Coroutines Conway developed the concept of
coroutines, having coined the term
coroutine in 1958 and he was the first to apply the concept to an
assembly program. He later authored a seminal paper on the subject of coroutines, titled "Design of a Separable Transition-diagram Compiler", which included the first published explanation of the concept. which attempted to provide a solution to economically produce compilers for new
programming languages and
computer architectures.
Conway's law The
adage remains relevant in modern
software engineering and is still being referenced and investigated.
SAVE Conway wrote an
assembler for the
Burroughs model 220 computer called SAVE. The name SAVE was not an acronym, but a feature: programmers lost fewer
punched card decks because they all had "SAVE" written on them.
MUMPS In the 1970s, he was involved with the
MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) medical programming language standard specification for the
National Bureau of Standards. He also wrote a reference book on MUMPS in 1983.
Pascal His work on
Pascal compiler for Rockwell Semiconductor (an immediate-turnaround Pascal trainer for the Rockwell AIM-65) led to an arrangement between Apple and Think Technologies (where he served as a principal) under which the latter produced the
Apple II Instant Pascal and the 1984 original Macintosh Pascal.
Other work Conway was granted a
US patent in 2001 on "Dataflow processing with events", concerned with
programming using
graphical user interfaces. The patent expired in 2019. In 2002, Conway obtained a
teacher license for high school math and physics in
Massachusetts. He taught at
Chelsea High School from 2002 to 2006. In 2024, Conway published an article called
NEEDED: SYSTEMS THINKING IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS which summarizes his view that in order to understand human systems, one must focus on networks first, rather than actors. He posits that this is the barrier to building systems that are in alignment with human needs at scale. == Education ==