This collection contains records from Burt Grad’s work with General Electric and IBM from 1949-1978. Grad did substantial work on factory automation and business systems management, reflected in large projects called the Integrated Systems Project (ISP) and the Study Organization Plan (SOP), both documented in this collection. The collection also contains content about decision tables – a tool Grad developed to map cause-and-effect logic for systems programming purposes. Additional areas of interest include Grad’s work on Application System Development Method (ASDM), factory simulation models, the Productron computer, TABSOL software for automation of decision tables, and more. Materials consist primarily of technical reports and notes, correspondence, manuals and marketing materials for products, and some articles.

Burton (Burt) Grad was born in 1928 in Philadelphia, where his mother and her family had emigrated from the Ukraine in 1914. In 1932, Grad’s family moved from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., where he completed high school. He then received a Bachelor of Management Engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in 1949.

4.17 Linear feet, 3 record cartons and 1 manuscript box

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The collection is open for research.