Work
Culler was a developer, with Burton Fried,1 of the Culler-Fried Online System,2 ("The UCSB On-Line System"3), one of the first interactive computer systems in the mid-1960 era. This was the first system to make use of a storage oscilloscope as a means of presenting graphical information, and provided an innovative means of presentation and teaching of mathematical concepts. One of the first object oriented approaches to computing, the system provided a set of operators (e.g., add, subtract, display, multiply, sin, exp) on a predefined set of mathematical objects: scalars, vectors, arrays, and matrices (2-D only, up to about order 30..33).
This interpreted programming language was named MOLSF for Mathematically-Oriented Language, Single-Precision, Floating-point. The MOLSF keyboard consisted of a modified double QWERTY keyboard with the second, upper keyboard, renaming all keys to various functions (special hardware which included APL keyboard capability, two generations existed). The graphical integration was nearly seamless, but memorization of commands was nearly impossible.
The CFS has a second programming language named COL for Card-Oriented Language, somewhat like modern day text-editors. MOLSF and COL didn't communicate very well. They were vastly different languages. The Culler-Fried System ran at UCSB, UCLA, and TRW.
By December 1969, Culler's online system was chosen by ARPA to be the third node on the original ARPANET,45 by adding an IBM 360/75 computer using the OS/MVT operating system, from the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), participated in the first exchange of packets of data transmitted in the nascent Internet.6
Culler-Harrison is occasionally cited as one of the precursors to the founding of Floating Point Systems, Inc. and the Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture by Joseph Fisher and James Ellis.
Culler returned to UCSB as an adjunct professor from 1982 through 1984. Over 25 companies in Santa Barbara were spun out of Culler's work and the College of Engineering's Computer Research Laboratory including Culler Harris and Culler Scientific .