John Mashey
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John Mashey is "an ancient UNIX person," having started work on it at Bell Labs in 1973, and continuing to work there for 10 years. He moved to Silicon Valley in 1983 to join Convergent Technologies, ending as director of software.
Mashey joined MIPS Computer Systems in early 1985, managing operating systems development, and helping design the MIPS RISC architecture, as well as specific CPUs, systems and software. He continued similar work at Silicon Graphics (1992 – 2000), most recently contributing to the design of SGI's NUMAflex modular computer architecture, ending as VP and chief scientist.
Mashey was one of the founders of the SPEC benchmarking group, was an ACM National Lecturer for four years, has been guest editor for IEEE Micro, and one of the long-time organizers of the Hot Chips conferences. Additionally, he has chaired technical conferences on operating systems and CPU chips, and has given more than 500 public talks on software engineering, RISC design, performance benchmarking and supercomputing. He currently consults for venture capitalists and high-tech companies, and is a Trustee of the Computer History Museum.
He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Pennsylvania State University. John was widely known for the IBM Model 360 assembler language teaching software, ASSIST (Assembler System for Student Instruction and Systems Teaching), that he developed while at Penn State with the help of his computer science students.