Sandy Douglas

Career

1953–1957: Trinity College

Following his graduation, Douglas was awarded a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he later became a junior bursar. He was also an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he worked at the Computing Laboratory for a year.

The Pegasus holds an especial place in my affection, it being the machine I installed as the central University machine in a disused chapel in Leeds in 1957 – it was known as Lucifer, for Leeds University Computing Installation (FERranti). Our au pair girl from Spain made a beautiful little devilish doll which decorated the machine – it has probably disappeared by now.

In June 1960, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals at the university set up a working party to explore the creation of a national system for handling university admissions. Douglas was appointed a member of the party, and provided advice on the use of computers for this system. Douglas had previously worked with university administrator Ronald Kay on "an early and primitive but successful attempt to introduce computer methods into student registration procedures." Kay would later be named General Secretary of the Universities Central Council on Admissions.

1960–1968: C-E-I-R Holdings Ltd In 1960, Douglas was headhunted by the British subsidiary of C-E-I-R (later known as Scientific Control Systems) and hired as a technical director. Douglas performed consultancy work at C-E-I-R for several years. Shortly afterwards, Douglas was appointed Professor of Computational Methods at the London School of Economics, and worked with professor Frank Land to establish the Information Systems Group within the university's Department of Statistics.

On April 29, 2010, Douglas died in his sleep from pneumonia.

Notable publications Douglas published more than 60 papers in fields such as atomic physics, crystallography, mathematics, and computer science.

A. S. Douglas. "Living with Computers," in Special Edition: Computers in the Seventies, Science Journal, Vol 6, No. 10, pp. 35-41. Alexander Shafto Douglas. "Computers and Society: An Inaugural Lecture," delivered on April 27, 1972. London School of Economics, 1973. . Sandy Douglas. "Some Memories of EDSAC I: 1950–1952." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp, 98–99, 208, October 1979. Alexander S. Douglas. "Computers and Communications in the 1980s: Benefits and Problems." Computer Networks, Vol. 5, Issue 1, pp. 9–14, February 1981.