Wes Graham

James Wesley Graham (January 17, 1932 to August 20, 1999) was a Canadian computer scientist born in Copper Cliff, Ontario, and died in Waterloo, Ontario, known as the father of computing at the University of Waterloo. He joined Waterloo in 1959 as one of its first computer science professors and became director of the university's Computing Centre in 1962. Beginning in 1965 he led development of WATFOR, a fast teaching compiler for Fortran that was adopted at roughly 420 postsecondary institutions around the world, along with related teaching compilers WATBOL for COBOL and WATIAC for assembly language. He secured tens of millions of dollars in donated computing equipment for the university and co-founded the Watcom software company, later sold to Powersoft for about 100 million Canadian dollars. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in July 1999, shortly before his death from cancer, and the University of Waterloo's J.W. Graham Medal for computing excellence is named in his honor.