Michael A. Jackson

Michael Anthony Jackson (born 16 February 1936) is a British computer scientist, and independent computing consultant in London, England. He is also part-time researcher at AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ, U.S., and visiting research professor at the Open University in the UK.

Born in Birmingham to Montagu M. and Jackson and Bertha (Green) Jackson, Jackson was educated at Harrow School in Harrow, London, England. There he was taught by Christopher Strachey and wrote his first program under Strachey's guidance. From 1954 to 1958 he studied classics (known as "Greats") at Merton College, Oxford; a fellow student, two years ahead of him, was C. A. R. Hoare. They shared an interest in logic, which was studied as part of Greats at Oxford.

After his graduation in 1961 Jackson started as computer science designer and consultant for Maxwell Stamp Associates in London. Here he designed, coded and tested his first programs for IBM and Honeywell machines working in Assembler. There Jackson found his calling, as he recollected in 2000: "Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before coding — and a conscientious tester, I realised that program design was hard and the results likely to be erroneous..." Information system design was in need of a structured approach.

In 1964 Jackson joined the new consultancy firm John Hoskyns and Company in London, before founding his own company Michael Jackson Systems Limited in 1971. In the 1960s he had started his search for "more reliable and systematic way of programming." He contributed to the emerging modular programming movement, meeting Larry Constantine, George H. Mealy and several others on a 1968 symposium. In the 1970s, Jackson developed Jackson Structured Programming (JSP). In the 1980s, with John Cameron, he developed Jackson System Development (JSD). Then, in the 1990s, he developed the Problem Frames Approach. In collaboration with Pamela Zave, he created "Distributed Feature Composition", a virtual architecture for specification and implementation of telecommunication services.

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