Alan Jones, Inventor / Software Creator

Alan Jones ran cross country in high school and college (Penn State) in the 1950s. He scored his first cross country meet via computer in 1970 using a $4000 terminal and a $1,000,000 computer at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton. He continued to write programs for scoring running races and in 1982 wrote his first program for the IBM Personal Computer, Running Score, and in 1985 released RunScore. This program has been continually updated over the years. He is also the inventor of the Jones/Oerth counter, which is the only official device for measuring road racecourses around the world. It has been used for Olympic Marathons since 1976. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees from Penn State in engineering and a Ph.D. from Purdue. After a 26-year career with IBM, he joined the faculty at SUNY Binghamton in the Geology Department where he writes educational programs about earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. His programs are part of the Geology, Gems and Minerals exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Today, RunScore is probably the most widely used race scoring software in the world.

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