Background
Smith was born June 26, 1907, in Marshall, Illinois.
Smith was born June 26, 1907, in Marshall, Illinois.
He graduated from Indiana Central College (now University of Indianapolis), and completed an Master of Arts
He founded the Digital Computer Newsletter published by the Navy from 1948 through 1962. Smith also participated in the development of the programming language. in physics at the University of Illinois. He taught high school and junior college until the outbreak of World World War World War II Smith was on active duty in the United States. Navy from 1942 to 1946, completing his tour as a lieutenant commander.
In June, 1946, he joined the computer section of the Mathematics Branch of the Office of Naval Research (Office of Naval Research).
While at Office of Naval Research and later at the United States. Navy"s Bureau of Ships, Smith oversaw research contracts including Whirlwind and the Harvard calculators. Starting in 1951, Smith collaborated with Mina Rees and Grace Murray Hopper to organize a series of seminars on computing development.
In 1946, Smith represented the Office of Naval Research at the Moore School Lectures organized by the ENIAC team The following year, Smith compiled summaries of active computer projects and published a survey of their activities.
This led to the Navy"s Digital Computer Newsletter.
In April, 1959, a group of computer manufacturers and users met at the University of Pennsylvania to plan the development of a computer language for business applications. At the time, business-oriented languages were built to work with specific computer systems This new effort would seen to build a language whose programs could be easily adapted to run on other computers.
Gene Smith represented the Navy"s Bureau of Ships at that meeting.
The development was divided among three task forces:
Short Range - chaired by Grace Hopper
Intermediate Range - chaired by Gene Smith
Long Range - chaired by Saul Gorn
The language evolved from proposals developed by the Short Range Task Force. Smith remained active in the community through the Conference on Data System Languages (CODASYL) until his retirement.