would continue to function in the presence of failing parts. One solution was to embody in software the ability to recover from hardware failure. Although the group was blessed with a cadre of talent, Jack Goldberg continued to hire a splendid array of additional people lured by the new and inviting challenge of designing software such that its correctness could be proved mathematically. By 1976 the group had grown sufficiently to become the Computer Science Laboratory with Jack Goldberg as its Director. The reputation of the Lab grew to worldwide prominence and soon developed the world’s most advanced program verification system called HDM. CSL went on to look into the problem of computer security and the design of software languages themselves, including ADA.
The Computer Science laboratory is still one of the world’s most noted labs in computer science, continuing in the formal methods of software design and proof and in computer security systems. It continues to attract computer software and security specialists, who come from around the world to learn or to stay.