We regret to advise of the death of Captain John Alexander Channing “Sandy” Buckland (Ret’d) of Hillcrest Manor in Fort Collins, Colorado on 25 March 2013.
Sandy was born in Vancouver BC and grew up on a small farm outside the city. He was a Queen Scout and a Junior Forest Warden. He developed a lifelong devotion to conservation which stayed with him throughout his life. He graduated in 1943 from the University of British Columbia and immediately joined the Royal Canadian Engineers.
During training, he suffered a serious attack of appendicitis. By the time he recovered, his unit had already deployed to Europe. Sandy was sent to Washington DC and worked in intelligence at the Pentagon, specifically building charts of the Japanese order of battle.
After the war, Sandy returned to Vancouver and received a Masters Degree in Engineering from UBC. This was followed by earning a PhD at Pennsylvania State University. He then took a job with the Shell Development Company in California where he developed distillation technologies that were used in both the petroleum and nuclear industries.
In the late 50s, Shell entered the world of computers. Sandy was sent to New York for training and later took charge of the computer installation at the Shell refinery in Anacortes WA. This success led to a posting to Princeton NJ and a position in SHARE, a consortium of five major oil companies to develop a computer program to efficiently move oil through the refining and shipping process. The program the group developed was Simplex Linear programming, which is still in wide use today.
After more successes at Shell, Sandy saw the future of computing and moved to the Univac Data Processing Centers in Data Processing and Operations Research. This led to his involvement as an entrepreneur in developing cross-tabulation technologies. Unfortunately, the computing power of the day was not enough and it was 15 years later that spreadsheets came into common use. Sandy returned to the corporate world taking a senior position as Director of Corporate Systems and Data Processing for PepsiCo in Connecticut.
Sandy retired to Fort Collins Colorado in 2003 after 15 years of semi-retirement as a consultant, writer and lecturer.
A memorial service for Sandy will be held on 21 April 2018. Condolences may be sent to the Crist Mortuary & Cremation and Mountain View Memorial Park In Boulder CO.
