James E. Thornton

James E. Thornton (September 25, 1925 to January 11, 2005) was an American computer engineer. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, earning a bachelor's degree in 1950, then joined Engineering Research Associates, which was acquired by Remington Rand in 1952. In 1958 he left with other engineers to form the new Control Data Corporation, where he remained until 1973 and worked on the CDC 1604, CDC 6600, 6400, 6500 and the STAR-100. With Seymour Cray he was the main developer of the pioneering CDC 6600 supercomputer, which reached the market in 1964. In 1974 he co-founded Network Systems Corporation, which built computer networks connecting mainframes and minicomputers, including HYPERchannel. He received the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1994 for his pioneering work on high performance processors, for inventing the scoreboard for instruction issue, and for fundamental contributions to vector supercomputing, and the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 1997.