Biographical Presentation By: Kenneth Bonte

 Ole-Johan Dahl was born in October 12, 1931 in Mandal, Norway.  He was the first member of his family to show an aptitude for higher education. Everyone else had always been sea captains and sailors.  When he was 13 his elder cousin was shot dead by the Nazis and the whole family fled to Sweden.  While in school he was so smart he helped the teacher explain math to his peers and was nicknamed “the professor”

 Dahl studied numerical mathematics at the University of Oslo while working part time for the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (NDRE).  He worked there full time after he graduated as the assistant to Jan Garwick (also know as the father of Informatics) who helped to stimulate and nurture Dahl’s talents.  In 1957 the NDRE acquired an early Ferranti Mercury computer and Dahl designed and implemented a “high level language” (of the time) for it called MAC (Mercury Automatic Coding).  At the NDRE he met Kristen Nygaard, and together they changed the face of computing.

 Nygaard and Dahl realized that they were doing a lot of repetitive tasks and thought “there has to be a better way” and together produced the initial ideas for OOP  Together they developed Simula the programming language, with its original purpose being for simulation programming.  It introduced its users to the idea of organizing their programs as a system of interacting (known as objects), executing components, and this idea proved useful for a wide rand of applications.

 They implemented the key ideas of objects, inheritance and modularity for the first time.  This is why they won the Turing award in  The process there wasn’t always easy, in the spring of 1967 a new switchboard employee went to his boss proclaiming “two men are fighting violently in front of the blackboard in the upstaris corridor. What shall we do? And his boss came out of his office, listened for a few seconds and then said “relax. Its only Dahl and Nygaard discussing simula”

 After Dahl finished working on SIMULA 67 he singlehandedly tried to build up computer science as an academic discipline in Norway.  For years he was the only computer science professor in all of Norway. He had a multitude of graduate students under his supervision and wrote many textbooks.  In the 90s he helped develop the OOP language ABEL  Dahl died in 2002 after a long battle with Lymphatic Cancer.

 "Ole-Johan Dahl." - A.M. Turing Award Winner. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Feb  "Ole-Johan Dahl." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 22 Feb