Home/ProfilesHome/ProfilesGerrit BlaauwAward RecipientHe was a designer on the IBM 7030 STRETCH project. He worked on the ill-fated IBM 8000 series, and in particular designed a paging system for the IBM 8106 in the 1960-1961 period. He was a key engineer on the IBM System/360 project, announced in 1964. Among other contributions, Blaauw made the successful case for an 8-bit (as opposed to 6-bit) design. He designed a revolutionary address translation system, the "Blaauw Box", which was removed from the original System/360 design, but was later used in IBM's proposal to Project MAC, and incorporated in the important IBM System/360-67. As implemented on the -67, this system became one of the first practical implementations of paged virtual memory – perhaps the first to be commercially practical. (The earlier Ferranti Atlas Computer was a seminal platform for paging research, but suffered from well-studied performance issues such as thrashing.) The -67 was being used in commercial applications by 1968. After leaving IBM, Blaauw became a computer science professor in the Netherlands. He retired in 1989 as professor emeritus with Universiteit Twente. In 1997, he co-authored a computer architecture book with Brooks.