Bruce Gilchrist (4 August 1930 – 23 May 2015) is considered one of the notable figures in modern computing history. Early life and education Gilchrist was born 4 August 1930 in Pontefract, Yorkshire, England and attended King Edward VII School in Kings Lynn. He harbored a keen interest in computing and computing devices from an early age. In October 1948, after being awarded a State Scholarship, he started an accelerated applied mathematics degree course at Imperial College of Science and Technology of the University of London. In 1951, he be able to attend a two-week course at Cambridge University given by Dr. Maurice Wilkes, the developer of the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC). Gilchrist recalls that "this was my first real exposure to computer programming, the problems of debugging, etc.". In 1954, he married his first love Jean DeWolf Littlefield in Princeton, NJ. Bruce and Jean had three children: Ian, James, and Andrew. Institute for Advanced Study In the summer of 1952, he received his doctorate in Meteorology at the University of London. That same year, with a special interest in calculating methods for weather forecasting, and with funding arranged by the mathematician John von Neumann, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey supported on United States Smith-Mundt and Fulbright programs. He worked with Dr. Jule Charney, a gifted meteorologist and mathematician, on weather prediction calculations, programming the institute's IAS machine. He also worked in the area of computers at IAS. Gilchrist first collaborated with the engineer James H. Pomerene on bettering the performance of cathode ray tube memory (the Williams tube developed first at the University of Manchester in England), writing diagnostic programs which allowed the team to make necessary adjustments for speed and reliability. Further collaborating with Pomerene and Y.K. Wong, they invented a fast adder which incorporated a speed up technique for asynchronous adders reducing the time for additive carry-overs to propagate. This design was actually later incorporated in one commercial computer, the Philco TRANSAC S-2000, introduced in 1957, the first commercial transistorized computer. Gilchrist was married in Princeton in April 1954 and his eldest son, Ian, was born there in February 1956. In 1955, John von Neumann left the Institute for Advanced Study to join the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and so, in the summer of 1956, the group Gilchrist had been working with, broke up. Later career In