Robert Montrose (Bob) Graham, 90, of Pelham died peacefully on January 2, 2020, with family at his bedside. Bob was born in St. Johns, Michigan to Esther Pearl of Clinton County, Michigan and Walter L. Graham of Kincardine, Ontario. He is predeceased by his younger sister Margaret. Bob is survived by his wife Judith Pierce of Pelham, by two children and one grandson from his first wife Charlotte, Heather Graham of Atlanta, and Monty Graham and grandson Walter Graham, both of New York City and by Judith’s daughter Gale Hubley and granddaughters Jessica and Katharine Swiercz of Pelham, and son Lincoln Hubley of Haydenville.

As a child during the Great Depression, Bob was raised on his mother’s family farm. Both his parents were unemployed. But the farm was self-sufficient, so Bob did not want. In fact, in the background was the sound of his aunt Francis playing the family Steinway Baby Grand. Bob’s ancestry is rooted in academia. His mother taught high school math, his uncle Orsamus Merrill Pearl was Chairman of the Classics Department at the University of Michigan, and his uncle William Pearl was an Oxford Rhodes Scholar, before being wounded in 1917 in the Battle of Verdun, while serving as an ambulance driver in the French Army. Bob also served. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1952 serving in the Korean War as part of the U.S. Army Security Agency, rising to the rank of Sergeant and receiving multiple commendations at the time of his Honorable Discharge in 1955.

Bob led a storied life in computer science, beginning as a pioneer in the 1950’s at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Bob received an MA in Mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1957, where his passion for computers began. At the time, there were no formal academic programs, as computer science was not yet a discipline in its own right. As a Senior Programmer at the University of Michigan in 1960, he co-authored the MAD compiler, which was widely used at universities and in industry. Coupled with in-depth early experience as a systems programmer, it launched his career. The MAD compiler was perhaps best known for its wry error-handling. If a program did not compile, MAD would output a line-printed image of Alfred E. Neuman, with the inscription “What, me worry?”

During the Cuban missile crisis, the Pentagon realized its computer systems were fatally slow: they could only do one thing at a time. MIT legends J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Fano persuaded the Department of Defense to fund the idea of “Time Sharing” computers. In 1963 Bob was one of a few chosen to join Dr. Fernando (“Corby”) Corbató’s “Project MAC” as a core designer of the Multics operating system, the first generation of time-sharing operating systems, helping to make the expensive, hard to get, and slow computers of the day, orders of magnitude more efficient. Multics was an ancestor of Unix, and the origin of key technologies, such as email.

After MIT, Bob was Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, before joining the Computer Science faculty at the City College of New York, from 1972-1975. He accepted the position of Chairman of the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts in 1975. It was to become his academic “home”. Under his leadership, the University of Massachusetts developed an undergraduate major in computer science.

Bob retired in 1996, having taught for 30 years, authored dozens of papers, given countless talks, hosted numerous workshops, and written a textbook. In 1996 he was inducted as an Association of Computing Machinery “Fellow”. He became Professor Emeritus at the College of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Massachusetts and for years after regularly visited the University to participate in events with faculty, students and staff. It was his home away from home.

Colleagues at MIT nurtured Bob’s interest in the outdoors, with weekend hiking, backpacking, and rock-climbing outings. He joined the Appalachian Mountain Club, and introduced his family to New Hampshire’s White Mountains. He taught his son rock-climbing at Quincy Quarries and at the Shawangunks. His son and grandson actively hike and climb, a tribute to Grandpa Bob’s legacy.

Bob and Judi traveled extensively to parks and conservation land all over the world, from Africa to the Galapagos, the Northwestern U.S and Alaska, finding refuge and delight in the flora and fauna along the way. Their travels were not solely focused on nature, but on history as well. They spent two summer vacations driving and camping, and sometimes paddling, the route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back.

Bob was a keen supporter of his wife Judi’s passion for land conservation in Massachusetts. Judi serves on the Board of Kestrel Land Trust, which currently monitors and permanently protects over 3,500 acres of private and municipal land in 15 towns for the benefit of future generations. He often volunteered to join her at Kestrel functions and on her many visits monitoring land projects. Bob was a devotee of light opera and served on the board and worked behind the scenes on set construction for Valley Light Opera productions for 27 consecutive years. Both Bob and Judi found warm comradery in the VLO community.

Visiting hours at the Douglass Funeral Service, 87 North Pleasant St., Amherst are Friday, January 31 from 5 to 7 PM. In lieu of flowers memorial donations can be made to The Valley Light Opera, P.O. Box 2143, Amherst MA 01004 or to Kestrel Land Trust, P. O. Box 1016, Amherst MA 01004.