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

https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/articles/250078-lets-not-dumb-down-the-history-of-computer-science/fulltext

by hypomnemata • 5 years ago

241 166 5 years ago

cacm.acm.org

username903• 5 years ago

The main problem seems to be that computer scientists don't care about history. That seems a bit strange to me, since there is no lack of people to analyse the historical parts of mathematics of physics. Maybe the problem is that computer science history doesn't seem like history yet since it is relatively recent?

ampdepolymerase2• 5 years ago

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 itself holds little value for your average computer scientist outside of being an intellectual exercise.

Another issue is that CS is a branch of applied math that also happens to be extremely profitable. Math operates on much larger timescales than other domains. But business and economics demands immediate attribution. McCulloch and Pitts had their Hebbian neural network almost a century ago. Kleene of the Regex fame designed his neural network in 1951 [0]. These vast timescales are quite normal for advanced mathematics. But in 2010 GPUs became cheap and the obscure theories of the pre-GOFAI age are suddenly immensely profitable. Of course the names and associations would be with their most recent implementors. The ones who actually applied and made it possible, rather than those whom dreamt it up a century ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25882079

username903• 5 years ago

Re first paragraph: Do you think mathematics and physics are different? It isn't like the old papers are relevant after hundreds of years, others have written the same things in more distilled and easier to read formats.

tyingq• 5 years ago

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.

dkarl• 5 years ago

People don't want to look back at

- how far we came in each decade

- how brilliant people had to be to invent ideas that feel obvious to us

- how much people got done with previous decades' technology

- how many times history the consensus of expert opinion mis-predicted the next development

because we want to believe

- the current state of the art is close to perfection than it is to the last generation

- we only have to embrace the obvious

- people who are one step behind the times are at an insurmountable disadvantage to us who are up-to-date

- the future will bring nothing more than a higher perfection of the ideas we embrace now

It's intellectual millennialism. We want to think that the new ideas we receive at the beginning of our career are the final piece of the puzzle, that there's no point in generations beyond us. Our ideas give us special powers to accomplish things that no previous generation could accomplish, and no subsequent generation will accomplish much more, or the same things much easier, than we did. We are standing at the end of history. We are the generation that left the desert and entered the promised land.

History upsets all that. History teaches us that the future will stand in relation to us as we stand in relation to the past, whereas we want to believe that we are equals with the future and superior to the past.

TheOtherHobbes• 5 years ago

The main problem is that computer researchers don't always write up their ideas in papers. And source code is hard to read, system dependent - you can't understand it without being familiar with hardware which may not even exist any more - and may be impossible to access.

This isn't really about history. This is about ideas which could still be useful today but which have been forgotten, for a variety of reasons.

Most CS departments don't have anyone who specialises in this. And academic historians have other priorities.

Calling this dumbing down doesn't help. It's not about historians "dumbing down" CS, it's about not understanding the difference between what historians do - create narratives - and what archivists and researchers do, which is more closely related to continuing research and development.

Physics actually has the same problem. Anything outside a limited mainstream is forgotten very quickly. Math seems less prone to it, perhaps because math is made of academic papers and nothing else, and there's more of a tradition of open exploration and communication.

dwheeler• 5 years ago

One problem in understanding computer science history is the essentially perpetual copyright laws. It's illegal to view or share many important past programs' source code, a problem not shared by other fields. Imagine discussing literature without being allowed to read it! There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.

The rise of open source software is finally letting us view some of that software. But we may never publicly know what some past giants did.

ed25519FUUU• 5 years ago

Is the actual source code that important? I’m trying to think of what I’m missing. I’m personally more interested in the comments left in the code of some or those old projects than the actual code, which was probably full of bugs and a bit crufty just like the stuff we write today.

sanxiyn2• 5 years ago

Yes it is important. Sometimes details matter, and often the only place details can be found is actual source code.

aidenn03• 5 years ago

Programs source code is just as copyrighted as late 20th century literature.

However, it's not generally available (unlike late 20th century literature). If windows sold with the source code (even if you were forbidden from doing anything with it), then we would be reading windows source code in our CS classes.

detaro• 5 years ago

Microsoft even had a "research kernel" they licensed out to unis, and we did read (parts of) that in CS classes. (but still of course very different than actually having the full source of real systems through history available for general study)

jonathankoren4• 5 years ago

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.

guidoism6• 5 years ago

Fortunately people are putting up some of that early work: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects

blt2• 5 years ago

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 don't think they feel "my work could change the world" in the same way as CS researchers.

Learning about CS history would make us better researchers, and thus more likely to change the world, but that line of motivation is not direct enough to excite people. There is still so much low-hanging fruit that can be plucked with only shallow knowledge of the field.

wernercd10• 5 years ago

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...

Sharlin3• 5 years ago

The GP is talking about (future) researchers in particular. Still, there’s a tremendous historical myopia among practicing software engineers as well, leading us as a field to reinvent old ideas in new clothes every ten years or so.

mikewarot5• 5 years ago

The optimization bottleneck you're fighting against in the game might have been solved 50 years ago, if you don't know history, you don't have a complete toolkit of all the good tools.

There are good reasons to learn assembler, basic, forth, lisp, smalltalk, pascal, c, c++, python, java, etc. even if you don't use them on a regular basis.

afarrell3• 5 years ago

how is history going to land me a job interview

Step 1. Go to software conference.

Step 2. Get into hallway track conversation where a historical anecdote and its lessons are relevant.

Step 3. Say things that prompt y'all to have insight and establish trust that you're thoughtful about how to build software.

juliendorra3• 5 years ago

I won’t try to give a list of examples of how historical knowledge is useful for a developer, but just compare this statement with different fields:

An architect will learn about the history of hundreds of buildings at school.

A product designer like a designer designing chairs, knows about the history of chairs, has dozens of example of chairs in their mind.

That developers strive to be so a-historical is a sad state of affairs. It makes the whole field naive and stuck in a perpetual present.

But digital art and web design are in the same mode too, so it’s something about the whole digital fields.

The only exception is game design, where it’s considered important and valued to learn about old games, play them, understand how they worked.

Shorel4• 5 years ago

If you ever need to read something in one of Knuth's books, that's useful history for you.

I know because I was looking how to efficiently generate power sets and eventually the only good answer was in TAoCP!!!

So the answer is: history, the kind of history full of technical details that Knuth argues for, is extremely useful for our profession.

It is the empty, pop history, made without algorithm descriptions and full of only anecdotes what you are thinking about? Knuth argues against that!

Animats3• 5 years ago

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.

contingencies5• 5 years ago

As We May Think https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

The First Draft Report on the EDVAC http://history-computer.com/Library/edvac.pdf

The invention of index registers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_register#History

Report on the algorithmic language ALGOL 60 https://sci-hub.do/10.1016/s0066-4138(61)80016-5

HAKMEM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18793554

SAGE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environm...

B5500 https://github.com/pkimpel/retro-b5500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems#B5000 http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/burrough...

IBM 1401 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/1401.html

P&V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_(programming)

PASCAL – User Manual and Report http://seriouscomputerist.atariverse.com/media/pdf/book/Pasc...

The UNIX Time-Sharing System https://archive.org/download/bstj57-6-1905/bstj57-6-1905.pdf

A Trip Down The Graphics Pipeline: The Homogeneous Perspective Transform http://cfile204.uf.daum.net/attach/272FF54D519C8D973525F4

thundergolfer2• 5 years ago

A favourite quote, that appears on my Github profile:

Computing is pop culture. [...] Pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating, It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]. - Alan Kay

Changed how I think about my career.

lowdose• 5 years ago

To make new pop culture cooperation is necessary otherwise a culture stays niche. Diffusion of new culture works exactly as diffusion of technology from innovators to late adopters. The paradox with culture is that when an innovation is adopted in the mainstream late adopters do not perceive it as innovation because it is now the normal thing to do. Innovators do because brands validate new behavior, values and rituals that are contrarian to the status quo.

Nike & BLM, Tesla & global warming, Apple and computing without a 1000 page manual.

Nike validated Kaepernick at a moment for the first time that more kids of color are born than white.

https://www.slideshare.net/superbrands_poland/douglas-holt-h...

Mauricebranagh2• 5 years ago

The problem with this blanket rejection of "pop culture" as something lesser is that its almost always deployed by "young fogey" conservatives, harkening back to so golden imperial age.

And of course these sort of people don't actually have any in depth historical knowledge.

oretoz• 5 years ago

What an amazing quote! Thanks for sharing.

pattusk• 5 years ago

This is a wonderful quote, thank you for sharing.

I particularly like how he had the insight of making the statement true only for "people who write code for money." Growing up in various computing "scenes" (open source, hacking, demoscene) in the 90's and 2000's, nobody did anything for money. And it seemed everybody had the utmost respect for the history of the scene. Demosceners were all about "old school" stuff and the old Amiga days. Hacking ezines and forums retold the tales of Captain Crunch and other legendary hackers from yore. And the open source community was still full of completely antiquated practices that some would have question but nobody would have dared to disrespect.

Only when I started programming as a job did I encounter people who, strangely, had no interest for such things. There was plenty of enthusiasm for new languages, but little for their genealogy. It really seemed odd to me and I think the lack of love for the "craft" and its history is ultimately what drove me out of industry and to academia.

contingencies5• 5 years ago

Added to the substantial Alan Kay section of https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

Compared to those employed in an industry, few write about the history of trains, or wifi, or road building, and on and on. It's normal for only a few academics to be interested.

There are only a couple of fields that are different - media (movies/broadcast), military, medicine. Probably because of the built-in human drama that's easily accessible?

As others have mentioned, Computer Science has a little human drama but few have sacrificed their lives or appeared heroic. It's a pretty dry field to document - more similar to road building.

johnorourke• 5 years ago

I wonder if Architecture - a much older trade, also having immediate commercial value and expensive intellectual property - has a technical history?

Or accountancy - another old trade with immediate commercial value, though perhaps without as much intellectual property.

sjg0072• 5 years ago

Umm. yes?

Ice_cream_suit• 5 years ago

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 Brachioradialis Reflex) https://neurologyminute.libsyn.com/history-of-neurology-3-hx..., there is no expectation that it will actually contribute to practice.

herodoturtle• 5 years ago

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 :)

Synaesthesia• 5 years ago

That sounds fascinating. Can't wait for you to finish that. I also live in Pretoria. You know we have the national library here, which I've never visited, but I'm interested in SA history. Cheers, Paul

svat3• 5 years ago

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

gnud• 5 years ago

Wow, "Fermat's library" is horrible to read in.

Luckily, the raw PDF is available at http://public.callutheran.edu/~reinhart/CSC521/Week3/KnuthVo...

cratermoon2• 5 years ago

Thank you. I know many of these older papers aren't exactly in the best format, but Fermat violating basic usability by turning the perfectly good text into a bitmap format somehow ends up worse than a PDF.

dalbasal• 5 years ago

Interesting.

I think it's a valid point/pursuit but somewhat sisyphean. Technical is harder to follow. That means fewer people will read it, even people who do have the skill to. Publishing is a medium, not entirely unlike HN or pop science books and has a media dynamic. I think history of X tends to go "accessible" in every field, with the counterexamples (eg mathematics) being exceptions. A HN article with lots of code is harder to read, digest and comment than an article about the business/societal implications of facebook's new policy on squirrels. Even people who do read the former, can read more of the latter more easily... so they do.

Also, generalities tend to be more evocative than specifics. If there is a message to the "story" about small teams, outsiders, or other cultural element... that's engaging. Technical is necessarily specific, and a lot of actual invention is somewhat random... without a wider implication.

I'm skeptical that "history of X" fields can really focus on what he wants them to focus on. The types of insights that he's looking for are, as he says himself, best found in primary sources. There will always be a limited supply of these, since people who write books and people who invent things overlap irregularly.

On the positive side, since he seems to mostly want inspiration, a little can go a long way.

Totally tangential... Military historians used to play a lot of "tactics," trying to recreate battles with board game pieces or whatnot. There are endless generations of such commentary on Roman vs Etruscan spear formations. The evolution of helmets or whatnot. I don't think we learn much from this.

auggierose2• 5 years ago

So, what Haigh is saying, what historians as a field do, is useless. I agree.

scott_s• 5 years ago

That is an absurd take. For all fields, most people are on the outside. Historical work for most people - produced by those on the outside - is how our society and culture understands itself.

I recently finished an excellent one volume history of the Civil War, "Battle Cry of Freedom." It was written by James McPherson, a historian. This book has informed my understanding of not just the Civil War, but also the lead up to it. I believe this context is essential for understanding where we are now.

psyklic• 5 years ago

Here is an interesting Cornell reading group+papers on the history of Instruction Set Architectures - https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs7491/2020sp/

mikewarot5• 5 years ago

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.

Animats3• 5 years ago

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.

brandmeyer• 5 years ago

Although the real problem today is that we need to run programs with less authority than the user running them,

All true; But. What really stopped capability systems is that most users cannot be bothered to grant minimum privilege. Even most developers cannot - we invented containers in part as a way to mitigate the consequences of failing to grant minimum privilege.

contingencies5• 5 years ago

we need to run programs with less authority than the user running them, and we still lack a good conceptual model for doing that

Isn't this now the standard reality for most desktop and mobile OSs?

"Allow write to SD card" is far, far too powerful a privilege to grant.

Granting a permission based upon user approval is never secure anyway since if they want to see the porn / flashing lights they are going to click the button regardless. Having spent some time with both carriers and mobile device manufacturers, there are also areas of undeclared commercial utility in keeping control with the OS (device manufacturer) and out of the hands of the user: DRM, app sales, increased chargeable mobile data use, reduced chance of non-cellular data paths (mesh networking), etc.

jdsalaro• 5 years ago

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.

For FreeBSD there's Capsicum(1) and for Linux, although the implementation is not strictly capabily-based, there's SE-Linux which depending on the usecase resembles capability-based restrictions.

Also, although not based around capabilities, Linux has supported them for awhile https://linux.die.net/man/7/capabilities

(1) https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/

mikewarot5• 5 years ago

SE-Linux is the worst possible way to secure a linux system, its like when Microsoft went overboard on warnings, instead of actually trying to solve the problem.

The main implementation difference in a capability based system is using a PowerBox to select files to give to a process, instead of letting the process access everything the user has rights to.

C4ne• 5 years ago

I find the comparison between medicine and computer science very interesting! I have never thought about it this way. Could you elaborate on how you „dig back“? Do you read old papers / books? I imagine that one would have to dig through much old stuff that just isn‘t interesting until you find something that could be really usefull (like capability based security).

mikewarot5• 5 years ago

Look at the recent talks by Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Joe Armstrong on YouTube. Watch "The Mother of all Demos" by Douglass Engelbart.

There is a lot of stuff online, just follow the threads. I've been pushing Capability Based Security for a decade... only in the last 6 hours did I learn that they had it at Xerox PARC, in an offhanded comment by Ted Nelson at the end of one of his videos, where he mentions the great ideas that got away.

saagarjha• 5 years ago

Well, better in some sense: they might be cleaner, or more robust on some axis, but perhaps not practical or efficient. But, with computing the landscape can change rapidly so it is always good to see if older ideas can now be made a reality.

redis_mlc• 5 years ago

Capability based security, ... They had it at Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs chose not to take that part.

To be fair:

1) Apple II and Macintoshes were slow

2) and single user

3) and pre-Internet (no networking, even.)

Microsoft also had to make an early choice about what features to add to DOS, particularly networking or multiuser, and networking was chosen to implement first. (Probably because of Novell and other early networking competitors.)

the PARC focus on replicating paper was a step backwards

"Replicating paper" was resurrected about 10 years ago when everybody was making apps with a UI like books turning pages. There was actually a programmer (Russian name if I receall) who specialized in consulting on that, advising companies on what algorithms to use and how to get the page flipping appearance they wanted. I thought it was pointless but hilarious, as it was totally ornamental.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

andi9995• 5 years ago

"The limitation of a single desktop was put in place to allow children to ease into the desktop metaphor." Any source for this? I dont thinkchildren were the target customers at that time.

tremon2• 5 years ago

They didn't mean literal children I guess, but "children" in the sense of blank-slate individuals exploring a new space.

Adults can use training wheels too when first learning to ride a bike. But once they're competent, it's more expressive to ride without.

afarrell3• 5 years ago

When you someone performs surgery on one patient, the legacy medical impacts of that surgery are contained to at most 2 people and their immediate families. There will probably be fewer than 10 surgeries where someone might think about that -- and we don't begrudge a surgeon who doesn't.

When you add a commit to an OS, the legacy impact of that stays with the OS and must be un-done by anyone who changes it.

mr_t• 5 years ago

Could you name a few examples of ideas we missed? You made me quite curious.

doctorbaum• 5 years ago

How do you go about digging old PARC papers?

pjmlp4• 5 years ago

You start here,

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox

And then go over to symbolics, Borland, whatever.

forgotmypw172• 5 years ago

I think the same problems are present in medicine. For example, there's tons of evidence that fasting and rest can heal most things.

It's talked about in just about every tribal knowledge compendium. It's assisted by doctors in some countries, almost completely ignored in others.

bsder• 5 years ago

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.

Basically, haven't we "reinvented" this via "The Eternal Mainframe"? Only now it's called Amazon Web Services?

Shorel4• 5 years ago

That's not your system.

pjmlp4• 5 years ago

The Burroughs mentioned by Knuth, already had tagged memory, a systems programming language with unsafe code blocks, co-routines, bounds checking, the whole package, Go like compile speed (for 1961 hardware), compiler intrisics instead of Assembly, the whole package.

Nowadays still available as Unisys ClearPath MCP, with high level security as selling point, while it will take generations to fix UNIX and C's adoption at large, if ever.

pjmlp4• 5 years ago

They had it at Xerox PARC, but Steve Jobs chose not to take that part.

At least they created Object Pascal and did two OSes with it, and contributed later on to the C++ industry adoption, instead of being yet another C powerhouse cloning UNIX.

kps• 5 years ago

Capability based security … allowed you to run any program, with no danger to your system.

‘No danger to your system’ shouldn't be conflated with ‘no danger to you.’ The problem with capabilities is that they reinforce and solidify the ‘smartphone model’: your data isn't yours, it's an app's, so what you're permitted to do with it is entirely controlled by someone else.

Jtsummers• 5 years ago

We shouldn't fear ideas just because it could be used to restrict some users of some systems. In the end, there will continue to be a market for less regulated hardware and OSes. Linux and the BSDs, as an end user if you own the system, are still wide open. x86/x64 systems aren't getting more locked down in general, and there's a significant movement toward more open hardware (at least within some niches) with RISC-V.

Something like capability based security would be a godsend for the corporate and enterprise environment compared to what's commonly in place.

jonjacky4• 5 years ago

See also Bret Victor's talk, "The Future of Programming". The conceit: it's 1973, he describes (with an overhead projector and transparencies) some then-innovative ideas that he hopes will be adopted in the future.

http://worrydream.com/dbx/

jonjacky4• 5 years ago

This was linked on HN a few days ago, contains links to dozens of classic papers back to the 1930s:

https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/34992/assignments/syllabu... - Classics of Computer Science

and that page contains this link to a spreadsheet with links to over 150 historic papers and other sources:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wS6O7-ZoFL7Cfjgt-kdh...

jonjacky4• 5 years ago

An unusual historical paper from Niklaus Wirth, about many "good and original ideas (that) turned out to be less brilliant than they first appeared."

http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/wirth/Good%20Ideas%20Wir...

bboreham2• 5 years ago

I would submit that the “Graphics Gems” series of books does document a lot of rendering techniques in their historical context. They were written to be current for practitioners at the time, but the connections are drawn.

Similarly Michael Abrash’s articles on the development of Doom et al.

svat3• 5 years ago

Also I guess Fabien Sanglard's "Game Engine Black Books" (on Doom and Wolfenstein 3D: https://fabiensanglard.net/gebb/), and John Aycock's book "Retrogame Archeology: Exploring Old Computer Games".

(Wonder why all these examples are from computer games…)

bboreham2• 5 years ago

I suppose to Knuth’s point there is no “book of the history of graphics algorithms”. The information exists, and some people know how to find it, but we don’t choose to write the book.

cromwellian• 5 years ago

Wow, He used my wife's portrait of himself. I was there the day she took it, it was the opportunity of a lifetime to meet one of my heroes, and he didn't disappoint. Knuth is incredibly sharp, lightning sharp for his age. He plays Emacs as masterfully as he plays his pipe organ in his home. I watched as he whipped around different buffers of literate programming, as he demoed some new angle on the properties of Sudoku solving algorithms. I asked him if he had been keeping up with machine learning, and he instantly name-dropped a dozen papers/authors he had read recently.

I have to say, I'm worried. Just in 2020, we lost of a lot of greats, including Jon Conway, Larry Tessler, Chuck Peddle, Bert Sutherland, Frances Allen, most recently Brad Cox. We're losing not just a lot of history, but a lot of the historians themselves, the people to whom can tell the stories that may not have been written down yet.

jecel• 5 years ago

That is why this project is so important:

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/

Except for Jon Conway, all the other people you mentioned were interviewed.

forgotmypw172• 5 years ago

I feel the same way about the history of the Web. There are hundreds of browsers we can be using, each one with its own unique features, advantages, and dare I say, beauty. Really writing for ANY browser shows you why things are the way they are today, and helps you not reinvent Unix, poorly :D

tannhaeuser2• 5 years ago

In 2021, we're having difficulties to surface even the history of computing and canonical documentation of the last two decades or so. Go search anything about early HTML, early JavaScript, research results in CompSci not even ten years old, POSIX reference docs, or even up-to-date JVM javadoc pages using your favorite search engine. It'll bring up all kinds of content marketing, naive march-of-progress advertising fringe tech and PLs addressed at juniors, hit-and-miss StackOverflow articles, and masses of academic pseudo science publications with original content/sites being decommissioned in favor of shiny content-less "web 2.0" crap.

Fuck the algorithm!

juliendorra3• 5 years ago

that’s probably where the methodology used by trained historians is useful.

I created a History of Tech Design class [0] of 6 different tracks for design students. I’m not an historian, but I have some training in finding original sources, sorting them, accessing archives… it helped a lot, and I could use a lot of primary sources full of not-well-known details.

Back in the 90s it would have taken me weeks or months to just access this amount of historical material!

I had to turn this class into something accessible and interesting for design students / pros, but I certainly do not consider that dumbing down, just: Know your audience!

[0] https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7...

ghaff2• 5 years ago

Especially as you get back to 20 or 25 years ago, the idea that you can just do some web searches to uncover much more than surface information is somewhat naive. A lot of information isn't accessible to casual public search. You need to use libraries, talk to people, etc.

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

What do you think is the difference between 'research results in CompSci not even ten years old' and 'academic pseudo science publications'?

Do you just disagree with the research of the last ten years for some reason so dismiss it as not the real research and think there's some kind of under-appreciated research out there?

tannhaeuser2• 5 years ago

Please don't put words in my mouth. What I've said is that publication cadence is overwhelming, and academic, much less general-purpose search isn't up to it.

Guthur• 5 years ago

I wonder how much this is born from what at outwardly appear very transient.

Our interfaces with computing have changed so radically and many things are legitmately obselete for the majority of us; no one is likely to reach for a punch card or a 3.5" floppy (might be a few edge cases on this one :) ).

Most of this is the facade of computing though and many of underlying fundamentals are the same but I feel that this outward appears of transiency leaves us flippant about the retrospective.

It's not a great comparison but lets look at military history, many of the tactics, and hardware remain the same for decades with design and development taking an significant portion of time. the F35 has been in development for nearly 2 decades and it's only now at the beginning of it's service life.

ballenf2• 5 years ago

This type of history is also crucial in the fight against overreaching patent and copyright.

Talking in broad strokes about a novel solution that is later patented probably won’t get the patent invalidated. Showing the code for the implementation would.

Shorel4• 5 years ago

Excellent point and also a very important one!

20thCB• 5 years ago

Martin Campbell-Kelly was my lecturer for "History of Computing" at Warwick University in 1986. Nice guy, and one of the few CS courses I actually enjoyed :-)

baobabKoodaa• 5 years ago

This article returns error 500 for me. Seriously, STOP rendering your static web content with run-time server-side rendering! There is absolutely no reason this article couldn't be delivered as static assets by a CDN.

guidoism6• 5 years ago

I’ve been saying the same thing so much that I should probably just get it tattooed on my forehead.

It’s crazy to think about the carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere in order to do the same computations over and over again. Same goes with layout and rendering on the client. There’s no reason we can’t just do this for a few standard widths and send that static content to the client.

nickdothutton• 5 years ago

Knuth writes eloquently what I have thought for a while. Some of these early works and ideas, even and perhaps especially those that did not evolve into something successful today, are worthy of study. I strongly suspect some of them could take us in new directions. Some of those that “blocked” may now be unblocked by related developments in our field. Maybe we have to go back to forwards.

https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-f...

guidoism6• 5 years ago

This this this.

We’ve sort of settled on the architecture of our “stack” mostly by historical accident. It has constantly been the local maxima for various variables throughout our short history. And because of the inertia of the mass of what we’ve built that mostly works we don’t look outside very far.

There are a lot of excellent ideas that were too early, or due to a coin toss not taken, or killed because of winner-takes-all market competition, or because they were just some footnote at the bottom of a paper some researcher wrote and never investigated. These ideas are ripe for investigation.

I’ve been reading papers and looking at source code from the early days of programming languages. There was definitely more interplay between the design of the machine’s API (the instruction set) and programming language designers than we see these days. Our ISAs are made to emulate a PDP-11 running C (a glib take I know but not entirely inaccurate). Oh yeah, we also now get an instruction that handles JavaScript floats better. :-)

User23• 5 years ago

Operating Systems. I have at home Edsger Dijkstra's source code for the operating system he wrote in 1965. Nobody has looked at it, and we should.

I'd love to see this. Please put it on your webpage Dr. Knuth!

guidoism6• 5 years ago

I was going to say the same thing but it’s probably a cardboard box filled with paper. Somebody who understands the stuff needs to spend the time to go through it and scan it and catalog it. And given the time crunch for the test of Vol 4, not to mention the rest I don’t want Knuth doing it.

commandlinefan• 5 years ago

I often find that when I can come across documentation that was written for a practitioner, say, 50 years ago, it helps clarify why things work the way they do today - the new, "streamlined" way of doing something only ever makes sense to me after I understand what the old way actually was.

wittycardio• 5 years ago

Seems to me that there are multiple histories of computing . One is the history of theoretical computer science which I think is what Knuth is referring to. This is actually fairly well preserved in academia and anyone with a CS background should have gone through it. Another is the history of programming, of which we know the origins but off late has become nearly impossible to track. The last is the social history of the internet , which doesn't require a technical background.

kevinwang• 5 years ago

This is actually fairly well preserved in academia and anyone with a CS background should have gone through it.

I don't think I've been exposed to it, but I would love to be. Where did you learn about TCS history?

squibbles• 5 years ago

There was a brilliant programmer at Digitek who had completely novel and now unknown ideas for software development; he never published anything, but you could read and analyze his source code.

Does anyone know about whom Knuth was referring? Did this have anything to do with the work on the PL/I compiler?

svat3• 5 years ago

Seems to have been Jim Dunlap (James R. Dunlap), who wrote many Fortran compilers. Just posted a comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25955227

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

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