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Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

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Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#21

Post by Animats »

tyingq wrote: post #13
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a lot of CS history are only relevant in a larger/humanities context. In terms of absolute technical value, the historical contributions are not necessarily as valuable. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica has next to no practical use in modern day software engineering. Their existence helped induce Church and Turing to create modern computer science theory but the discrete mathematics in that book…

I had the impression that there was a fair amount of CS history that only shined much later when CPU, IO, memory, etc, was big enough or fast enough for it to become practical. Edit: Meaning there are pretty straightforward reasons to care about history.

You can definitely come up with ideas that are too early for the hardware. When I was doing proof of correctness work in the early 1980s, it took 45 minutes to run something that now runs in a second. I had a nice ragdoll physics system in the late 1990s, and on a 100 MIPS machine it was about a quarter of real time speed. Now games have ragdolls. Around 1970, I was working on 3D graphics with hidden surface elimination. I had it working, but I had to monopolize a million dollar UNIVAC mainframe in the middle of the night to do it at 2 FPS. Usually I just ran batch jobs and used a pen plotter. Asked to figure out a way to create drawings of parts from tool paths, I thought of what are now called octrees, figured out how memory would be needed, knew I had 64K of 36 bit words, and abandoned that approach. At a million dollars a megabyte, it was unaffordable. TCP was at one time considered too much compute for PC-sized machines. This produced a decade of now-forgotten "PC LAN" systems.

Some ideas just need a big engine.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#22

Post by [deleted] »

aidenn0 wrote: post #12
jonathankoren wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we wouldn’t. Source code is notoriously hard to read if you’re not familiar with it, and optimized source code using internal APIs is even harder. If you’re learning an algorithm, just stick to pseudocode, otherwise youre stuck with MMIX bullshit.

I mean Joyce is notoriously hard to read, no?

[deleted]

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#23

Post by wernercd »

blt wrote: post #10

As a computer science graduate student, I am always surprised by how rarely my peers seem to know or care about the history of our field. I doubt many of them would write papers about computer science history even if the incentives were better. I think it is somehow related to the power of computer science to change the human condition. Everyone is thinking about the future. Mathematicians also crave novelty, but I d…

I like history but how is history going to get me a functional game released or land a job interview?

I don't need to know about DARPA to create a wordpress page or a C# Windows Service...

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#24

Post by svat »

To be clear about the "(2014)", although Knuth gave this talk in 2014, this transcript of the talk is from the upcoming (February 2021) issue of Communications of the ACM.

The whole sequence of articles/talks is interesting:

- (2007, Martin Campbell-Kelly), "The History of the History of Software" (DOI: 10.1109/MAHC.2007.4407444 ) — the trigger for what follows.

- (2014, Donald Knuth): "Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science". Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAXdDEQveKw Transcript: this submission (As mentioned, there was also a 2009 talk at Greenwich of which I can only find a 6-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKUg0V7pt8o)

- (2014, Martin Campbell-Kelly): "Knuth and the Spectrum of History": https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6880249 (click on PDF)

- (2015, Thomas Haigh): "The Tears of Donald Knuth": https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181633-the-tears-of-do...

The short version is that over the years, in all "history of X" fields other than history of mathematics, the proportion of papers with technical content—exactly what ideas did people come up with, and how, etc—has decreased, while historians have taken a turn towards broader social commentary. In this talk, Knuth explains why he finds this unfortunate and what value practitioners can get from history. (He also ends with examples of this kind of history waiting to be written.) In his reply, Haigh points out that if computer scientists want such history they'll have to write and fund such writing; historians as a field won't do it.

(Someone in the YouTube comments points out that military history is like this: there exist military historians writing technical history about things like the "terrain, weapon systems, tactics, strategy, etc", funded by the military, because members of the profession do care about this. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be much the case in computer science.)

BTW, here are a couple of papers that Knuth wrote himself, which I would guess is the kind of historical writing he'd like to read (rich in technical detail):

- Von Neumann's First Computer Program (1970): https://fermatslibrary.com/s/von-neumanns-first-computer-pro...

- Ancient Babylonian algorithms (1972): http://www.realtechsupport.org/UB/NP/Numeracy_BabylonianAlgo...

- The Early Development of Programming Languages (1976): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25717306

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#26

Post by jonathankoren »

aidenn0 wrote: post #12
jonathankoren wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we wouldn’t. Source code is notoriously hard to read if you’re not familiar with it, and optimized source code using internal APIs is even harder. If you’re learning an algorithm, just stick to pseudocode, otherwise youre stuck with MMIX bullshit.

I mean Joyce is notoriously hard to read, no?

While there is only one Joyce, please tell me how build 627252 of Windows 3.11 glonkglonk.cpp is a unique example that provides more insight into a heap, than five lines of pseudocode.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#27

Post by mikewarot »

Unlike Medicine, many of the ideas that we had in the past were better than the commonly accepted way things are done now.

Capability based security, for example was something that allowed you to run any program, with no danger to your system. It's not part of any common OS. They had it at Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs chose not to take that part.

On the other hand, the PARC focus on replicating paper was a step backwards from work by Engelbart and others.

The limitation of a single desktop was put in place to allow children to ease into the desktop metaphor... it wasn't meant for adults to be stuck with the training wheels on.

I've been digging back, looking for the ideas we missed... and boy, there are some really powerful tools waiting to be reified in a modern context.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#28

Post by herodoturtle »

Ice_cream_suit wrote: post #17

In most active and growing fields ( medicine is one example ), the history of the field is generally ignored by students and practitioners. There are a few pleasant exceptions. For instance, Neurology Minute have had occassional bits on the history of neurology. See https://neurologyminute.libsyn.com/ However, when reading something historical ( for instance this interesting podcast on the history of the Inverted Bra…

Funny you should mention Neurology in this context - my experience in South Africa has been the same.

South Africa is renowned for grooming some of the world's best doctors (as subjective as this sounds, it is largely owed to the relentless influx of patients in state hospitals and the inevitable hands-on experience that follows).

So practically speaking, you have some very young yet very experienced doctors emerging from the assorted residency programmes and specialisations.

And yet the history is largely overlooked - which is mostly a function of "not enough time to learn this as well" - and I know this because I was fortunate enough to collaborate with a very old and respected Neurologist in Pretoria who has made it his personal mission to collate all the historical tidbits on his field, so that he can pass it on to the next generation.

He has subsequently prepared a rather extensive 2,000+ page archive on the history of Neurology (all manually typed up in his old Word installation), and I'm helping him transpose it onto a an easily searchable website so that his work can live on.

Anyhow your comment reminded me of this, thought I'd share :)

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#29

Post by Animats »

blt wrote: post #10

As a computer science graduate student, I am always surprised by how rarely my peers seem to know or care about the history of our field. I doubt many of them would write papers about computer science history even if the incentives were better. I think it is somehow related to the power of computer science to change the human condition. Everyone is thinking about the future. Mathematicians also crave novelty, but I d…

Suggested reading. This will take some searching.

- "As We May Think"

- Von Neumann's report on the EDVAC.

- The invention of index registers, originally called the "B Box". (The "A Box" being the main arithmetic unit.) Von Neumann missed that one.

- The original 19 page definition of ALGOL-60.

- HAKMEM, from MIT.

- A description of the SAGE air defense system.

- Something that describes how the Burroughs 5500, a very early stack machine, works.

- Something that describes how the IBM 1401 works. At one time, there were "business computers", all decimal, and they were very strange machines.

- Djykstra's original P and V paper.

- Wirth's Pascal manual, the one with the compiler listing

- The Bell System Technical Journal issue that describes UNIX.

- Jim Blinn's "A trip down the graphics pipeline", for the basics of classical computer graphics.

Re: Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)

#30

Post by Animats »

mikewarot wrote: post #27

Unlike Medicine, many of the ideas that we had in the past were better than the commonly accepted way things are done now. Capability based security, for example was something that allowed you to run any program, with no danger to your system. It's not part of any common OS. They had it at Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs chose not to take that part. On the other hand, the PARC focus on replicating paper was a step backwar…

Capability based security, for example was something that allowed you to run any program, with no danger to your system. It's not part of any common OS.

I know, I know. Norm Hardy was really good, his system, KeyCos, worked, and few could understand him. I used to know his "explainer", Susan Rajunas. We don't even have proper "rings of protection", like Multics, any more.

Although the real problem today is that we need to run programs with less authority than the user running them, and we still lack a good conceptual model for doing that. "Allow write to SD card" is far, far too powerful a privilege to grant.

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