Lawrence M. Breed

Lawrence Moser "Larry" Breed (July 17, 1940 – May 16, 2021)

As a graduate student at Stanford, he corresponded with APL's inventor, Ken Iverson, to correct the formal description of the IBM System/360 which used Iverson's notation. He received his M.S. from Stanford in 1965, under academic supervisor Niklaus Wirth. He then joined Iverson's group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. In 1965 he and Philip S. Abrams created the first implementation of APL, written in FORTRAN on an IBM 7090.

He later created APL implementations for an experimental IBM Little Computer, and the IBM 360 in 1966, and for the IBM 1130.

Breed was the 1973 recipient (with Dick Lathwell and Roger Moore) of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery "for their work in the design and implementation of APL\360, setting new standards in simplicity, efficiency, reliability and response time for interactive systems."

With Dan Dyer and others he co-founded Scientific Time Sharing Corporation in 1969, where he led the development of the APL PLUS time-sharing system. While there, in 1972, he and Francis Bates III wrote one of the world's first worldwide email systems, named Mailbox.

Breed rejoined IBM in 1977. He helped develop the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) APL standard, then joined IBM efforts to port Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix onto IBM platforms. He worked on compilers for the programming language C, floating-point arithmetic standardization, and radix conversion, until retiring in 1992.

Retirement Breed became a significant contributor to the Burning Man event, under the playa name of Ember. He coined the term "MOOP" (matter out of place), and conceived and built the first trash fence to capture windborne debris. He created the spiraling, flaming sculpture "Chaotick", the playa’s longest-running art piece besides the Man himself, and built artistic bicycle light effects. He edited and proofread the Black Rock Gazette newspaper, a role in which he continued as a co-founder and director of its successor the Black Rock Beacon, and edited other Burning Man materials. As co-founder of the Earth Guardians, Breed promoted the "Leave No Trace" ethos, particularly in post-event cleanup.

Publications