Computing History

May you Go To a better place if such a place is

The recent comment "Dijkstra" is from the famous maven of applied structured programming Edward Yourdon. Although this is "not verified," the style, courtesy and literacy are the Yourdon I knew. For all you young kids, Ed Yourdon formed a company in the 1970s to teach the structured techniques in a real programming language after Mr. F. T. Baker of IBM found that their consistent use in PL/I had created an on-time, effective system (still in use) at the New York Times for journalistic information recording and tracking.

A review of The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt. Leavitt's biography regales readers with back story, including idiosyncrasies and horror stories associated not only with Turing, but some of his contemporaries.

Dr. Naur was instrumental in establishing software engineering as a discipline. He made pioneering contributions to methodologies for writing correct programs through his work on assertions that enable programmers to state their assumptions, and on structured programming.

My review of What the Dormouse Said can be found here on Amazon.

My first real program was a vulgar version of the Mad Libs game. Luckily our teacher never figured out who wrote it and put it on all the 5.25" floppies stored in the supply cabinet with the filename PLAYMENOW, or I surely would have been kicked out of school.

I worked in Silicon Valley during its glory days, but today it's kinda sad. The home prices are outa sight but the job base is struggling to recover. There has been some improvement in the past year because OFFSHORING CREATES JOBS (dammit) but there still seems to be a lot of unused office space, etc.

I went to the Computer Museum in Mountain View, near the sweet-smelling salt flats in the old Silicon Graphics building. They have a super collection of Old Stuff.

Highlights, for me, include TWO 1401 mainframes (this an IBM midrange introduced in 1959 on which I learned machine and assembler programming in the early 1970s).

This is pretty cool:

   http://www.levenez.com/lang/

Click on the miniaturized chart, scroll all the way to the right, and follow the lines backward from what you're programming in now.

From 1987 to 1992, I was a programmer at Princeton University and during that time met several Remarkable men and women.

The most noteworthy encounter was in 1991, when John Nash was brought to my office and I discovered a bug in the old Microsoft C compiler on John's behalf: he'd (correctly according to the standard) used 2^31-1 as a limit value but the Microsoft compiler had failed to evaluate the 2^31 value correctly (it was itself using Long precision).

I've been thinking this afternoon about the photo posted today that turned out to be a hoax, and in particular about my own readiness to believe that the photo was real and depicted what the caption describes. When I first saw the photo and read the caption, I swallowed the hook like a hungry fish going after a plastic worm. Berrydoo gets credit for at least being skeptical enough to preface his post with "I'm not sure if this is legitimate, but...".

So I've been thinking about how I was so easily conned. (Not that I'm suggesting that the person who made this photo had anything more in mind than a good joke.) One thing that I've learned about confidence games is that it's much harder to con a stupid person than it is to con a smart person.