In Memoriam – Ed Lassettre

I was out of the country when my old colleague from IBM days, Ed Lassettre passed away last November. I only found out earlier this month about his demise from a mutual friend from IBM Almaden Research. Ed was one of the best computer software professionals I knew and respected.

He was at IBM’s Santa Teresa Lab (now called Silicon Valley Lab) when I started there back in 1981 after my five-year stint at IBM Canada. That year he got promoted to a Senior Technical Staff member (STSM), the very first at the lab to get that honor. Subsequently he became an IBM Fellow, the highest technical honor. His reputation of being one of the key software engineers for IBM’s MVS operating system preceded him. Ed had spent a few years at IBM’s Poughkeepsie Lab in upstate New York. He did his undergraduate  and post-graduate studies at Ohio State University in Math. He had deep insights into the intricacies of high performance computing systems. When we were building DB2 at the IBM lab, Ed was providing guidance on its interface with the operating system.

Subsequently I went to IBM’s Austin Lab for two years in the mid-1980s to lay the foundation of the DB2 product for the PC (which at the time lacked the processing power and memory of the large mainframes). Hence our design had to accommodate to those limitations. The IBM executives wanted someone to audit our design before giving the green signal for development. I could not think of a better person than Ed Lassettre to do that. At my request Ed spent some time and gave a very positive report on our design. He had great credibility in the technical community. Many times, I sought his views on technical matters and he provided timely advice. His wisdom was complemented by a tremendous humility, a rare feature in our industry.

I had left IBM back in 1992 for Oracle and lost touch with Ed. Later on I found that he had retired from IBM and joined Microsoft Research. He was a good friend of the late Jim Gray, also at Microsoft Research at the time. Ed retired from Microsoft in 2013 at the age of 79! He was quite well-known in the HPTC (High Performance Technical Computing) world.

RIP, Ed Lassettre, a great computer scientist and friend! You will be missed.