Daniel McCracken obituary

Author of hugely successful textbooks on computing
Daniel McCracken
Daniel McCracken's 1961 Guide to Fortran Programming sold 300,000 copies.

Daniel McCracken, who has died of cancer aged 81, was computing's most successful textbook author. In the 1960s, when computers were beginning to take off, tens of thousands of programmers were urgently needed. Most of them came from other professions and they often learned their new trade using one of McCracken's textbooks. He was a born educator, and his books were peppered with practical examples and exercises that made them good for both private study and university courses. As new techniques arrived, for 20 years McCracken usually had the first textbook on the market. He sold 1.6m books and the royalties brought him the wealth and independence that made him rethink his life.

McCracken was born in Hughesville, Montana, and raised in Ellensburg, Washington, the youngest of six children of a mining engineer and his schoolteacher wife. He did well at school and attended Central Washington College of Education, intending to become a science teacher. However, atomic power seemed to be the new frontier and in 1951 he took a job at General Electric's atomic products division in Hanford, Washington. There he got his first taste of computing, and he was hooked. For the next few years he gained experience in General Electric's various computer centres, in Cincinnati, Phoenix and New York.

He was encouraged by his manager to write his first textbook, Digital Computer Programming, which appeared in 1957. It sold modestly by later standards, but it did well enough for him to leave General Electric and take a low-paying programming job at New York University and study for a PhD in mathematics at the university's Courant Institute. While he was there, computer programming was being revolutionised by the Fortran language, which came to dominate scientific programming for decades. His Guide to Fortran Programming appeared in 1961. It sold 300,000 copies and made McCracken quite famous in the small world of computing. He decided to abandon his PhD and become a full-time writer and consultant. He toured the country as a lecturer, promoting his books and meeting his constituency of buyers. His next big success came in 1963 with A Guide to Cobol Programming, which sold in vast numbers, and, although he never had a literary agent, McCracken managed to negotiate an unprecedented 25% royalty rate.

In 1965 he received a cheque from his publishers for over $100,000 which represented just six months' royalties. It was more money than he had ever imagined possible and he was guilt-stricken. He came from a liberal-minded, religious background and he decided to invest the money in changing his career and giving it back to society through doing good works. He trained to become a Unitarian minister at the Union Theological Seminary, New York. He never served as a minister, but instead became active in the politics of the computer profession.

In 1965 he founded Computer Professionals Against the ABM to campaign against a US anti-ballistic missile system. For this, he won the Norbert Wiener award in 1989. He became chairman of the Scientists' Institute for Public Information and in 1971 jointly edited the book To Love or to Perish: The Technological Crisis and the Churches, the report of a taskforce looking into technology and society which also included the anthropologist Margaret Mead. He became a leading light in the Association for Computing Machinery, America's learned society for the computer profession. He served as its president from 1978 until 1980 and took a special interest in computer-science education and literature.

For all his prominence, McCracken felt himself to be a simple teacher. In 1981 he settled down to become a full-time professor of computer science at the City College of New York. There he had what even then was an unusual privilege – he was allowed to teach and write textbooks, with no requirement to undertake research. He liked nothing better than getting to know undergraduates, and he continued to work until the last weeks of his life.

He is survived by his second wife, Helen; and two sons, Charles and Thomas, and five daughters, Judith, Virginia, Cynthia, Rachel and Aliza, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.

Daniel Delbert McCracken, computer scientist, born 23 July 1930; died 30 July 2011