Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Softpanorama History of Computer Science Page

Here is the timeline modified from History of Computer Science

1950's

John Backus and others developed the first FORTRAN compiler in April 1957. LISP, a list-processing language for artificial intelligence programming, was invented by John McCarthy about 1958. Alan Perlis, John Backus, Peter Naur and others developed Algol.

In hardware, Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) and Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor) invented the integrated circuit in 1959.

Edsger Dijkstra invented an efficient algorithm for shortest paths in graphs as a demonstration of the ARMAC computer in 1956. He also invented an efficient algorithm for the minimum spanning tree in order to minimize the wiring needed for the X1 computer. (Dijkstra is famous for his caustic, opinionated memos. For example, see his opinions of some programming languages).

In a famous paper that appeared in the journal Mind in 1950, Alan Turing introduced the Turing Test, one of the first efforts in the field of artificial intelligence. He proposed a definition of "thinking" or "consciousness" using a game: a tester would have to decide, on the basis of written conversation, whether the entity in the next room responding to the tester's queries was a human or a computer. If this distinction could not be made, then it could be fairly said that the computer was "thinking".

In 1952, Alan Turing was arrested for "gross indecency" after a burglary led to the discovery of his affair with Arnold Murray. Overt homosexuality was taboo in 1950's England, and Turing was forced to take estrogen "treatments" which rendered him impotent and caused him to grow breasts. On June 7, 1954, despondent over his situation, Turing committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

In 1957 FORTRAN --mathematical FORmula TRANslating system--appears. Heading the team is John Backus, who goes on to contribute to the development of ALGOL and the well-known syntax-specification system known as BNF.

In 1959 LISP 1.5 appears. the same year COBOL is created by the Conference on Data Systems and Languages (CODASYL).

1960's

Operating systems saw major advances. Fred Brooks at IBM designed System/360, a line of different computers with the same architecture and instruction set, from small machine to top-of-the-line. Edsger Dijkstra at Eindhoven designed the THE multiprogramming system.

At the end of the decade, ARPAnet, a precursor to today's Internet, began to be constructed.

In 1960 ALGOL 60 , the first block-structured language, appears. This is the root of the family tree that will ultimately produce the likes of Pascal. ALGOL goes on to become the most popular language in Europe in the mid- to late-1960s.  Sometime in the early 1960s , Kenneth Iverson begins work on the language that will become APL--A Programming Language. It uses a specialized character set that, for proper use, requires APL-compatible I/O devices. APL is documented in Iverson's book, A Pro gramming Language  published in 1962

Many new programming languages were invented on the base of Algol, such as BASIC (developed c. 1964 by John Kemeny (1926-1992) and Thomas Kurtz (b. 1928)).  It became very popular with PC revolution.

The same year PL/1 was released.

The 1960's also saw the rise of automata theory and the theory of formal languages. Big names here include Noam Chomsky and Michael Rabin. Chomsky later became well-known for his theory that language is "hard-wired" in human brains, and for his criticism of American foreign policy.

Proving correctness of programs using formal methods also began to be more important in this decade. The work of Tony Hoare played an important role. Hoare also invented Quicksort.

Douglas C. Englebart invents the computer mouse c. 1968, at SRI.

Ted Hoff (b. 1937) and Federico Faggin at Intel designed the first microprocessor (computer on a chip) in 1969-1971.

A rigorous mathematical basis for the analysis of algorithms began with the work of Donald Knuth (b. 1938), author of 3-volume treatise entitled The Art of Computer Programming.

In 1968 ALGOL 68 , a monster compared to ALGOL 60, appears. Some members of the specifications committee--including C.A.R. Hoare and Niklaus Wirth--protest its approval. ALGOL 68 proves difficult to implement.

The same year Niklaus Wirth begins work on Pascal.

1970's

Unix, a very influential operating system, was developed at Bell Laboratories by Ken Thompson (b. 1943) and Dennis Ritchie (b. 1941). Brian Kernighan and Ritchie together developed C, an influential programming language. The first release was made in 1972. The definitive reference manual for it will not appear until 1974.

Other new programming languages, such as Pascal (invented by Niklaus Wirth) and Ada (developed by a team led by Jean Ichbiah), arose.

The first RISC architecture was begun by John Cocke in 1975, at the Thomas J. Watson Laboratories of IBM. Similar projects started at Berkeley and Stanford around this time.

The 1970's also saw the rise of the supercomputer. Seymour Cray (b. 1925) designed the CRAY-1, which was first shipped in March 1976. It could perform 160 million operations in a second. The Cray XMP came out in 1982. Cray Research was taken over by Silicon Graphics.

There were also major advances in algorithms and computational complexity. In 1971, Steve Cook published his seminal paper on NP-completeness, and shortly thereafter, Richard Karp showed that many natural combinatorial problems were NP-complete. Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman published a paper that introduced the theory of public-key cryptography, and a public-key cryptosystem known as RSA was invented by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman.

In 1978  AWK -- a text-processing language named after the designers, Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan -- appears. The same year the ANSI standard for FORTRAN 77 appears.

In 1979, three graduate students in North Carolina developed a distributed news server which eventually became Usenet.

1980's

In 1982 PostScript appears.

The first computer viruses are developed c. 1981. The term was coined by Leonard Adleman, now at the University of Southern California.

In 1981, the first truly successful portable computer was marketed, the Osborne I. In 1984, Apple first marketed the Macintosh computer.

• Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation by Goldberg et al is published.
• Ada appears . Its name comes from Lady Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of the English poet Byron. She has been called the first computer programmer because of her work on Charles Babbage's analytical engine. In 1983, the Department of Defense directs that all new "mission-critical" applications be written in Ada.
• In late 1983 and early 1984, Microsoft and Digital Research both release the first C compilers for microcomputers.
• In July , the first implementation of C++ appears. The name is coined by Rick Mascitti.
• In November , Borland's Turbo Pascal hits the scene like a nuclear blast, thanks to an advertisement in BYTE magazine.

In 1987, the US National Science Foundation started NSFnet, precursor to part of today's Internet.

1990's and Beyond

In February 1995, ISO accepts the 1995 revision of the Ada language. Called Ada 95, it includes OOP features and support for real-time systems.

In 1996  first ANSI C++ standard was released.

In 1997 Java was released.

Notes:

• Unix history is probably the most fascinating part of OS history and is covered in a separate page
   
• Influential MIT operating systems (Corbato's CTSS, Multix and VM/CMS ) are covered in general OS history page
   
• The history of the fist 10 years of Linux can be found in Nikolai Bezroukov. Portraits of Open Source Pioneers. Ch 4: A Slightly Skeptical View on Linus Torvalds
   
• Some fragments of DOS history are reflected in The Orthodox File Manager(OFM) Paradigm see especially The History of Development of Norton Commander
   
• A Plea for Help in Researching and Establishing the History of Computer Software should be of interest to many readers. Help these people out please!

Old News ;-)

[Aug 1, 2008] Author Wallace Says Gates Surrounds Himself With Smart People

July 31 (Bloomberg) -- Author James Wallace, a reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, talks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene about Microsoft Corp.'s strategy and competition with Google Inc., Boeing Co.'s performance, and the shortage of engineers in the U.S. James Wallace and Jim Erickson co-wrote the best seller ``Hard Drive: Bill Gates & the Making of the Microsoft Empire,'' published in 1992.

Listen/Download

[Jul 23, 2008] Randy Pausch, whose 'last lecture' became sensation dies -- chicagotribune.com

Randy Pausch, a terminally ill professor whose earnest farewell lecture at Carnegie Mellon University became an Internet phenomenon and bestselling book that turned him into a symbol for living and dying well, died Friday. He was 47.

Pausch, a computer science professor and virtual-reality pioneer, died at his home in Chesapeake, Va., of complications from pancreatic cancer, the Pittsburgh university announced.

When Pausch agreed to give the talk, he was participating in a long-standing academic tradition that calls on professors to share their wisdom in a theoretical "last lecture." A month before the speech, the 46-year-old Pausch was told he had only months to live, a prognosis that heightened the poignancy of his address.

Originally delivered last September to about 400 students and colleagues, his message about how to make the most of life has been viewed by millions on the Internet. Pausch gave an abbreviated version of it on "Oprah" and expanded it into a best-selling book, "The Last Lecture," released in April.

Related links

• Randy Pausch | 1960-2008 Photos
• Video: Pausch's 'Last Lecture'
• Randy Pausch's daily journal

Yet Pausch insisted that both the spoken and written words were designed for an audience of three: his children, then 5, 2 and 1.

"I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children," Pausch wrote in his book.

Unwilling to take time from his family to pen the book, Pausch hired a coauthor, Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal writer who had covered the lecture. During more than 50 bicycle rides crucial to his health, Pausch spoke to Zaslow on a cellphone headset.

"The speech made him famous all over the world," Zaslow told The Times. "It was almost a shared secret, a peek into him telling his colleagues and students to go on and do great things. It touched so many people because it was authentic."

Thousands of strangers e-mailed Pausch to say they found his upbeat lecture, laced with humor, to be inspiring and life-changing. They drank up the sentiments of a seemingly vibrant terminally ill man, a showman with Jerry Seinfeld-esque jokes and an earnest Jimmy Stewart delivery.

If I don't seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.

He used that line after projecting CT scans, complete with helpful arrows pointing to the tumors on his liver as he addressed "the elephant in the room" that made every word carry more weight.

Some people believe that those who are dying may be especially insightful because they must make every moment count. Some are drawn to valedictories like the one Pausch gave because they offer a spiritual way to grapple with mortality that isn't based in religion.

Sandra Yarlott, director of spiritual care at UCLA Medical Center, said researchers, including Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, have observed that work done by dying patients "resonates with people in that timeless place deep within."

As Pausch essentially said goodbye at Carnegie Mellon, he touched on just about everything but religion as he raucously relived how he achieved most of his childhood dreams. His ambitions included experiencing the weightlessness of zero gravity; writing an article in the World Book Encyclopedia ("You can tell the nerds early on," he joked); wanting to be both a Disney Imagineer and Captain Kirk from "Star Trek"; and playing professional football.

Onstage, Pausch was a frenetic verbal billboard, delivering as many one-liners as he did phrases to live by.

Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

When his virtual-reality students at Carnegie Mellon won a flight in a NASA training plane that briefly simulates weightlessness, Pausch was told faculty members were not allowed to fly. Finding a loophole, he applied to cover it as his team's hometown Web journalist -- and got his 25 seconds of floating.

Since 1997, Pausch had been a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon. With a drama professor, he founded the university's Entertainment Technology Center, which teams students from the arts with those in technology to develop projects.

The popular professor had an "enormous and lasting impact" on Carnegie Mellon, said Jared L. Cohon, the university's president, in a statement. He pointed out that Pausch's "love of teaching, his sense of fun and his brilliance" came together in his innovative software program, Alice, which uses animated characters and storytelling to make it easier to learn to write computer code.

During the lecture, Pausch joked that he had become just enough of an expert to fulfill one childhood ambition. World Book sought him out to write its virtual-reality entry.

[Apr 10, 2008] Andrew Brown The creation of artificial stupidity reflects badly on the human race Technology by Andrew Brown

April 10 2008 | The Guardian

Joseph Weizenbaum, who died last month, was one of the computer scientists who changed the way we think. Unfortunately for all of us, he didn't change it in the way he wanted to. His family was driven from Germany by the Nazis in 1936, and by the early 1960s he was a professor at MIT, part of the first wave of brilliant programmers to whom it sometimes seemed that there was nothing that computers could not do. Contemporaries like John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky confidently predicted the emergence of "strong" human-like artificial intelligence (AI). Then, in 1965, Weizenbaum demonstrated artificial stupidity, and the world has never been the same since.

He wrote a program called Eliza, which would respond to sentences typed in at a terminal with sentences of its own that bore some relation to what had been typed in; it mimicked a completely non-directional psychotherapist, who simply encouraged the patient to ramble till they stumbled on the truth, or the end of the session. What happened, of course, was that some students started to confide in the program as if it were a real person.

Even professional psychiatrists were completely deceived. One of them wrote: "If the Eliza method proves beneficial then it would provide a therapeutic tool which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centres suffering a shortage of therapists ... several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system." Clearly, this is not a misunderstanding of the particular powers of one program, but a much larger misunderstanding of what computers are and what we are.

For Weizenbaum this raised unsettling questions about what human understanding might be. Instead of building computers which were genuinely capable of understanding the world, his colleagues had simply redefined understanding and knowledge until they were things of which computers were, in principle, capable.

We live in a world full of Eliza's grandchildren now, a race of counterfeit humans. I am not thinking of the automated systems that appear to parse the things that we say on customer service hotlines, but the humans chained to scripts whom we eventually reach, trained to react like machines to anything that is said to them.

What made Weizenbaum such an acute critic was not just that he understood computers very well and was himself a considerable programmer. He shared the enthusiasms of his enemies, but unlike them he saw the limits of enthusiasm. Perhaps because of the circumstances of his family's expulsion from Germany, he saw very clearly that the values associated with science - curiosity, determination, hard work and cleverness - were not on their own going to make us happy or good. Scientists had been complicit, sometimes enthusiastically complicit, in the Nazi war machine, and now computer programmers were making possible the weapons that threaten all life on Earth. He was an early campaigner against anti-ballistic missile systems, because they would make war more likely.

He wrote a wonderful denunciation of the early hacking culture in his book, Computer Power and Human Reason:

 "Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted ... The hacker ... has only technique, not knowledge. He has nothing he can analyze or synthesize. His skill is therefore aimless, even disembodied. It is simply not connected with anything other than the instrument on which it may be exercised. His skill is like that of a monastic copyist who, though illiterate, is a first-rate calligrapher. His grandiose projects must therefore necessarily have the quality of illusions, indeed, of illusions of grandeur. He will construct the one grand system in which all other experts will soon write their systems."

But Weizenbaum did much more than that himself even if he wrote only one long book. His book has dated very little, and nothing else I've read shows so well how a humanist may love computers without idolising them.

thewormbook.com/helmintholog

Edge ELIZA'S WORLD by JARON LANIER, Computer Scientist and Musician; Columnist, Discover Magazine

We have lost a lion of Computer Science. Joseph Weizenbaum’s life is proof that someone can be an absolute alpha-geek and a compassionate, soulful person at the same time. He displayed innovative courage in recognizing the seductive dangers of computation.

History will remember Weizenbaum as the clearest thinker about the philosophy of computation. A metaphysical confrontation dominated his interactions with the non-human centered mainstream. There were endless arguments about whether people were special in ways that cybernetic artifacts could never be. The mainstream preferred to sprinkle the magic dust of specialness on the “instruments,” as Weizenbaum put it, instead of people.

But there was a less metaphysical side of Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently applicable to the most pressing problems we all face right now. He warned that if you believe in computers too much, you lose touch with reality. That’s the real danger of the magic dust so liberally sprinkled by the mainstream. We pass this fallacy from the lab out into the world. This is what apparently happened to Wall Street traders in fomenting a series of massive financial failures. Computers can be used rather too easily to improve the efficiency with which we lie to ourselves. This is the side of Weizenbaum that I wish was better known.

We wouldn’t let a student become a professional medical researcher without learning about double blind experiments, control groups, placebos, the replication of results, and so on. Why is computer science given a unique pass that allows us to be soft on ourselves? Every computer science student should be trained in Weizenbaumian skepticism, and should try to pass that precious discipline along to the users of our inventions.

Weizenbaum’s legacy includes an unofficial minority school in computer science that has remained human-centered. A few of the other members, in my opinion, are David Gelernter, Ted Nelson, Terry Winograd, Alan Kay, and Ben Schneiderman.

Everything about computers has become associated with youth. Turing’s abstractions have been woven into a theater in which we can enjoy fantasies of eternal youth. We are fascinated by wiz kids and the latest young billionaires in Silicon Valley. We fantasize that we will be uploaded when the singularity arrives in order to become immortal, and so on. But when we look away from the stage for a moment, we realize that we computer scientists are ultimately people. We die.

The Machine That Made Us KEVIN KELLY Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum recently passed away at the age of 85. Weizenbaum invented the famous Eliza chat bot forty years ago. Amazingly this pseudo-AI still has the power to both amusing and confuse us. But later in life Weizenbaum became a critic of artificial intelligence. He was primarily concerned about the pervasive conquest of our culture by the computational metaphor — the idea that everything interesting is computation — and worried that in trying to make thinking machines, we would become machines ourselves. Weizenbaum's death has prompted a review of his ideas set out in his book "Computer Power and Human Reason".

On the Edge Nick Carr says this book "remains one of the best books ever written about computing and its human implications. It's dated in some its details, but its messages seem as relevant, and as troubling, as ever. Weizenbaum argued, essentially, that computers impose a mechanistic point of view on their users — on us — and that that perspective can all too easily crowd out other, possibly more human, perspectives." He highlights one passage worth inspecting.

The computer becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure. That is virtually a tautology. The utility of this tautology is that it can reawaken us to the possibility that some human actions, e.g., the introduction of computers into some complex human activities, may constitute an irreversible commitment. . . . The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond; its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most "progressive" elements of American government, business, and industry quickly made it a resource essential to society's survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping.

That's an elegant summary of a common worry: we are letting the Machine take over, and taking us over in the process.

Reading this worry, I was reminded of a new BBC program called "The Machine That Made Us." This video series celebrates not the computer but the other machine that made us — the printing press. It's a four part investigation into the role that printing has played in our culture. And it suggested to me that everything that Weizenbaum said about AI might be said about printing.

So I did a search-and-replace in Weizenbaum's text. I replaced "computer" with this other, older technology, "printing."

Printing becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure. That is virtually a tautology. The utility of this tautology is that it can reawaken us to the possibility that some human actions, e.g., the introduction of printing into some complex human activities, may constitute an irreversible commitment. . . . Printing was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society; its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most "progressive" elements of government, business, and industry quickly made it a resource essential to society's survival in the form that the printing itself had been instrumental in shaping.

Stated this way its clear that printing is pretty vital and foundational, and it is. I could have done the same replacement with the technologies of "writing" or "the alphabet" — both equally transformative and essential to our society.

Printing, writing, and the alphabet did in fact bend the culture to favor themselves. They also made themselves so indispensable that we cannot imagine culture and society without them. Who would deny that our culture is unrecognizable without writing? And, as Weizenbaum indicated, the new embedded technology tends to displace the former mindset. Orality is gone, and our bookish culture is often at odds with oral cultures.

Weizenbaum's chief worry seems to be that we would become dependent on this new technology, and because it has its own agenda and self-reinforcement, it will therefore change us away from ourselves (whatever that may be).

All these are true. But as this exercise makes clear, we've gone through these kind of self-augmentating transitions several times before, and I believe come out better for it. Literacy and printing has improved us, even though we left something behind.

Weizenbaum (and probably Carr) would have been one of those smart, well-meaning elder figures in ancient times preaching against the coming horrors of printing and books. They would highlight the loss or orality, and the way these new-fangled auxiliary technologies demean humanity. We have our own memories, people: use them! They would have been in good company, since even Plato lamented the same.

There may indeed be reasons to worry about AI, but the fact that AI and computers tend to be pervasive, indispensable, foundational, self-reinforcing, and irreversible are not reasons alone to worry. Rather, if the past history of printing and writing is any indication, they are reasons to celebrate. With the advent of ubiquitous computation we are about to undergo another overhaul of our identity.

[Apr 24, 2008] Eliza's world by Nicholas Carr

April 11, 2008

Reposted from the new edition of Edge:

What is the compelling urgency of the machine that it can so intrude itself into the very stuff out of which man builds his world? - Joseph Weizenbaum

Somehow I managed to miss, until just a few days ago, the news that Joseph Weizenbaum had died. He died of cancer on March 5, in his native Germany, at the age of 85. Coincidentally, I was in Germany that same day, giving a talk at the CeBIT technology show, and — strange but true — one of the books I had taken along on the trip was Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason.

Born in 1923, Weizenbaum left Germany with his family in 1936, to escape the Nazis, and came to America. After earning a degree in mathematics and working on programming some of the earliest mainframes, he spent most of his career as a professor of computer science at MIT. He became - to his chagrin - something of a celebrity in the 1960s when he wrote the Eliza software program, an early attempt at using a computer to simulate a person. Eliza was designed to mimic the conversational style of a psychotherapist, and many people who used the program found the conversations so realistic that they were convinced that Eliza had a capacity for empathy.

The reaction to Eliza startled Weizenbaum, and after much soul-searching he became, as John Markoff wrote in his New York Times obituary, a “heretic” in the computer-science world, raising uncomfortable questions about man's growing dependence on computers. Computer Power and Human Reason, published in 1976, remains one of the best books ever written about computing and its human implications. It’s dated in some its details, but its messages seem as relevant, and as troubling, as ever. Weizenbaum argued, essentially, that computers impose a mechanistic point of view on their users - on us - and that that perspective can all too easily crowd out other, possibly more human, perspectives.

The influence of computers is hard to resist and even harder to escape, wrote Weizenbaum:

The computer becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure. That is virtually a tautology. The utility of this tautology is that it can reawaken us to the possibility that some human actions, e.g., the introduction of computers into some complex human activities, may constitute an irreversible commitment. . . . The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond; its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most “progressive” elements of American government, business, and industry quickly made it a resource essential to society's survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping.

The machine’s influence shapes not only society’s structures but the more intimate structures of the self. Under the sway of the ubiquitous, “indispensable” computer, we begin to take on its characteristics, to see the world, and ourselves, in the computer’s (and its programmers’) terms. We become ever further removed from the “direct experience” of nature, from the signals sent by our senses, and ever more encased in the self-contained world delineated and mediated by technology. It is, cautioned Weizenbaum, a perilous transformation:

Science and technology are sustained by their translations into power and control. To the extent that computers and computation may be counted as part of science and technology, they feed at the same table. The extreme phenomenon of the compulsive programmer teaches us that computers have the power to sustain megalomaniac fantasies. But the power of the computer is merely an extreme version of a power that is inherent in all self-validating systems of thought. Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems — the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world — may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest. We must also learn that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally detached from authentic human experience, and particularly in those sciences that insist they can capture the whole man in their abstract skeletal frameworks.

His own invention, Eliza, revealed to Weizenbaum the ease with which we will embrace a fabricated world. He spent the rest of his life trying to warn us away from the seductions of Eliza and her many friends. The quest may have been quixotic, but there was something heroic about it too.

See other appreciations of Weizenbaum by Andrew Brown, Jaron Lanier, and Thomas Otter.

[Feb 6, 2008] Industry milestone DNS turns 25

02/06/08 | Network World

The Domain Name System turned 25 last week. 

Paul Mockapetris is credited with creating DNS 25 years ago and successfully tested the technology in June 1983, according to several sources.

The anniversary of the technology that underpins the Internet -- and prevents Web surfers from having to type a string of numbers when looking for their favorite sites -- reminds us how network managers can't afford to overlook even the smallest of details. Now in all honesty, DNS has been on my mind lately because of a recent film that used DNS and network technology in its plot, but savvy network managers have DNS on the mind daily.

DNS is often referred to as the phone book for the Internet, it matches the IP address with a name and makes sure people and devices requesting an address actually arrive at the right place. And if the servers hosting DNS are configured wrong, networks can be susceptible to downtime and attacks, such as DNS poisoning. 

And in terms of managing networks, DNS has become a critical part of many IT organization's IP address management strategies. And with voice-over-IP and wireless technologies ramping up the number of IP addresses that need to be managed, IT staff are learning they need to also ramp up their IP address management efforts. Companies such as Whirlpool are on top of IP address management projects, but industry watchers say not all IT shops have that luxury. (Learn more about IP ADDRESS MANAGEMENT products from our IP ADDRESS MANAGEMENT Buyer's Guide)

"IP address management sometimes gets pushed to the back burner because a lot of times the business doesn't see the immediate benefit -- until something goes wrong," says Larry Burton, senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates.

And the way people are doing IP address management today won't hold up under the proliferation of new devices, an update to the Internet Protocol (from IPv4 to IPv6) and the compliance requirements that demand detailed data on IP addresses.

"IP address management for a lot of IT shops today is manual and archaic. It is now how most would say to manage a critical network service," says Robert Whiteley, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. "Network teams need to fix how they approach IP address management to be considered up to date."

And those looking to overhaul their approach to IP address management might want to consider migrating how they do DNS and DHCP services as well. While the technology functions can be conducted with separate platforms -- albeit integration among them is a must -- some experts say while updating how they manage IP addresses, network managers should also take a look at their DNS and DHCP infrastructure.

"Some people think of IP address management as the straight up managing of IP addresses and others incorporate the DNS/DHCP infrastructure, says Lawrence Orans, research director at Gartner. "If you are updating how you manage IPs it's a good time to also see if how you are doing DNS and DHCP needs an update."

Low-tech Magazine Email in the 18th century

More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an aeroplane – wireless and without need for electricity.

Email leaves all other communication systems far behind in terms of speed. But the principle of the technology – forwarding coded messages over long distances – is nothing new. It has its origins in the use of plumes of smoke, fire signals and drums, thousands of years before the start of our era. Coded long distance communication also formed the basis of a remarkable but largely forgotten communications network that prepared the arrival of the internet: the optical telegraph.

(Maps and picture : Ecole Centrale de Lyon)

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Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through the telescope
at the previous tower in the chain.

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Throughout history, long distance communication was a matter of patience – lots of patience. Postmen have existed longer than humans can write, but the physical transport of spoken or written messages was always limited by the speed of the messenger. Humans or horses can maintain a speed of 5 or 6 kilometres an hour for long distances. If they walk 10 hours a day, the transmission of a message from Paris to Antwerp would take about a week.

Already in antiquity, post systems were designed that made use of the changing of postmen. In these stations, the message was transferred to another runner or rider, or the horseman could change his horse. These organised systems greatly increased the speed of the postal services. The average speed of a galloping horse is 21 kilometres an hour, which means that the distance in time between Paris and Antwerp could be shortened to a few days. A carrier pigeon was twice as fast, but less reliable. Intercontinental communication was limited to the speed of shipping.

 A chain of towers

Centuries of slow long-distance communications came to an end with the arrival of the telegraph. Most history books start this chapter with the appearance of the electrical telegraph, midway the nineteenth century. However, they skip an important intermediate step. Fifty years earlier (in 1791) the Frenchman Claude Chappe developed the optical telegraph. Thanks to this technology, messages could be transferred very quickly over long distances, without the need for postmen, horses, wires or electricity.

The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. On each of these towers a wooden semaphore and two telescopes were mounted (the telescope was invented in 1600). The semaphore had two signalling arms which each could be placed in seven positions. The wooden post itself could also be turned in 4 positions, so that 196 different positions were possible. Every one of these arrangements corresponded with a code for a letter, a number, a word or (a part of) a sentence.

1,380 kilometres an hour

Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through the telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly. In this way, messages were signed through symbol by symbol from tower to tower. The semaphore was operated by two levers. A telegrapher could reach a speed of 1 to 3 symbols per minute.

The technology today may sound a bit absurd, but in those times the optical telegraph was a genuine revolution. In a few decades, continental networks were built both in Europe and the United States. The first line was built between Paris and Lille during the French revolution, close to the frontline. It was 230 kilometres long and consisted of 15 semaphores. The very first message – a military victory over the Austrians – was transmitted in less than half an hour. The transmission of 1 symbol from Paris to Lille could happen in ten minutes, which comes down to a speed of 1,380 kilometres an hour. Faster than a modern passenger plane – this was invented only one and a half centuries later.

From Amsterdam to Venice

The technology expanded very fast. In less than 50 years time the French built a national infrastructure with more than 530 towers and a total length of almost 5,000 kilometres. Paris was connected to Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Toulon, Perpignan, Lyon, Turin, Milan and Venice. At the beginning of the 19^th century, it was possible to wirelessly transmit a short message from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour’s time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month’s time to do the same.

The system was copied on a large scale in other countries. Sweden developed a country-wide network, followed by parts of England and North America. A bit later also Spain, Germany and Russia constructed a large optical telegraph infrastructure. Most of these countries devised their own variations on the optical telegraph, using shutters instead of arms for example. Sweden developed a system that was twice as fast, Spain built a telegraph that was windproof. Later the optical telegraph was also put into action in shipping and rail traffic.

A real European network never really existed. The connection between Amsterdam and Venice existed for only a short period. When Napoleon was chased out of the Netherlands, his telegraph network was dismantled. The Spanish, on the other hand, started too late. Their nationwide network was only finished when the technology started to fall into disuse in other countries. The optical telegraph network was solely used for military and national communications, individuals did not have access to it – although it was used for transmitting winning lottery numbers and stock market data. (Map : Ecole Centrale de Lyon)

Intercontinental communication

The optical telegraph disappeared as fast as it came. This happened with the arrival of the electrical telegraph, fifty years later. The last optical line in France was stopped in 1853, in Sweden the technology was used up to 1880. The electrical telegraph was not hindered by mist, wind, heavy rainfall or low hanging clouds, and it could also be used at night. Moreover, the electrical telegraph was cheaper than the mechanical variant. Another advantage was that it was much harder to intercept a message – whoever knew the code of the optical telegraph, could decipher the message. The electrical telegraph also made intercontinental communication possible, which was impossible with the optical telegraph (unless you made a large detour via Asia.

The electrical telegraph was the main means of communication for transmitting text messages over long distances for more than 100 years. At first, electrical wires were used; later on radio waves were used to communicate. The first line was built in 1844, the first transatlantic connection was put into use in 1865. The telegraph made use of Morse code, where dots and dashes symbolize letters and numbers.

Not the telephone, nor the railroads, nor radio or television made the telegraph obsolete. The technology only died with the arrival of the fax and the computer networks in the second half of the 20^th century. Also in rail-traffic and shipping optical telegraphy was replaced by electronic variants, but in shipping the technology is still used in emergency situations (by means of flags or lamps).

Keyboard

The electrical telegraph is the immediate predecessor of e-mail and internet. Since the thirties, it was even possible to transmit images. A variant equipped with a keyboard was also developed, so that the technology could be used by people without any knowledge of Morse code. The optical as well as the electrical telegraph are both in essence the same technology as the internet and e-mail. All these means of communication make use of code language and intermediate stations to transmit information across large distances; the optical telegraph uses visual signs, the electrical telegraph dots and dashes, the internet ones and zeroes. Plumes of smoke and fire signals are also telegraphic systems – in combination with a telescope they would be as efficient as an optical telegraph.

Low-tech internet

Of course, e-mail is much more efficient than the optical telegraph. But that does not alter the fact that the low-tech predecessor of electronic mail more or less obtained the same result without wires or energy, while the internet consists of a cluster of cables and is devouring our energy resources at an ever faster pace.

© Kris De Decker (edited by Vincent Grosjean)

[Nov 10, 2007] MIT releases the sources of MULTICS, the father of UNIX! -

November 10, 2007  | Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog

This is extraordinary news for all nerds, computer scientists and the Open Source community: the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened.

Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system started in 1964 and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a "simplified" successor to MULTICS (the name "Unix" is itself a hack on "Multics"). The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000.

From now on, MULTICS can be downloaded from the following page (it's the complete MR12.5 source dumped at CGI in Calgary in 2000, including the PL/1 compiler):

http://web.mit.edu/multics-history

Unfortunately you can't install this on any PC, as MULTICS requires dedicated hardware, and there's no operational computer system today that could run this OS. Nevertheless the software should be considered to be an outstanding source for computer research and scientists. It is not yet know if it will be possible to emulate the required hardware to run the OS.

Special thanks to Tom Van Vleck for his continuous work on www.multicians.org, to the Group BULL including BULL HN Information Systems Inc. for opening the sources and making all this possible, to the folks at MIT for releasing it and to all of those who helped to convince BULL to open this great piece of computer history.

UNIX letters   Anti-Foreword by Dennis Ritchie.

Dear Mr. Ritchie,

I heard a story from a guy in a UNIX sysadmin class, and was wondering if it was true.

The guy in this class told of a co-worker of his who was in a UNIX training class that got involved in UNIX bashing. You know, like why is the -i option for grep mean ignore case, and the -f option for sort mean ignore case, and so on. Well, the instructor of the course decided to chime in and said something like this:

"Here's another good example of this problem with UNIX. Take the find command for example. WHAT idiot would program a command so that you have to say -print to print the output to the screen. What IDIOT would make a command like this and not have the output go to the screen by default."

And the instructor went on and on, and vented his spleen...

The next morning, one of the ladies in the class raised her hand, the instructor called on her, and she proceeded to say something like this:

"The reason my father programmed the find command that way, was because he was told to do so in his specifications."

I've always wondered if this story was true, and who it was who wrote the find command. In the Oct. 94 issue of Byte they had an article on "UNIX at 25" which said that Dick Haight wrote the find command along with cpio, expr, and a lot of the include files for Version 7 of UNIX. I don't know where to send this message directly to Dick Haight, and I would appreciate it if you would forward it to him, if you are able. If you can't, well then I hope you liked the story. I got your mail address from "The UNIX Haters Handbook", and would like to add this to your Anti-Forward:

Until that frozen day in HELL occurs, and the authors of that book write a better operating system, I'm sticking with UNIX.

Sincerely,

Dan Bacus
nsc@edge.ercnet.com.

From daemon Thu Feb  9 02:22 GMT 1995
Return-Path: dmr@plan9.research.att.com
Received: from plan9.research.att.com ([192.20.225.252]) by nscsgi.nscedu.com (8.6
From: dmr@plan9.research.att.com
Message-Id:  <199502090222.CAA04283@nscsgi.nscedu.com>
To: danb
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 21:20:30 EST
Subject: Re: story
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 1031
Status: RO

Thanks for the story and the note.  Dick Haight was in what was
then probably called USG, for Unix Support Group (the name changed
as they grew).  Their major role was to support the system within
AT&T, and later to turn it into a real commercial product.  He was indeed
one of the major people behind find and cpio.  This group was distinct from
the research area where the system originated, and we were somewhat put
off by the syntax of their things.  However, they were clearly quite useful,
and they were accepted.

Dick left AT&T some years ago and I think he's somewhere in South
Carolina, but I don't have an e-mail address for him.  I'm not sure what
he thinks of find and cpio today.  That group always was more concerned
with specifications and the like than we were, but I don't know enough
about their internal interactions to judge how these commands evolved.
All of your story is consistent with what I know up to the punchline,
about which I can't render an opinion!

Thanks again for your note.

       Dennis

[Sep 24, 2007] Happy Birthday, Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet) by Gary Anthes

September 24, 2007 (Computerworld)

Quick, what's the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine?

More likely, it was a 183-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik, Russian for "traveling companion." Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to orbit the Earth stunned and frightened the U.S., and the country's reaction to the "October surprise" changed computing forever.

Although Sputnik fell from orbit just three months after launch, it marked the beginning of the Space Age, and in the U.S., it produced angst bordering on hysteria. Soon, there was talk of a U.S.-Soviet "missile gap." Then on Dec. 6, 1957, a Vanguard rocket that was to have carried aloft the first U.S. satellite exploded on the launch pad. The press dubbed the Vanguard "Kaputnik," and the public demanded that something be done.

Happy Birthday, Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet) Timeline: Sputnik and Three Decades of DARPA Hegemony DARPA's Role in IT Innovations The IT Godfather Speaks: Q&A With Charles M. Herzfeld

The most immediate "something" was the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a freewheeling Pentagon office created by President Eisenhower on Feb. 7, 1958. Its mission was to "prevent technological surprises," and in those first days, it was heavily weighted toward space programs.

Speaking of surprises, it might surprise some to learn that on the list of people who have most influenced the course of IT -- people with names like von Neumann, Watson, Hopper, Amdahl, Cerf, Gates and Berners-Lee -- appears the name J.C.R. Licklider, the first director of IT research at ARPA.

Armed with a big budget, carte blanche from his bosses and an unerring ability to attract bright people, Licklider catalyzed the invention of an astonishing array of IT, from time sharing to computer graphics to microprocessors to the Internet.

J.C.R. Licklider

Indeed, although he left ARPA in 1964 and returned only briefly in 1974, it would be hard to name a major branch of IT today that Licklider did not significantly shape through ARPA funding -- all ultimately in reaction to the little Soviet satellite. 

But now, the special culture that enabled Licklider and his successors to work their magic has largely disappeared from government, many say, setting up the U.S. once again for a technological drubbing. Could there be another Sputnik? "Oh, yes," says Leonard Kleinrock, the Internet pioneer who developed the principles behind packet-switching, the basis for the Internet, while Licklider was at ARPA. "But it's not going to be a surprise this time. We all see it coming."

The ARPA Way
Licklider had studied psychology as an undergraduate, and in 1962, he brought to ARPA a passionate belief that computers could be far more user-friendly than the unconnected, batch-processing behemoths of the day. Two years earlier, he had published an influential paper, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," in which he laid out his vision for computers that could interact with users in real time. It was a radical idea, one utterly rejected by most academic and industrial researchers at the time. (See sidebar, Advanced Computing Visions from 1960.)

Driven by the idea that computers might not only converse with their users, but also with one another, Licklider set out on behalf of ARPA to find the best available research talent. He found it at companies like the RAND Corp., but mostly he found it at universities, starting first at MIT and then adding to his list Carnegie Mellon University; Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; the University of Utah; and others.

		Advanced Computing Visions from 1960 Nearly a half-century ago, a former MIT professor of psychology and electrical engineering wrote a paper -- largely forgotten today -- that anticipated by decades the emergence of computer time sharing, networks and some features that even today are at the leading edge of IT. Licklider wrote "Man-Computer Symbiosis" in 1960, at a time when computing was done by a handful of big, stand-alone batch-processing machines. In addition to predicting "networks of thinking centers," he said man-computer symbiosis would require the following advances: Indexed databases. "Implicit in the idea of man-computer symbiosis are the requirements that information be retrievable both by name and by pattern and that it be accessible through procedures much faster than serial search." Machine learning in the form of "self-organizing" programs. "Computers will in due course be able to devise and simplify their own procedures for achieving stated goals." Dynamic linking of programs and applications, or "real-time concatenation of preprogrammed segments and closed subroutines which the human operator can designate and call into action simply by name." More and better methods for input and output. "In generally available computers, there is almost no provision for any more effective, immediate man-machine communication than can be achieved with an electric typewriter." Tablet input and handwriting recognition. "It will be necessary for the man and the computer to draw graphs and pictures and to write notes and equations to each other on the same display surface." Speech recognition. "The interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a ... corporation president away from his work to teach him to type."

Licklider sought out researchers like himself: bright, farsighted and impatient with bureaucratic impediments. He established a culture and modus operandi -- and passed it on to his successors Ivan Sutherland, Robert Taylor, Larry Roberts and Bob Kahn -- that would make the agency, over the next 30 years, the most powerful engine for IT innovation in the world.

Recalls Kleinrock, "Licklider set the tone for ARPA's funding model: long-term, high-risk, high-payoff and visionary, and with program managers, that let principal investigators run with research as they saw fit." (Although Kleinrock never worked at ARPA, he played a key role in the development of the ARPAnet, and in 1969, he directed the installation of the first ARPAnet node at UCLA.)

Leonard Kleinrock

From the early 1960s, ARPA built close relationships with universities and a few companies, each doing what it did best while drawing on the accomplishments of the others. What began as a simple attempt to link the computers used by a handful of U.S. Department of Defense researchers ultimately led to the global Internet of today. 

Along the way, ARPA spawned an incredible array of supporting technologies, including time sharing, workstations, computer graphics, graphical user interfaces, very large-scale integration (VLSI) design, RISC processors and parallel computing (see DARPA's Role in IT Innovations). There were four ingredients in this recipe for success: generous funding, brilliant people, freedom from red tape and the occasional ascent to the bully pulpit by ARPA managers.

These individual technologies had a way of cross-fertilizing and combining over time in ways probably not foreseen even by ARPA managers. What would become the Sun Microsystems Inc. workstation, for example, owes its origins rather directly to a half-dozen major technologies developed at multiple universities and companies, all funded by ARPA. (See Timeline: Three Decades of DARPA Hegemony.)

Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, offers this story from the 1970s and early 1980s, when Kahn was a DARPA program manager, then director of its Information Processing Techniques Office:

What Kahn did was absolutely remarkable. He supported the DARPA VLSI program, which funded the [Carver] Mead-[Lynn] Conway integrated circuit design methodology. Then he funded the SUN workstation at Stanford because Forest Baskett needed a high-
resolution, bitmapped workstation for doing VLSI design, and his grad student, Andy Bechtolsheim, had an idea for a new frame buffer.

Meanwhile, [Kahn] funded Berkeley to do Berkeley Unix. He wanted to turn Unix into a common platform for all his researchers so they could share results more easily, and he also saw it as a Trojan horse to drive the adoption of TCP/IP. That was at a time when every company had its own networking protocol -- IBM with SNA, DEC with DECnet, the Europeans with X.25 -- all brain-dead protocols.

Bob Kahn

One thing Kahn required in Berkeley Unix was that it have a great implementation of TCP/IP. So he went to Baskett and Bechtolsheim and said, "By the way, boys, you need to run Berkeley Unix on this thing." Meanwhile, Jim Clark was a faculty member at Stanford, and he looked at what Baskett was doing with the VLSI program and realized he could take the entire rack of chips that were Baskett's graphics processor and reduce them to a single board. That's where Silicon Graphics came from.

All this stuff happened because one brilliant guy, Bob Kahn, cherry-picked a bunch of phenomenal researchers -- Clark, Baskett, Mead, Conway, [Bill] Joy -- and headed them off in complimentary directions and cross-fertilized their work. It's just utterly remarkable.

 

		Surprise? The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik shocked the world and became known as the "October surprise." But was it really? Paul Green     Paul Green was working at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in 1957 as a communications researcher. He had learned Russian and was invited to give talks to the Popov Society, a group of Soviet technology professionals. "So I knew Russian scientists," Green recalls. "In particular, I knew this big-shot academician named [Vladimir] Kotelnikov." In the summer of 1957, Green told Computerworld, a coterie of Soviet scientists, including Kotelnikov, attended a meeting of the International Scientific Radio Union in Boulder, Colo. Says Green, "At the meeting, Kotelnikov -- who, it turned out later, was involved with Sputnik -- just mentioned casually, 'Yeah, we are about to launch a satellite.'" "It didn't register much because the Russians were given to braggadocio. And we didn't realize what that might mean -- that if you could launch a satellite in those days, you must have a giant missile and all kinds of capabilities that were scary. It sort of went in one ear and out the other." And did he tell anyone in Washington? "None of us even mentioned it in our trip reports," he says.

DARPA Today
But around 2000, Kleinrock and other top-shelf technology researchers say, the agency, now called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), began to focus more on pragmatic, military objectives. A new administration was in power in Washington, and then 9/11 changed priorities everywhere. Observers say DARPA shifted much of its funding from long-range to shorter-term research, from universities to military contractors, and from unclassified work to secret programs.

Of government funding for IT, Kleinrock says, "our researchers are now being channeled into small science, small and incremental goals, short-term focus and small funding levels." The result, critics say, is that DARPA is much less likely today to spawn the kinds of revolutionary advances in IT that came from Licklider and his successors.

DARPA officials declined to be interviewed for this story. But Jan Walker, a spokesperson for DARPA Director Anthony Tether, said, "Dr. Tether ... does not agree. DARPA has not pulled back from long-term, high-risk, high-payoff research in IT or turned more to short-term projects." (See sidebar, DARPA's Response.)

A Shot in the Rear

David Farber, now a professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, was a young researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories when Sputnik went up.

"We people in technology had a firm belief that we were leaders in science, and suddenly we got trumped," he recalls. "That was deeply disturbing. The Russians were considerably better than we thought they were, so what other fields were they good in?"

David Farber

Farber says U.S. university science programs back then were weak and out of date, but higher education soon got a "shot in the rear end" via Eisenhower's ARPA. "It provided a jolt of funding," he says. "There's nothing to move academics like funding."

Farber says U.S. universities are no longer weak in science, but they are again suffering from lack of funds for long-range research.

"In the early years, ARPA was willing to fund things like artificial intelligence -- take five years and see what happens," he says. "Nobody cared whether you delivered something in six months. It was, 'Go and put forth your best effort and see if you can budge the field.' Now that's changed. It's more driven by, 'What did you do for us this year?'"

DARPA's budget calls for it to spend $414 million this year on information, communications and computing technologies, plus $483 million more on electronics, including things such as semiconductors. From 2001 to 2004, the percentage going to universities has shrunk from 39% to 21%, according the Senate Armed Services Committee. The beneficiaries have been defense contractors.

Victor Zue

Meanwhile, funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for computer science and engineering -- most of it for universities -- has increased from $478 million in 2001 to $709 million this year, up 48%. But the NSF tends to fund smaller, more-focused efforts. And because contract awards are based on peer review, bidders on NSF jobs are inhibited from taking the kinds of chances that Licklider would have favored. 

"At NSF, people look at your proposal and assign a grade, and if you are an outlier, chances are you won't get funded," says Victor Zue, who directs MIT's 900-person Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the direct descendent of MIT's Project MAC, which was started with a $2 million ARPA grant in 1963.

"At DARPA, at least in the old days, they tended to fund people, and the program managers had tremendous latitude to say, 'I'm just going to bet on this.' At NSF, you don't bet on something."

		DARPA's Response "We are confident that anyone who attended DARPATech [in Aug. 2007] and heard the speeches given by DARPA's [managers] clearly understands that DARPA continues to be interested in high-risk, high-payoff research," says DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker. Walker offers the following projects as examples of DARPA's current research efforts: Computing systems able to assimilate knowledge by being immersed in a situation Universal [language] translation Realistic agent-based societal simulation environments Networks that design themselves and collaborate with application services to jointly optimize performance Self-forming information infrastructures that automatically organize services and applications Routing protocols that allow computers to choose the best path for traffic, and new methods for route discovery for wide area networks Devices to interconnect an optically switched backbone with metropolitan-level IP networks Photonic communications in a microprocessor having a theoretical maximum performance of 10 TFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second)

 

Farber sits on a computer science advisory board at the NSF, and he says he has been urging the agency to "take a much more aggressive role in high-risk research." He explains, "Right now, the mechanisms guarantee that low-risk research gets funded. It's always, 'How do you know you can do that when you haven't done it?' A program manager is going to tell you, 'Look, a year from now, I have to write a report that says what this contributed to the country. I can't take a chance that it's not going to contribute to the country.' "

A report by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, released Sept. 10, indicates that at least some in the White House agree. In "Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World," John H. Marburger, science advisor to the president, said, "The report highlights in particular the need to ... rebalance the federal networking and IT research and development portfolio to emphasize more large-scale, long-term, multidisciplinary activities and visionary, high-payoff goals."

Still, turning the clock back would not be easy, says Charles Herzfeld, who was ARPA director in the mid-1960s. The freewheeling behavior of the agency in those days might not even be legal today, he adds. (See The IT Godfather Speaks: Q&A With Charles M. Herzfeld.)

No Help From Industry
The U.S. has become the world's leader in IT because of the country's unique combination of government funding, university research, and industrial research and development, says the University of Washington's Lazowska. But just as the government has turned away from long-range research, so has industry, he says.

According to the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy at the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. industry spent more on tort litigation than on research and development in 2001, the last year for which figures are available. And more than 95% of that R&D is engineering or development, not long-range research, Lazowska says.

Ed Lazowska

"It's not looking out more than one product cycle; it's building the next release of the product," he says. "The question is, where do the ideas come from that allow you to do that five years from now? A lot of it has come from federally funded university research."

A great deal of fundamental research in IT used to take place at IBM, AT&T Inc. and Xerox Corp., but that has been cut way back, Lazowska says. "And of the new companies -- those created over the past 30 years -- only Microsoft is making significant investments that look out more than one product cycle."

Lazowska isn't expecting another event like Sputnik. "But I do think we are likely to wake up one day and find that China and India are producing far more highly qualified engineers than we are. Their educational systems are improving unbelievably quickly."

Farber also worries about those countries. His "Sputnik" vision is to "wake up and find that all our critical resources are now supplied by people who may not always be friendly." He recalls the book, The Japan That Can Say No (Simon & Schuster), which sent a Sputnik-like chill through the U.S. when it was published in 1991 by suggesting that Japan would one day outstrip the U.S. in technological prowess and thus exert economic hegemony over it.

"Japan could never pull that off because their internal markets aren't big enough, but a China that could say no or an India that could say no could be real," Farber says.

The U.S. has already fallen behind in communications, Farber says. "In computer science, we are right at the tender edge, although I do think we still have leadership there."

		Science and Technology Funding by the U.S. Department of Defense (in millions)   Account FY 2006 Level FY 2007 Estimate FY 2008 Request $ Change FY 07 vs. FY 08 % Change FY 07 vs. FY 08 Total Basic Research $1,457 $1,563 $1,428 -$135 -8.6% Total Applied Research $4,948 $5,329 $4,357 -$972 -18% Total Advanced Technology Development $6,866 $6,432 $4,987 -$1,445 -22.4% Total Science and Technology $13,272 $13,325 $10,772 -$2,553 -19% Source: The Computing Research Association

Some of the cutbacks in DARPA funding at universities are welcome, says MIT's Zue. "Our reliance on government funding is nowhere near what it was in 1963. In a way, that's healthy, because when a discipline matures, the people who benefit from it ought to begin paying the freight."

"But," Zue adds, "it's sad to see DARPA changing its priorities so that we can no longer rely on it to do the big things."

Related News:

• A Peek Inside Darpa
• An out of this world IT job: Mars rover driver
• NASA, Google bring more of the moon to Earth
• Image Gallery: Mars rovers return to exploration

Gary Anthes is a Computerworld national correspondent.

[Apr 5, 2007]  AlanTuring.net The Turing Archive for the History of Computing

Largest web collection of digital facsimiles of original documents by
Turing and other pioneers of computing. Plus articles about
Turing and his work, including Artificial Intelligence.

NEW Recently declassified previously top-secret documents about codebreaking.

[Apr 5, 2007] Proceedings of Symposium Computer in Europe.1998

Pretty unique and little known material

• Wilkes Mauris Early Digital Computer Developments in England
• Wilkes Maurice Cmos Workstations and Servers-How Far Can Evolution and Innovation Take Us?
• Richards B.The Manchester Mark 1: The Turing-Richards Era
• Aris John. Inventing Systems Engineering
• Land Frank The First Business Computer a Case Study in User-Driven Innovation
• Janouch Frantishek Breaking Information Barriers (Personal Computers and the East-European Dissent [1984-1990])
• Trogemann Georg, Nitussov Alexander, Ernst Wolfgang The joint project ARIFMOMETR an archaeology of computing in the USSR
• Avgerou Chrisanthi Institutional and Cognitive Features of the Academic Field of Information Systems in Europe
• Samet P. The Evolution of Computer Science Teaching and Research the UK
• Coopey Richard. Technology Gaps and National Champions: The Computer Industry and Government Policy in Post-War Britain
• Wilson John F. Scientists, Engineers and Market Forces: A Study of Ferranti and Computers, 1949-1993
• P.-E. Mounier-Kuhn History of Computing in France: A Brief Sketch

[Apr 5, 2007] Andrei P. Ershov, Aesthetics and the human factor in programming, Communications of the ACM, v.15 n.7, p.501-505, July 1972

In 1988 the charitable Ershov's Fund was founded. The main aim of the Fund was development of informatics in forms of invention, creation, art and education activity.)

• Academician A. Ershov's archive Documents (raw images of the ACM article)

[Mar 20, 2007] Fortran creator John Backus dies  by Brian Bergstein

First FORTRAN compilers have pretty sophisticated optimization algorithms and generally much of compiler optimization research was done for Fortran compliers.  More information can be found at  The History of the Development of Programming Languages

March 20, 2007 (MSNBC.com)

John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.

Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., according to IBM Corp., where he spent his career.

Prior to Fortran, computers had to be meticulously "hand-coded" — programmed in the raw strings of digits that triggered actions inside the machine. Fortran was a "high-level" programming language because it abstracted that work — it let programmers enter commands in a more intuitive system, which the computer would translate into machine code on its own.

The breakthrough earned Backus the 1977 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the industry's highest accolades. The citation praised Backus' "profound, influential, and lasting contributions."

Backus also won a National Medal of Science in 1975 and got the 1993 Charles Stark Draper Prize, the top honor from the National Academy of Engineering.

"Much of my work has come from being lazy," Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979. "I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."

John Warner Backus was born in Wilmington, Del., in 1924. His father was a chemist who became a stockbroker. Backus had what he would later describe as a "checkered educational career" in prep school and the University of Virginia, which he left after six months. After being drafted into the Army, Backus studied medicine but dropped it when he found radio engineering more compelling.

Backus finally found his calling in math, and he pursued a master's degree at Columbia University in New York. Shortly before graduating, Backus toured the IBM offices in midtown Manhattan and came across the company's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, an early computer stuffed with 13,000 vacuum tubes. Backus met one of the machine's inventors, Rex Seeber — who "gave me a little homemade test and hired me on the spot," Backus recalled in 1979.

Backus' early work at IBM included computing lunar positions on the balky, bulky computers that were state of the art in the 1950s. But he tired of hand-coding the hardware, and in 1954 he got his bosses to let him assemble a team that could design an easier system.

The result, Fortran, short for Formula Translation, reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20.

It showed skeptics that machines could run just as efficiently without hand-coding. A wide range of programming languages and software approaches proliferated, although Fortran also evolved over the years and remains in use.

Backus remained with IBM until his retirement in 1991. Among his other important contributions was a method for describing the particular grammar of computer languages. The system is known as Backus-Naur Form.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[Dec 15, 2006]  Ralph Griswold died Lambda the Ultimate

Ralph Griswold, the creator of Snobol and Icon programming languages, died in October 2006 of cancer.  Until recently Computer Science was a discipline where the founders were still around. That’s changing. Griswold was an important pioneer of programming language design with Snobol sting manipulation facilities different and somewhat faster then regular expressions.

Ralph Griswold died two weeks ago. He created several programming languages, most notably Snobol (in the 60s) and Icon (in the 70s) — both outstandingly innovative, integral, and efficacious in their areas. Despite the abundance of scripting and other languages today, Snobol and Icon are still unsurpassed in many respects, both as elegance of design and as practicality.

Ralph Griswold

See also Ralph Griswold 1934-2006 and Griswold Memorial Endowment

Ralph E. Griswold died in Tucson on October 4, 2006, of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was Regents Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona.

Griswold was born in Modesto, California, in 1934. He was an award winner in the 1952 Westinghouse National Science Talent Search and went on to attend Stanford University, culminating in a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1962.

Griswold joined the staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, and rose to become head of Programming Research and Development. In 1971, he came to the University of Arizona to found the Department of Computer Science, and he served as department head through 1981. His insistence on high standards brought the department recognition and respect. In recognition of his work the university granted him the breastle of Regents Professor in 1990.

While at Bell Labs, Griswold led the design and implementation of the groundbreaking SNOBOL4 programming language with its emphasis on string manipulation and high-level data structures. At Arizona, he developed the Icon programming language, a high-level language whose influence can be seen in Python and other recent languages.

Griswold authored numerous books and articles about computer science. After retiring in 1997, his interests turned to weaving. While researching mathematical aspects of weaving design he collected and digitized a large library of weaving documents and maintained a public website. He published technical monographs and weaving designs that inspired the work of others, and he remained active until his final week.

-----Gregg Townsend Staff Scientist The University of Arizona

[Mar 3, 2006] ACM Press Release, March 01, 2006

BTW John Backus  authored of extremely speculative 1977 ACM Turing award Lecture "Can Programming be liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and its Algebra of Programs". It can be found here. As E.W.Dijkstra noted "The article is a progress report on a valid research effort but suffers badly from aggressive overselling of its significance. This is the more regrettable as it has been published by way of Turing Award Lecture."

From Slashdot: "It's interesting that Peter Naur is being recognized 40 years later, when another Algol team member, Alan Perlis, received the first Turing Award in 1966. Here's a photo of Perlis, Naur and the other Algol 1960 conference participants. [tugurium.com] ".

Some contributions of Algol60 (Score:2, Informative)
by Marc Rochkind (775756) on Saturday March 04, @04:39PM (#14851091)
(http://mudbag.com/)
 

1. The Report on the language used a formal syntax specification, one of the first, if not the first, to do so. Semantics were specified with prose, however.
2. There was a distinction between the publication language and the implementation language (those probably aren't the right terms). Among other things, it got around differences such as whether to use decimal points or commas in numeric constants.
3. Designed by a committee, rather than a private company or government agency.
4. Archetype of the so-called "Algol-like languages," examples of which are (were?) Pascal, PL./I, Algol68, Ada, C, and Java. (The term Algol-like languages is hardly used any more, since we have few examples of contemporary non-Algol-like languages.)

However, as someone who actually programmed in it (on a Univac 1108 in 1972 or 1973), I can say that Algol60 was extremely difficult to use for anything real, since it lacked string processing, data structures, adequate control flow constructs, and separate compilation. (Or so I recall... it's been a while since I've read the Report.)

Backus Normal Form vs. Backus Naur Form

The following exchange comes from a transcript given at the 1978 conference which the book documents:

CHEATHAM: The next question is from Bernie Galler of the University of Michigan, and he asks: "BNF is sometimes pronounced Backus-Naur-Form and sometimes Backus-Normal- Form. What was the original intention?

NAUR: I don't know where BNF came from in the first place. I don't know -- surely BNF originally meant Backus Normal Form. I don't know who suggested it. Perhaps Ingerman. [This is denied by Peter Z. Ingerman.] I don't know.

CHEATHAM: It was a suggestion that Peter Ingerman proposed then?

NAUR: ... Then the suggestion to change that I think was made by Don Knuth in a letter to the Communications of the ACM, and the justification -- well, he has the justification there. I think I made reference to it, so there you'll find whatever justification was originally made. That's all I would like to say.

About BNF notation

BNF is an acronym for "Backus Naur Form". John Backus and Peter Naur introduced for the first time a formal notation to describe the syntax of a given language (This was for the description of the ALGOL 60 programming language, see [Naur 60]). To be precise, most of BNF was introduced by Backus in a report presented at an earlier UNESCO conference on ALGOL 58.

Few read the report, but when Peter Naur read it he was surprised at some of the differences he found between his and Backus's interpretation of ALGOL 58. He decided that for the successor to ALGOL, all participants of the first design had come to recognize some weaknesses, should be given in a similar form so that all participants should be aware of what they were agreeing to. He made a few modificiations that are almost universally used and drew up on his own the BNF for ALGOL 60 at the meeting where it was designed. Depending on how you attribute presenting it to the world, it was either by Backus in 59 or Naur in 60.

(For more details on this period of programming languages history, see the introduction to Backus's Turing award article in Communications of the ACM, Vol. 21, No. 8, august 1978. This note was suggested by William B. Clodius from Los Alamos Natl. Lab).

[Jan 12, 2007] Jeff Raikes interview -- the whole thing from ..By Jack Schofield

December 14, 2006 (Guardian Unlimited)

This week's interview, in the printed Guardian Technology section, is with Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, and "a member of the company's Senior Leadership Team" with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Obviously we don't have room to print more than 3,000 words, even if you have time to read it. However, if you do want more, what follows is an almost complete transcript. You don't often get Microsoft's most senior guys one-on-one, and they are rarely as forthcoming as Raikes was this time....
For searches: the topics covered include Office Genuine Advantage (piracy), the Office 2007 user interface (the ribbon), SharePoint Server, hosted Office and online applications, the new XML file formats, and the Office bundles....

To set the scene, it's around 8.20am at the QEII Conference Centre in London, where Microsoft is holding a conference for software partners. I'm setting up my tape, and one of the PRs is getting us cups of coffee. I'm telling Raikes that I used to run VisiCalc on an Apple II, so I remember he joined Microsoft from Apple in 1981. "Unlike most of the people I talk to nowadays, you've been in this business longer than I have!"
 
Jeff Raikes: [Laughs] I started on VisiCalc in June of 1980, I actually worked for Atari briefly, when I was finishing up college. I ended up spending more in the company store than I made in income, so it's probably a good thing I moved on. Atari at that time was owned by Warner, so you could buy all the music albums for like a dollar, and games machines for all my friends.
 
Jack Schofield: Before we get going, did you write the Gates memo?
JR: Which memo are you referring to?
 
JS: The 1985 memo that Bill Gates sent to Apple, saying "you ought to license Mac OS to make it an industry standard." (http://www.scripting.com/specials/gatesLetter/text.html)
JR: I did. It's funny, there's a great irony in that memo, in that I was absolutely sincere in wanting the Macintosh to succeed, because that was the heart of our applications business at the time. And Apple somehow decided it was a devious plot and that I wa