11 ms·

Computer technology is about 60 years old, though. There were people doing some pioneering work in the 50s and 60s, and the modern hacker culture really has it

by Gormo 13y ago

Computer technology is about 60 years old, though. There were people doing some pioneering work in the 50s and 60s, and the modern hacker culture really has its roots in the 1970s, just prior to the rise of personal computing. There was lots of stuff going on with the DEC minicomputers, LISP machines, early UNIX systems, and big-iron mainframes long before most of us were even born, let alone getting our starts on TI-99s, Apple IIs, and Commodore 64s. And let's not forget that the people who were creating those early home-computer platforms were themselves all from the previous generation. Would you turn people like Steve Wozniak or Al Alcorn or Ken Williams away from your new startup? You'd be a fool if you did. The basic architecture of computers hasn't changed at all since they did their most important work, and the cognitive skillset that makes a great programmer is the same as it's always been. In fact, I'd expect that people who cut their teeth on early systems, and had to work within narrow constraints, without a big stack of abstraction layers and frameworks, would be all the more adept at writing robust and efficient code than those who learned on modern tools. And I'd bet, with Moore's law slowing down, and with better-optimized code becoming more advantageous in building scalable systems, older programmers will soon be in higher demand.

troels 13y ago
Assuming Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, programming as a discipline is more like 160 years old.
- Dale1 13y ago
  She was certainly the first Computer Scientist, well that's what I was told in uni!
  - electronvolt 13y ago
    She was definitely the first person to realize the potential that Babbage's Analytic Engine had, particularly outside of just calculating things. Babbage's design, if I remember correctly, was basically an improvement on a design he initially made to calculate trajectories for artillery teams, and most of his thoughts on what to use his computer for were "calculate (thing)". Lovelace wrote on how the computer could be programmed to solve more complex problems. I think that it would be a mistake to say that computer science has truly been around for 160 years, though. A few people (there was also an Italian who was interested in Babbage's work, although I'm not sure what his contributions ended up being, if any) does not a field make, and the fact that any progress in it was more or less put on hold until the early 20th century (when mathematicians started working on what you could calculate or construct in a finite number of steps), and you didn't get (untyped) lambda calculus and turing machines until 1936, which is probably the best place to truly start the idea of computer science as a field. (And since you got early devices that were sort of primitive mechanical computers in the late 30s, early 40s as part of the whole Bletchley Park cryptography work by the Brits.) A very large debate around the turn of the century was if mathematics that you couldn't specifically construct in a finite (or countable) manner were, which became particularly heated after Cantor's set theory work (showing that the real numbers were uncountable) and then things like Russel's paradox (showing contradictions in Cantor's naive set theory if you allowed sets that contained themselves). I'd argue (without firm, researched proof that it was definitely the intent and case) that the spirit of early computer science (lambda calculus, turing machines, etc.), which was concerned with what you could and could not compute with a finite algorithm, came in spirit from those sorts of debates. (See finitism, intuitionism, constructivism, etc. for parts of this debate; traces of it remain in modern day mathematics with some people's concerns about if the Axiom of Choice is a valid or reasonable axiom to have)
    - csixty4 13y ago
      I think you're mixing up a couple stories there, but it doesn't really matter that much. Just to fill in the details (and because the alternative is for me to start responding to work emails which I just don't feel like doing this morning): Babbage was concerned about the quality of mathmatical table books, which were used for calculations before we had modern calculators and slide rules weren't mainstream. The figures in them were computed by hand, and some were so bad there was an error on every page, which made them useless for scientific work and dangerous for industrial work. The Difference Engine was designed to print out pages of figures using a little printer attachment. ENIAC was ininitially put to work calculating artillery trajectories, once the programmers figured out the bug where the shell kept going after it hit the ground (oops!).
csixty4 13y ago
The work in the late 40s was interesting, too. First, you had specialized systems, then Eckert, Mauchly, and von Neumann started working on stored program computers. They had to figure out what opcodes were needed and how they were going to be implemented. Jean Jennings Bartik's book (http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Computer-Changed/dp/1612480861 http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Computer-C...) is a great first-hand account of all the work (and drama) from back then. (Not trying to short-change Bartik here either -- she did a lot of the work on the ENIAC instruction set when they converted it to a stored-program computer)
- aortega 13y ago
  The fact that you can name by memory the people that worked in the 40's means that the size of the computer science community back then was tiny.
  - Gormo 13y ago
    He didn't say that those were all of the people working on computers in the 40s.
    - csixty4 13y ago
      Exactly. Just like how history doesn't celebrate the names of everybody who worked for Thomas Edison, there were hundreds if not thousands of people toiling away in anonymity underneath these giants. Edit: And many more "giants", of course…

by Gormo 13y ago

troels 13y ago

Assuming Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, programming as a discipline is more like 160 years old.

Dale1 13y ago
She was certainly the first Computer Scientist, well that's what I was told in uni!
- electronvolt 13y ago
  She was definitely the first person to realize the potential that Babbage's Analytic Engine had, particularly outside of just calculating things. Babbage's design, if I remember correctly, was basically an improvement on a design he initially made to calculate trajectories for artillery teams, and most of his thoughts on what to use his computer for were "calculate (thing)". Lovelace wrote on how the computer could be programmed to solve more complex problems. I think that it would be a mistake to say that computer science has truly been around for 160 years, though. A few people (there was also an Italian who was interested in Babbage's work, although I'm not sure what his contributions ended up being, if any) does not a field make, and the fact that any progress in it was more or less put on hold until the early 20th century (when mathematicians started working on what you could calculate or construct in a finite number of steps), and you didn't get (untyped) lambda calculus and turing machines until 1936, which is probably the best place to truly start the idea of computer science as a field. (And since you got early devices that were sort of primitive mechanical computers in the late 30s, early 40s as part of the whole Bletchley Park cryptography work by the Brits.) A very large debate around the turn of the century was if mathematics that you couldn't specifically construct in a finite (or countable) manner were, which became particularly heated after Cantor's set theory work (showing that the real numbers were uncountable) and then things like Russel's paradox (showing contradictions in Cantor's naive set theory if you allowed sets that contained themselves). I'd argue (without firm, researched proof that it was definitely the intent and case) that the spirit of early computer science (lambda calculus, turing machines, etc.), which was concerned with what you could and could not compute with a finite algorithm, came in spirit from those sorts of debates. (See finitism, intuitionism, constructivism, etc. for parts of this debate; traces of it remain in modern day mathematics with some people's concerns about if the Axiom of Choice is a valid or reasonable axiom to have)
  - csixty4 13y ago
    I think you're mixing up a couple stories there, but it doesn't really matter that much. Just to fill in the details (and because the alternative is for me to start responding to work emails which I just don't feel like doing this morning): Babbage was concerned about the quality of mathmatical table books, which were used for calculations before we had modern calculators and slide rules weren't mainstream. The figures in them were computed by hand, and some were so bad there was an error on every page, which made them useless for scientific work and dangerous for industrial work. The Difference Engine was designed to print out pages of figures using a little printer attachment. ENIAC was ininitially put to work calculating artillery trajectories, once the programmers figured out the bug where the shell kept going after it hit the ground (oops!).

csixty4 13y ago

The work in the late 40s was interesting, too. First, you had specialized systems, then Eckert, Mauchly, and von Neumann started working on stored program computers. They had to figure out what opcodes were needed and how they were going to be implemented. Jean Jennings Bartik's book (http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Computer-Changed/dp/1612480861 http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Computer-C...) is a great first-hand account of all the work (and drama) from back then. (Not trying to short-change Bartik here either -- she did a lot of the work on the ENIAC instruction set when they converted it to a stored-program computer)

aortega 13y ago
The fact that you can name by memory the people that worked in the 40's means that the size of the computer science community back then was tiny.
- Gormo 13y ago
  He didn't say that those were all of the people working on computers in the 40s.
  - csixty4 13y ago
    Exactly. Just like how history doesn't celebrate the names of everybody who worked for Thomas Edison, there were hundreds if not thousands of people toiling away in anonymity underneath these giants. Edit: And many more "giants", of course…