Władysław Turski

Władysław Marek Turski (1938 to 2013) was a Polish computer scientist who came to computing from astronomy, developing a lasting interest after using a computer at Jodrell Bank in 1960 to simulate the Draconid meteor shower. He helped develop KLIPA, a symbolic programming language for the Soviet-built URAL-2 computer, and designed SODA, an original operating system for the Polish ODRA-1204 computer; his 1963 talk on KLIPA at the ACM National Conference was among the first computing science presentations in the United States by someone from the Eastern Bloc. He joined the Institute of Mathematical Machines in 1972, and in the mid-1960s was elected a member, then scientific secretary, of IFIP Working Group 2.1, the international committee responsible for the ALGOL programming language.