Harvey Cragon

Key takeaways

Harvey Cragon belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Harvey Cragon to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Harvey Cragon from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Harvey G. Cragon (21 April 1929 – 7 September 2018) was an American engineer, who was the Ernest Cockrell Jr. Centennial Chair Emeritus at the Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

Early career In 1950, Cragon graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana. After graduating, he worked for Southern Bell Telephone Company in New Orleans for a year and then spent two years in the U.S. Army in a unit that tested infrared night vision devices in the Mojave Desert. In 1953, he joined the Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, where he worked on automated air defense systems. While at Hughes, he took courses at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1957, he moved to Tennessee, where he worked as an engineer on the digital instrumentation of a wind tunnel at the United States Air Force (USAF) Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tullahoma with a UNIVAC 1102.

Texas Instruments In 1959, Cragon joined Texas Instruments, Incorporated in Dallas, Texas, to work on applying digital technology to develop processors for a variety of applications, including seismic data analysis. In 1961, he built the first digital computer (and similar digital central processing units) for use on rockets. He led the development of the TI-870 signal processor in the mid-1960s, as well as the construction of a transistorized computer. In 1965 he started the TI Advanced Scientific Computer (ASC), one of the first vector supercomputers. Its main problem was the cooling of the processor, but it was solved well enough for the ASC to be used until 1985. In the 1970s, he led the development of the TMS320 signal processor, which came out in 1983. The TMS320 and subsequent digital signal processors were revolutionary and had a significant impact in the field.

University of Texas at Austin After twenty-five years with Texas Instruments, Cragon left industry to teach in academia. As the Ernest Cockrell Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 to 1999, he advised and mentored numerous undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students. He taught courses in computer architecture and wrote three books on the subject.

Retirement Upon his retirement in 1999, Cragon was named a professor emeritus at UT Austin. He and Henrietta then moved to Dallas, where he became a visiting professor at Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Dallas. He continued research on a variety of topics, and wrote books on the development of early computers, including the British code-breaking computer Colossus, the Norden Bombsight, and torpedo data computers developed during World War II. Cragon died at The Glen, Shreveport, Louisiana on 7 September 2018.

Bibliography Brower, William; Cragon, Harvey (1961). Silicon Semiconductor Solid Circuits. Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Technical Information Center. OCLC 227264353. Cragon, Harvey (1980). "The elements of single-chip microcomputer architecture". Computer. 13 (10): 27–41. doi:10.1109/MC.1980.1653373. OCLC 926734875. S2CID 18408406. Cragon, H.G.; Watson, W.J. (1989). "The TI Advanced Scientific Computer". Computer. 22 (1): 55–64. doi:10.1109/2.19823. OCLC 926734509. S2CID 11086245. Cragon, Harvey (1992). Branch Strategy Taxonomy and Performance Models. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press. OCLC 932274307. Cragon, Harvey (1999). Memory Systems and Pipelined Processors. Burlington, Massachusetts: Sudbury Jones and Bartlett. OCLC 247575574. Cragon, Harvey (2000). Computer Architecture and Implementation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. OCLC 859641718. Cragon, Harvey (2003). From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park. Dallas, TX: Cragon Books. OCLC 1123934032. Cragon, Harvey (2005). Royal Navy Codes and Ciphers in the Napoleonic Wars. Dallas, TX: Cragon Books. OCLC 668427908. Cragon, Harvey (2007). The Fleet Submarine Torpedo Data Computer. Dallas, TX: Cragon Books. OCLC 1083546269. Cragon, Harvey (2007). The Eureka Springs Railway: An Automobile Tour into the Past. Dallas, TX: Cragon Books. OCLC 228657355. Cragon, Harvey; Remacle, Rosemary (2009-05-28). Cragon, Harvey Oral History (PDF). Dallas, TX: Computer History Museum. Retrieved 11 December 2019. Cragon, Harvey (2010). How the Norden Bombsight Works from Sighting the Target to Bomb Release. Dallas, TX: Cragon Books. OCLC 1086610207.

Works cited "Cragon, Harvey G." WorldCat. Retrieved December 16, 2016. "In Memoriam: Harvey G.Cragon" (PDF). University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved November 30, 2019. "Obituary: Harvey G. Cragon". Dallas Morning News. Retrieved December 1, 2019.

References

External links Cragon, Harvey oral history at the Computer History Museum

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Harvey Cragon

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Harvey Cragon claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Harvey Cragon before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Harvey Cragon ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Harvey Cragon

In research: Harvey Cragon appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Harvey Cragon in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Harvey Cragon is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1929 births, 2018 deaths, 20th-century American engineers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Harvey Cragon outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Harvey Cragon in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Harvey Cragon means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Harvey Cragon out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Harvey Cragon in simple terms?

Harvey G. Cragon (21 April 1929 – 7 September 2018) was an American engineer, who was the Ernest Cockrell Jr.

Why does Harvey Cragon matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Harvey Cragon?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Harvey Cragon.