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

[Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>]

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Steve,

Your list coincides well with my recollection. A couple of sidelights:

MIT had one computer course when I arrived there in 1954. It was more about
arithmetic than programming. Desk calculators were used in numerical
analysis classes.

Philco's release of a  transistorized competitor to IBM's 700 series caused
IBM to bring the 7090 out of the back room and drop the newly introduced
709. This was surely not a planned business decision. IBM was able to do
that quickly thanks to its work on the 7030 (Stretch) supercomputer for
national-defense labs.

Purdue's computer-science department was founded in 1962. That trickle
became a torrent by 1964-5, but as late as 1977 Fred Brooks still opined
that any calling with science in its name was not a science, witness
Christian Science, mortuary science and cosmetic science.

-------------------------------------------

Parochial event: Bell Labs split computer science from mathematics in 1967.

Rise of the quicksort fallacy. Tony Hoare's publication in 1961 made
algorithms a hip topic. Generations of students since have been led to
believe that quicksort is fit for general use, although it is almost always
programmed with deterministic pivot selection, while Tony specified random
selection. Deterministic selection requires one to believe that data sets
are random, not the algorithm. Maybe Fred Brooks was right.

On Sat, Apr 27, 2024 at 1:20 AM steve jenkin <sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au>
wrote:

> 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/institutional-memories
> >
>
>         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
>
>
>

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