Doug Ross, 77; developed important computer language

While still in high school, Doug Ross performed a full assembly program of music he had composed. By his late 20s, he had developed a key computer language and coined the term computer-assisted design. A decade later, he taught MIT's first graduate course in software engineering. Perhaps not surprisingly, he occasionally thought daily tasks lacked sufficient challenge.

"He was very, very brilliant, and sometimes he would get bored," said his daughter Jane of Brookline. "But he wasn't the type to complain about being bored. He would just make what he was doing more interesting. Also, he was a bit of a ham."

As he practiced with his church choir, Mr. Ross would periodically turn his music upside down and still keep up with the surrounding singers. "Partly it was to make things more interesting for him," his daughter said, "and partly it was to entertain the people around him who were looking over his shoulder."

Mr. Ross, who created APT, the automatically programmed tool computer language, died Jan. 31 at his home in the Brookhaven at Lexington care community from health complications resulting from a fall. He was 77 and also had founded the Waltham software engineering company SofTech in 1969.

"He's the most creative guy I've ever met," said Jorge Rodriguez, who first worked for Mr. Ross as a research assistant at MIT in 1961, was a vice president at SofTech, and now runs Knowledge Management Associates in Waltham. "He could grasp a problem quickly and find solutions."

In a 1970 interview with N/C World magazine that is posted on the Internet, Mr. Ross said that when he created SofTech, "The objective is to bring a man and a machine and a problem together to get the solution the man wants, and that's all."

The son of psychiatrists who were medical missionaries, Douglas T. Ross was born in China and returned to this country with his parents when he was an infant. He grew up in Canandaigua, N.Y., where his parents worked at Brigham Hall, a private psychiatric hospital.

At Canandaigua Academy, the town's public high school, "I composed and arranged and improvised, and got into boogie-woogie, jazz, and that sort of thing," he said in a 1984 interview with the Charles Babbage Institute in Minneapolis. "At one point I was in 13 musical organizations at the same time: marching bands, symphony bands, jazz bands, various choirs, and singing organizations."

He also pored over Scientific American and Science magazines and showed an early knack for taking things apart and putting them back together -- if only to tear them asunder again.

"I used to make things that exploded and all that sort of thing," he said in 1984. "So I evidently got quite a good background in science."

After high school he went to Oberlin College in Ohio, attracted by the school's reputation in science and math, and by its music conservatory and school of theology. Throughout his life Mr. Ross liked to ponder the unknowable, including when he was relaxing in his Lexington house with a living room that had large plate-glass windows on three sides.

"My father would sit there in his favorite chair looking out into the woods, thinking his deep thoughts," his daughter said. "He was very interested in philosophy, scientific proofs of God. He read widely, but especially philosophy and the intersection of philosophy and science."

In 1951, partway through his senior year at Oberlin, he married Patricia Mott, whom he had met in a college math class. He graduated a few months later and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where in 1954 he received a master's degree in science with an electrical engineering emphasis.

Mr. Ross finished his course requirements for a doctorate, but did not write a dissertation because by then he was deeply involved with MIT's Whirlwind computer, the world's first to operate in real time and use a video terminal to show graphics and text.

"I used to say I was a pure mathematician by training, but an engineer by heart because I discovered what engineering was: Get in there and make it work and understand as much as you can; do things systematically, but make it work," he said in the Babbage institute interview.

This practical approach, honed in childhood when he would sometimes work on farms run by relatives, may have contributed to the historic firsts he posted in the computer field.

While studying and later teaching at MIT in the 1950s, he directed development of APT, the computer language used for automatic programming of numerically controlled machine tools. He came up with the term computer-aided design, led MIT's CAD project through the 1960s, and helped develop the software engineering language AED. Mr. Ross also developed the Structured Analysis and Design Technique and founded SofTech to market products based on the system.

For his wife and daughters, though, his expertise had a more personal application.

"The real manifestation for us as a family was to have a computer in the house," his daughter said.

The teletype was connected through a private phone line to the computer at MIT.

"It was the first one in a private home," his wife said. "It was called 'Zelda.' "

In addition to his wife, Patricia, and his daughter Jane, Mr. Ross leaves two other daughters, Kathryn Chow of New York City and Margaret Thrasher of Durham, N.H.; two sisters, Margaret Hastings of Princeton, N.J., and Nancy Grimm of Portland, Ore.; two granddaughters; and a grandson.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. tomorrow in Hancock United Church of Christ in Lexington.

Burial will be private.