View Source: Ron Hall

Ron Hall joined the UBC Computing Centre in 1967as a programmer working in the numerical analysis and statistical areas, immediately after receiving an undergraduate degree from UBC. His work at the Computing Center (and later appellations) spanned more than 30 years, as a final departure from the institution was deferred until the next nearest millennium. He enjoyed a career timeframe ('67-'69, '70-2000) that completely enveloped the reign and wane of MTS ('69-'98) at UBC. During this time at UBC, Ron wended his way through a good deal of the spectrum of computing service areas, as well as performing some sleight of feet transitions in and out of management positions, serving as manager of the Systems Group on two occasions. In the relatively early days of MTS, Ron was the project manger as well as one of the developers for the IF ([Interactive FORTRAN]) Project, a major success in provision of scientific computing support for the MTS user community that was unparalleled, not only at that time, but for many years to follow. A paper on IF was presented at the 1973 SHARE conference in Miami. Ron also worked for a number of years doing system maintenance and development work on MTS components, and related applications such as SDS and the MTS Editor. Work in these areas led to development (with Ken Bowler) of the SWAT CLS, a unique tool that allowed the powerful SDS debugging capabilities to be applied to the inner workings of the MTS system. During the wind-down period of MTS, Ron moved on to other endeavors, the most significant being the project manager for development of the UBC Interchange system. This system delivered cost-recovered packaged Internet services to faculty, staff, students and external customers beginning in 1994, and rapidly grew to service over 40,000 accounts. The software (Interacc/Tracc-II) that was developed in-house to support this requirement remains in production today, more than a decade later, but its service duration will most certainly not come anywhere close to matching the three-decade persistence of MTS at UBC.