Hugh Blair-Smith

Hugh Blair-Smith completed an AB and SB in Engineering and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University before being recruited to MIT/IL in 1959 to work in the computing group. He was part of a key group of recruits to MIT/IL from the Harvard Computation Laboratory, including also Ramon Alonso, Al Hopkins and Robert Scott. Blair-Smith was initially responsible for the design and implementation of the assembler for what was to become the Mars mod 1 and its successors mod 2, mod 3C, and the AGC family. Concurrently, he designed and microprogrammed the instruction sets for Mars mod 3C (redesignated AGC3), AGC4 (redesignated AGC Block I), and AGC Block II. He continued to work in this area through a pioneering microprocessor and a Strapdown Inertial Reference Unit control computer, and then on fault-tolerance software for the Space Shuttle program. In 1981 he left MIT/IL to move into a User Interface specialization in the private software sector, where he remains.

Hugh Blair-Smith participated in AGC project conference 3 and has kindly annotated the transcripts of conferences 1 and 2.

• Conference 1
• Conference 2
• Conference 3
• Hugh Blair-Smith's introduction

He has also written a set of annotations to Eldon Hall's Journey to the Moon and was author of technical documents hosted on this site.

--A.B./H.B-S. - Jan, 2002.