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[ off topic ] History of US computing leading to 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering

by steve jenkin

Sorry for the dual list post, I don’t who monitors COFF, the proper place for this. There may a good timeline of the early decades of Computer Science and it’s evolution at Universities in some countries, but I’m missing it. Doug McIlroy lived through all this, I hope he can fill in important gaps in my little timeline. It seems from the 1967 letter, defining the field was part of the zeitgeist leading up to the NATO conference. 1949 ACM founded 1958 First ‘freshman’ computer course in USA, Perlis @ CMU 1960 IBM 1400 - affordable & ‘reliable’ transistorised computers arrived 1965 MIT / Bell / General Electric begin Multics project. CMU establishes Computer Sciences Dept. 1967 “What is Computer Science” letter by Newell, Perlis, Simon 1968 “Software Crisis” and 1st NATO Conference 1969 Bell Labs withdraws from Multics 1970 GE's sells computer business, including Multics, to Honeywell 1970 PDP-11/20 released 1974 Unix issue of CACM ========= The arrival of transistorised computers - cheaper, more reliable, smaller & faster - was a trigger for the accelerated uptake of computers. The IBM 1400-series was offered for sale in 1960, becoming the first (large?) computer to sell 10,000 units - a marker of both effective marketing & sales and attractive pricing. The 360-series, IBM’s “bet the company” machine, was in full development when the 1400 was released. ========= Attached is a text file, a reformatted version of a 1967 letter to ’Science’ by Allen Newell, Alan J. Perlis, and Herbert A. Simon: "What is computer science?” <https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html> ========= A 1978 masters thesis on Early Australian Computers (back to 1950’s, mainly 1960’s) cites a 17 June 1960 CSIRO report estimating 1,000 computers in the US and 100 in the UK. With no estimate mentioned for Western Europe. The thesis has a long discussion of what to count as a (digital) ‘computer’ - sources used different definitions, resulting in very different numbers, making it difficult to reconcile early estimates, especially across continents & countries. Reverse estimating to 1960 from the “10,000” NATO estimate of 1968, with a 1- or 2-year doubling time, gives a range of 200-1,000, including the “100” in the UK. Licklider and later directors of ARPA’s IPTO threw millions into Computing research in the 1960’s, funding research and University groups directly. [ UCB had many projects/groups funded, including the CSRG creating BSD & TCP/IP stack & tools ] Obviously there was more to the “Both sides of the Atlantic” argument of E.W. Dijkstra and Alan Kay - funding and numbers of installations was very different. The USA had a substantially larger installed base of computers, even per person, and with more university graduates trained in programming, a higher take-up in private sector, not just the public sector and defence, was possible. ========= <https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-history> In September 1949, a constitution was instituted by membership approval. ———— <https://web.archive.org/web/20160317070519/https://www.cs.cmu.edu/link/inst…> In 1958, Perlis began teaching the first freshman-level computer programming course in the United States at Carnegie Tech. In 1965, Carnegie Tech established its Computer Science Department with a $5 million grant from the R.K. Mellon Foundation. Perlis was the first department head. ========= From the 1968 NATO report [pg 9 of pdf ] <http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PDF> Helms: In Europe alone there are about 10,000 installed computers — this number is increasing at a rate of anywhere from 25 per cent to 50 per cent per year. The quality of software provided for these computers will soon affect more than a quarter of a million analysts and programmers. d’Agapeyeff: In 1958 a European general purpose computer manufacturer often had less than 50 software programmers, now they probably number 1,000-2,000 people; what will be needed in 1978? _Yet this growth rate was viewed with more alarm than pride._ (comment) ========= -- Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915) PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin

1 year, 2 months

Re: Chaosnet in v8

by Douglas McIlroy

Where did chunix (which contains chaos.c) and several other branches of the v8 /usr/sys tree on TUHS come from? This stuff does not appear in the v8 manual. I don't recall a Lisp machine anywhere near the Unix room, nor any collaborations that involved a Lisp machine. Doug

1 year, 2 months

Word erase?

by Dan Cross

I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the timing and rationale for the introduction of “word erase” functionality to the kernel terminal driver. My surface skim earlier leads me to believe it came to Unix with 4BSD, but it was not reincorporated into 8th Edition or later, nor did it make it to Plan 9 (which did incorporate ^U for the "line kill" command). TOPS-20 supports it via the familiar ^W, but I'm not sure about other PDP-10 OSes (Lars?). Multics does not support it. VMS does not support it. What was the proximal inspiration? The early terminal drivers seem to use the Multics command editing suite (`#` for erase/backspace, `@` for line kill), though at some point that changed, one presumes as TTYs fell out of favor and display terminals came to the fore. - Dan C.

1 year, 2 months

Chaosnet in v8

by John Floren

I've been doing some research on Lisp machines and came across an interesting tidbit: there was Chaosnet support in Unix v8, e.g. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/sys/chunix/chaos.c Does anyone remember why that went in? My first guess would be for interoperability with the Symbolics users at Bell Labs (see Bromley's "Lisp Lore", 1986), but that's just speculation. john

1 year, 2 months

Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

by Marcus Clark

Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link to https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan. I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using cscope on their projects or anything about its development. -Marcus.

1 year, 2 months

Re: Multiflow Compiler

by Paul McJones

> You can always read Josh Fisher's book on the "Bulldog" compiler, I > believe he did this work at Yale. Are you thinking of John Ellis’s thesis: Bulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architectures John R. Ellis February 1985 http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdf Fisher was Ellis’s advisor. The thesis was also published in ACM’s Doctoral Dissertation Award: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050340/bulldog/ I believe Ellis still has a tape with his thesis software on it, but I don’t know if he’s been able to read it.

1 year, 2 months

Old Solaris cdroms/docs/manuals

by Maciej Jan Broniarz

Hello Everyone One of polish academic institutions was getting rid of old IT-related stuff and they were kind enough to give me all Solaris related stuff, including lots (and i mean lots) of installation CD-ROMS, documentations, manuals, and some solaris software, mostly compilers and scientific stuff. If anyone would be interested feel free to contact me and i'd be happy to share - almost everything is in more than a few copies and I have no intention of keeping everything for myself. Currently all of the stuff is located in Warsaw, Poland. Best regards, mjb -- Maciej Jan Broniarz

1 year, 2 months

Re: *roff hyphenation trivia challenge

by Douglas McIlroy

> [Tex's] oversetting of lines caused by the periodic failure of the > paragraph-justification algorithms drove me nuts. Amen. If Tex can't do what it thinks is a good job, it throws a fit and violates the margin, hoping to force a rewrite. Fortunately, one can shut off the line-break algorithm and simply fill greedily. The command to do so is \sloppy--an ironic descriptor of text that looks better, albeit not up to Tex's discriminating standard. Further irony: when obliged to write in Tex, I have resorted to turning \sloppy mode on globally. Apologies for airing an off-topic pet peeve, Doug

1 year, 2 months

Multiflow Compiler

by Henry Bent

I happened upon https://old.gustavobarbieri.com.br/trabalhos-universidade/mc722/lowney92mul… and I am curious as to whether any of the original Multiflow compilers survive. I had never heard of them before now, but the fact that they were licensed to so many influential companies makes me think that there might be folks on this list who know of its history. -Henry

1 year, 2 months

.globl directive -- is this a 35-bit constant?

by ron minnich

ACPI has 4-byte identifiers (guess why!), but I just wondered, writing some assembly: is it globl, not global, or glbl, because globl would be a one-word constant on the PDP-10 (5 7-bit bytes)? Not entirely off track, netbsd at some point (still does?) ran on the PDP-10.

1 year, 3 months

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