Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Blaauw received his BA from the
Delft University of Technology in 1946. In 1947, Blaauw won an exclusive scholarship funded by IBM Chief Executive Officer
Thomas J. Watson. After an initial year at
Lafayette College in
Pennsylvania, Blaauw studied at
Harvard University. He received his MA in 1949 and his PhD in 1952 under supervision of
Howard Aiken, inventor of the early Mark I computer. At Harvard, he worked on design of the
Mark III and
Mark IV computers. Blaauw met
Fred Brooks while he was working for IBM and visited Harvard, where Fred Brooks was then a graduate student. • 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)
computer architecture. Blaauw also 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 unsuccessful proposal to MIT's
Project MAC. Subsequently, Dynamic Address Translation (DAT) hardware of a somewhat different design was incorporated in the important
IBM System/360-67 computer. As implemented on the Model 67, DAT hardware allowed the implementation of some of the first practical
paged virtual memory systems – perhaps the first to be commercially successful. The Model 67 was being used in commercial applications by 1968. The earlier Ferranti
Atlas Computer was a seminal platform for paging research, but suffered from well-studied performance issues such as
thrashing. Virtual memory address translation capabilities similar to those on the S/360-67 were subsequently included in all models of the
IBM System/370 computer line that followed. 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
Computer Architecture: Concepts and Evolution with Brooks. Blaauw died in Utrecht. Blaauw was a devout Christian who gave particular attention, especially after retirement, to the relationship of science and faith, a topic he explored in a booklet available in English, Dutch and Spanish. == Selected publications ==