Barton was born in
New Britain, Connecticut in 1925 and received his BA in 1948, and his MS in 1949 in Mathematics, from the
University of Iowa. His early experience with computers was when he worked in the
IBM Applied Science Department in 1951. In 1954, he joined the
Shell Oil Company Technical Services, working on programming applications. He worked at Shell Development, a research group in Texas where he worked with a
Burroughs/Datatron 205 computer. In 1958, he studied
Irving Copi and
Jan Łukasiewicz's work on symbolic logic and
Polish notation, and considered its application to arithmetic expression processing on a computer. In 1960, he became a consultant for
Beckman Instruments working on data collection from satellite systems, for
Lockheed Corporation working on satellite systems and organizing of data processing services, and for Burroughs continuing to work on the design concepts of the B5000. After an assignment in Australia in 1963 for
Control Data Corporation, he returned in 1965 to join the Computer Science staff of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the
University of Utah where, from 1968 to 1973, his colleagues included
David C. Evans,
Ivan Sutherland, and
Thomas Stockham. His Ph.D. students at the University of Utah were Duane Call, cofounder of Computer System Architects;
Alan Ashton, cofounder of
WordPerfect; and
Al Davis, University of Utah professor of computer science. Other Utah students that he influenced included:
Alan Kay,
James H. Clark cofounder of
Silicon Graphics,
John Warnock, cofounder of
Adobe Systems,
Ed Catmull of
Pixar,
Henri Gouraud (
Gouraud shading) and
Bui Tuong Phong (
Phong shading). After 1973, he devoted his full-time to Burroughs Systems Research in
La Jolla, San Diego, California, working on new computer architectures and systems programming. == Awards ==