R.I.P. Dave Cochran

[Monte Dalrymple]

I just learned that Dave Cochran passed away on October 7. Thought some of you would be interested. If you don't know who he was take a look at the HHC 2018 presentations.

[calc_freak]

That's quite a loss indeed. Here he was interviewed by Steven Leibson in 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IlSjfgr...venLeibson

[Steve Simpkin]

I am very sad to hear about his passing.

From the “How the Model 9100A Was Developed” page on this site:

“The task of compressing the floating point arithmetic operations and functional computations into the limited read only memory of the 9100A was accomplished by Dave Cochran. To make sure that all the calculations were accurate over the enormous range of arguments allowed by the floating point operation, to assure exact values at certain cardinal points, and above all to get so much in so little memory space was an enormous achievement.

I sometimes wonder If Dave realizes what a remarkable job he did. It took several passes. On the first pass it appeared hopeless to include all the functions. But by nesting routines and by inventing a number of space saving tricks he was able to save enough states to crowd them all in. Then various bugs were discovered and more states had to be freed to correct these. The 'battle of the states' continued for several months and the end result was one of the most efficient encoding jobs ever done.”

https://www.hpmuseum.org/journals/9100how.htm

[Steve Simpkin]

R.I.P. Mr. Cochran.

https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/wb_pages...ran_01.htm

[Steve Simpkin]

Memoriam: Dave Cochran, an Engineer’s Engineer
by Steven Leibson

https://www.eejournal.com/article/in-mem...-engineer/

[rprosperi]

Sad news indeed, thanks for sharing this Monte.

Dave was a warm, funny and interesting man, I felt privileged to meet him and just being in his presence made it clear how much he had to contribute in so many ways.

R.I.P. Dave.

[Eddie W. Shore]

Condolences and comfort to the Cochran family. R.I.P. Mr. Cochran. Thank you for everything.

[Mark Power]

Sad news.

Thank you for posting the articles. Clearly a very skilled engineer.

[pier4r]

RIP.

I read some of his articles in HP solve. Great ones.