xii, 374 pp; 11 figs.
Original cloth.
Spine sunned.
Corners of covers a little bent.
Marginal browning of text leaves (as always, due to the quality of the paper).
Small "duplicate" ink stamp of library on front flyleaf.
First Edition.
SIGNED BY KURT GOLDSTEIN to Alan Gregg: "Dr.
Alan Gregg/ with special compliments/ Dec.
1948 Kurt Goldstein" (see photo).
Alan Gregg spent his career at the Rockefeller Foundation.
Although Alan Gregg is not mentioned by name, in his Acknowledgments Goldstein writes: "I had several occasions to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for continued support of my studies in general.
I want to acknowledge my deep appreciation again particularly for the fund granted for my research in speech disturbances.
" There is a pencil note on the verso of the title page, as well as on the front pastedown, indicating this copy was the gift of Alan Gregg.
As to its next owner: in 1955 Ralph E.
Griswold purchased this book at a Stanford Library Sale.
His ink note on the front pastedown reads: "Ralph E.
Griswold/ November 15, 1955/ (Stanford Library Sale).
" At that time he was 21 years old and a recent graduate in physics at Stanford.
Quoting from Wikipedia: Griswold "was a computer scientist known for his research into high-level programming languages and symbolic computation.
His language credits include the string processing language SNOBOL, SL5, and Icon.
.
.
.
He attended Stanford University, receiving a bachelor's degree in physics, then an M.
S.
and Ph.
D.
in electrical engineering.
Griswold went to Bell Labs in 1962, where he studied ideas for non-numerical computation.
SNOBOL was the outcome; it was a radically different language in its time and still is.
He became the head of the Labs' Programming Research and Development department in 1967.
In 1971, he was hired by the University of Arizona to be its first professor of computer science, subsequently organized the department, and was its head until 1981.
While at Arizona, Griswold developed Icon.
The earlier Ratfor implementation of Icon was discarded and the language rewritten from scratch in C and UNIX.
.
.
.
'As one of the founders of the Bell Labs software culture that spawned UNIX, C, and many other essential contributions to modern software, Ralph Griswold brought to his academic research not only brilliance, but also experience and a value system that demanded that research ideas be tested by fire and proven useful and usable by real users, not just good-looking diagrams in academic papers.
' "