A S Douglas
| Sandy Douglas | |
|---|---|
| Born | Alexander Shafto Douglas 21 May 1921 London, England |
| Died | 29 April 2010 (aged 88) London, England |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | University of Leeds |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Thesis | Some Computations in Theoretical Physics (1954) |
| Known for | OXO |
Alexander Shafto "Sandy" Douglas CBE (21 May 1921 – 29 April 2010) was a British professor of computer science, credited with creating the first graphical computer game OXO (also known as Noughts and Crosses) a tic-tac-toe computer game in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at University of Cambridge.
Douglas was born on 21 May 1921 in London. At age eight, his family moved to Cromwell Road, near what would become the London Air Terminal.
A 74 bus ride for one old penny took me to Exhibition Road, from which I could go towards South Kensington station to my father's office (which is still there) and workshop (now demolished) down by what became the Elysée Française. Alternatively, I could turn north to the Science Museum – a trip I took often.
In the winter of 1938–39, Douglas and his future wife Andrey Parker made a snowman in the grounds of the Natural History Museum. Douglas and his wife would go on to have two children and at least two grandsons.
During the Blitz, in 1940–41, Douglas's Home Guard Unit, 'C' Company of the Chelsea and Kensington Battalion of the KRRC, had its headquarters in the basement of the Royal School of Mines, just the other side of Exhibition Road from the museums.
Douglas attended the University of Cambridge in 1950. In 1952, while working towards earning his PhD, he wrote a thesis which focused on human-computer interactions and he needed an example to prove his theories. At that time, Cambridge was home to the second only stored-program computer, the EDSAC or Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (the first being Manchester University's "Small Scale Experimental Machine" or SSEM, nicknamed "The Baby", which ran its first program on 21 June 1948). This gave Douglas the perfect opportunity to prove his findings by programming the code for a simple game where a player can compete against the computer – OXO.
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