What have you done today that was altruistic, creative, or educational?
Young Robinett happily took a junker car he got at 16 apart and rebuilt it again and again, starting up the engine each time he added a piece just to see what happened.
Incessant vibration was thought to be a major factor in pilot fatigue. B-17 pilots were returning from their missions over Germany in such a state of exhaustion they could barely land safely.
Norbert Wiener was the single most influential figure at MIT, especially when it came to generating new ideas in unexpected places. He didn’t just cross disciplinary boundaries, he never even noticed their existence.
Wiener had a working knowledge of thirteen languages.
When Turing’s bicycle chain developed a habit of falling off after a certain number of revolutions, he didn’t get it fixed; he simply kept count of the revolutions and got off the bike in time to readjust the chain by hand.
How a thermostat works: whenever the surrounding room gets too cold, a strip of metal bends, closes a contact, and turns the furnace on; when the room arms up again, the strip straightens out, releases the contact, and cuts the furnace off
The stored program idea (which now ranks as one of the great ideas of the computer age) was under patent dispute. Army attorneys eventually threw out all claims and it remained public domain.
Metaphorically, at least, this abstraction is probably about as close as science and technology have ever come to the pagan notion of animation, spirit, enchantment. It is certainly a big part of what gives computers their emotional clout.
Von Neumann’s enthusiasm for computers probably did as much as any other single thing to make computing respective.
Information was the concept that promised to make the mind and brain comprehensible. It was the origin of cognitive science which is our modern view of the brain as an organ designed to acquire, communicate, and transmute information.
Lincoln Lab research found that the digital signals that came through the telephone were hopelessly corrupted by noise and frequency shifts. The problem was that phone lines were analog. In frustration they developed a desk-sized box that would take digital bits on one end, modulate them into something the analog connections could handle, then fire them down the line. An identical box on the other end would demodulate the signal and retrieve the bits unscathed. They called this the modulator-demodulator aka modem.
The visionaries in the product planning department couldn’t see a significant market for computers and wanted to put the company’s resources where the real money was: developing better punch-card tabulators.
It became clear the air defense software was going to need something like 2000 programmers.
In the early 1950s, there were probably no more than a few thousand programmers on the whole country.
IBM had quickly been able to overcome its late start in computers and achieve near-hegemony in the field because many corporations and agencies had already invested heavily in IBM office equipment and it’s salesforce was already in place.
“any student from grade school through graduate school who doesn’t get two hours a day at the console will be considered intellectually deprived.”
John McCarthy was the founder of artificial intelligence, Lisp, and time-sharing computers.
You couldn’t divide the CPU, but you could let the CPU skip from one user’s memory area to the next user’s in a sequence, executing a few steps as it went. Even the slowest computers are very fast on human time scale, users wouldn’t notice the gaps. This is time-sharing.
The Internet can sort of be thought of as the evolution of time-sharing
Engelbart had to wait years to work on his vision of computing. In the meantime, he got 10s of patents.
Engelbart says Lick was the first person to believe (and fund) him
Nowadays, the amount of involvement Lick had in the MIT project, telling them what he wanted to see, would be illegal
Lick’s memo to the Intergalactic Network would become the direct inspiration for the ARPANET, which would eventually evolve into today’s internet.
It’s interesting how impactful multiple of these 6-8 week summer study programs were to the entire history of computing.
What beings as a convenience quickly becomes a necessity
Time sharing had made exchanging software trivia: you just stored one copy in the public repository and thereby effectively gave it to the world. “Immediately people began to document their programs and to think them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other’s work”
Neural nets were devised in 1956.
Once email was there, the process that had started in the 1960# with the PI meetings and graduate student meetings suddenly accelerated enormously. Because of ARPANET and email the ARPA community was rapidly transformed into a community in fact as well as in name
Hewlett and Packard’s first big customer was Walt Disney, who bought 8 of their audio oscillators for use on Fantasia
By 1967, Fairchild had 12k employees and revenues of $130M per year
Moore’s law had begun to take hold in earnest, and the staffers at PARC had begun to feel it in their bones: almost any hardware thru could imagine would he affordable in surprisingly short order. And if they could imagine a cheap, ultra-high-powered minicomputers serving a handful of users, then why not a cheap, ultra-high-powered minicomputer serving one user.
The Xerox PARC was unique, of those rare, near-miraculous combinations of talent, luck and timing you couldn’t reproduce if you tried. To begin with, PARC was the direct heir of the people, ideas, technology, and culture that had been nurtured by ARPA. PARC was ARPA continued by other means.
Xerox built machines and leased them so that every time somebody hit the little button and a copy got made, Xerox got paid.
To Lick, as Anderson soon realized, the important thing was to have fun with computers, to keep on pushing toward the future.
Unix was free only because AT&T wasn’t allowed to sell it.