12 ms·

MIT-related work that has transformed computer science

123 points by kp25 12y ago

TempleOSV207 12y ago
God
dalek2point3 12y ago
my favorite is the GUI. While many credit XEROX with the GUI, most of the ideas came out of the quite amazing Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland. As an MIT student, this list makes awesome reading! Here is the relevant snippet: Nearly 50 years before the iPad, an MIT PhD student had already come up with the idea of directly interfacing with a computer screen. Ivan Sutherland’s “Sketchpad” allowed users to draw geometric shapes with a touch-pen, pioneering the practice of “computer-assisted drafting” that has proven vital for architects, planners, and now even toddlers.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  The work demonstrated by Engelbart in his MOD was actually done at SRI, which then inspired XEROX. When Alan Kay started his PhD at U of Utah, he was given Sutherland's dissertation to start off with (where Sutherland was a professor). That eventually led to his ground breaking Dynapad concept. Anyways, back then, everyone knew everyone.
kijin 12y ago
It's interesting that they include the FSF, Internet Archive, Creative Commons, and Open Courseware among their "computer science" contributions. These are more political than scientific, although some of them did end up contributing massively to the development of computer science. Now let's talk about some ways in which MIT hindered the development of computer science, including political hindrances. 1. Complicity in the persecution of Aaron Swartz (2011) 2. Anyone else?
chiachun 12y ago
I believe that SICP should also be counted as one itself.
stillsut 12y ago
Clearly one of them is not writing click bait headlines: 50? Ain't nobody got time for that...
puppetmaster3 12y ago
Some PR? When I think MIT I think of Aaron Swartz.
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  Because inaction in response to federal charges being brought against an unconnected individual outweighs more than 100 years of academic contribution.
  - puppetmaster3 12y ago
    Hi TT. This may help you: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=aaron+swartz+mit http://lmgtfy.com/?q=aaron+swartz+mit
  - grinich 12y ago
    It should also be noted this this was inaction by the administrators, not necessarily the students, researchers, or faculty.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    That isn't how it works. You don't get to bank being a not-immoral so you can use it later.
    - serf 12y ago
      even if it did , MIT would likely still be working on the morality-debt incurred during their involvements with various wars. (along with every other famous tech school) http://web.mit.edu/physics/about/history/1940-1945.html http://web.mit.edu/physics/about/history/1940-1945.html
      - sitkack 12y ago
        I think this actually played into Swartz case. That possibly MIT didn't want waken a moral/ethical discussion around technology which is exactly what Aaron was trying to do. His message wasn't dangerous, but the conclusion of it means that the the army of engineers who work on MIT's weapons programs could disrupt a huge cash cow.
kercker 12y ago
The title should be "50 ways that MIT has transformed computer industry". Not too much are about "computer science". To say that MIT has transformed computer industry, it should include include someone like Leslie Lamport.
nkozyra 12y ago
Is there a school that's done more for computer science than MIT? I can think of a few contenders - and obviously this is largely subjective - but when I think computer science in the U.S. I think MIT, Stanford and Cal-Poly in that order.
- aroman 12y ago
  ...you think Cal-Poly over Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley? Really?
  - thesimpsons1022 12y ago
    probably went to cal-poly lol.
    - nkozyra 12y ago
      I'm not familiar with the lol campus.
  - nkozyra 12y ago
    :shrug: like I said, all subjective.
    - axolotlol 12y ago
      I'm curious what contributions you have in mind with regard to Cal Poly (also, Pomona or SLO?).
      - aroman 12y ago
        This. I agree that there is an element of subjectivity to it (Is Cambridge better than Oxford?), but I think it is simply impossible to successfully defend the claim that (as an example) The University of Phoenix has made more contributions to computer science than, say, Berkeley. One way — not the only way, but a reasonable way — to measure it is by the # of Turing Award laureates[0]. Cal Poly isn't even on the list. (Neither is it on the list of Nobel Prize winners, for what it's worth).
muneeb 12y ago
The title is misleading. It makes you think all this research happened at MIT.
- muneeb 12y ago
  For example: #12 The PC (1973), this is Butler Lampson's work on Alto while at PARC. MIT (the university) had nothing to do with it. Also, #17 TCP/IP (1977), Bob Kahn was at MIT for 2 years or so a decade before working on TCP/IP. Including such things takes away attention from "pure" MIT inventions e.g., RSA (all of that work was done by Ron Rivest while at MIT).
  - dang 12y ago
    That's a fair point, and we edited the title accordingly.
rbanffy 12y ago
So, Lisp machines get a mention, but Lisp itself does not. Who writes these things?
- anaphor 12y ago
  Well Lisp itself is a Stanford invention. Scheme is an MIT invention. I agree that Scheme deserves a mention though, even though it isn't widely popular, it certainly transformed how people thought about education and things like garbage collection.
  - lispm 12y ago
    Sure not. 'Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). '
dmolony 12y ago
Dan may not be happy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin
- 001sky 12y ago
  "While a student at Harvard Business School, Bricklin co-developed VisiCalc in 1979, making it the first electronic spreadsheet readily available for home and office use."
- Al__Dante 12y ago
  Also because spelling is apparently not one of MIT's 50 achievments...
  - Al__Dante 12y ago
    And not mine either :-)
abalone 12y ago
Most of this work is publicly funded. They whole VC industry is built on it. It should return more of its profits to the public, just as it would to early-stage investors.
- grinich 12y ago
  If you're interested in this, I highly recommend work by the economist Mariana Mazzucato. In particular, her book "The Entrepreneurial State – Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths." http://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Private-Economics/dp/0857282522/ref=la_B001HPNNRO_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400480167&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Privat...
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  The industries have returned value to the public in the form of taxes, jobs, and improved quality of life. It's already a two way street.
  - abalone 12y ago
    Ok, I'll bite. Next time you invest in a startup, or if you ever were to, you agree to forego equity. Instead take a cut of the sales tax, a job, and the opportunity to purchase the product. Fair deal?
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      That's basically what I do as a tax payer anyways...especially when it comes to investing in basic research, I can live with that.
      - abalone 12y ago
        The question is, would an angel investor take that deal? The answer is obvious: no way. An analogy would be if we all belonged to a VC fund, and the fund manager took a deal where instead of equity they take a cut of future sales tax. Imagine that. No way you'd consider that a fair deal, even if the startup produced some nice products and job opportunities. You'd want equity if it was your personal investment. Why should it be any different for taxpayer funds?
madhusudancs 12y ago
I think many of these claims as "MIT's contribution to transform Computer Science" is unjustified. Particularly, wasn't Bob Kahn already out of MIT when Vint Cerf and him created TCP/IP? What was MIT's role here? Just that they paid salary to Bob Kahn in the distant past? On the other hand, when I think of MIT, the most important contribution to Computer Science that comes to my mind is Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch's proof to Brewer's Conjecture, famously called CAP theorem. This proof is so profound, so important to Computer Science and the way we build large-scale computer systems today. And d'uh, it has been left out. This looks like pure marketing to me. And in some sense misleading.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  Yeah, and if I remember correctly, RMS's work on GNU was not affiliated with MIT and he did it on top of his actual responsibilities in the AI Lab. It's like saying your high school is a great place to be educated because you became famous down the road.
lispm 12y ago
The World Wide Web was INVENTED at CERN in Europe, I thought. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web After that Tim Berners-Lee went to the MIT and founded the W3C.
- Create 12y ago
  You mean the botched SGML clone sent over RPC clicked together in NextStep?
  - Create 12y ago
    dear downvoter: I am happy to counter each and every argument you may have, in case you should have any. Otherwise forget the PR and dig deeper than usual. ps: Actually, this MIT piece is like the CERN web pieces, run by the PR department of said institutions. Such accomplishments are rarely if ever obtained by a single lab, or institution for that matter. They are rather embodiments of the spirit of the times, the effort of many of a given era implemented with the technology then available (see Otlet). The only question is, who gets to win the (often propaganda) fight for the claim and who gets to write history.
    - abalone 12y ago
      You're most likely being downvoted for tone and for lack of any support for your argument. HTML was based on SGMLguid... with one exception. The only radical change was the addition of the all important anchor (<a>) link, without which the WWW wouldn't have taken off. [1] Minor detail. [1] http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/ http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/
      - Create 12y ago
        prewar networked knowledge-base, pre-Bush: https://archive.org/details/paulotlet https://archive.org/details/paulotlet or google youtu.be Paul Otlet, visioning a web in 1934 biased incomplete list of link implementations pre HTML: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations The reason why WWW has taken off is very well described in: High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars. and has very little, if anything to do with the <a> incarnation, which as you say is a minor detail.
randomsearch 12y ago
"50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science" This is really misleading and makes MIT look bad. It's just spin. MIT has done plenty of great work; there is no need to try to take credit for things that they really can't lay claim to. Many examples elsewhere in the comments, but I'll throw in that Ethernet was not invented at MIT. I know the main title now says "MIT-related", but the article is not so modest.
christiansmith 12y ago
#24 caught my attention with the poem/song about the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE_AbM8ZykI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE_AbM8ZykI Somewhere in between music school and programming for a living, I had the superficially nonsensical epiphany that algorithms and data structures were essentially music... just another language for expressing ideas about combinations and time. It's interesting to see this other perspective... an algorithm expressed as a song for the purpose of clearly communicating how it works. The interview with Radia Perlman is a good read too: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-perlman-dont-call-me-the-mother-of-the-internet/284146/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-...

123 points by kp25 12y ago

God

my favorite is the GUI. While many credit XEROX with the GUI, most of the ideas came out of the quite amazing Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland. As an MIT student, this list makes awesome reading! Here is the relevant snippet: Nearly 50 years before the iPad, an MIT PhD student had already come up with the idea of directly interfacing with a computer screen. Ivan Sutherland’s “Sketchpad” allowed users to draw geometric shapes with a touch-pen, pioneering the practice of “computer-assisted drafting” that has proven vital for architects, planners, and now even toddlers.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
The work demonstrated by Engelbart in his MOD was actually done at SRI, which then inspired XEROX. When Alan Kay started his PhD at U of Utah, he was given Sutherland's dissertation to start off with (where Sutherland was a professor). That eventually led to his ground breaking Dynapad concept. Anyways, back then, everyone knew everyone.

kijin 12y ago

It's interesting that they include the FSF, Internet Archive, Creative Commons, and Open Courseware among their "computer science" contributions. These are more political than scientific, although some of them did end up contributing massively to the development of computer science. Now let's talk about some ways in which MIT hindered the development of computer science, including political hindrances. 1. Complicity in the persecution of Aaron Swartz (2011) 2. Anyone else?

chiachun 12y ago

I believe that SICP should also be counted as one itself.

stillsut 12y ago

Clearly one of them is not writing click bait headlines: 50? Ain't nobody got time for that...

puppetmaster3 12y ago

Some PR? When I think MIT I think of Aaron Swartz.

TTPrograms 12y ago
Because inaction in response to federal charges being brought against an unconnected individual outweighs more than 100 years of academic contribution.
- puppetmaster3 12y ago
  Hi TT. This may help you: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=aaron+swartz+mit http://lmgtfy.com/?q=aaron+swartz+mit
- grinich 12y ago
  It should also be noted this this was inaction by the administrators, not necessarily the students, researchers, or faculty.
- sitkack 12y ago
  That isn't how it works. You don't get to bank being a not-immoral so you can use it later.
  - serf 12y ago
    even if it did , MIT would likely still be working on the morality-debt incurred during their involvements with various wars. (along with every other famous tech school) http://web.mit.edu/physics/about/history/1940-1945.html http://web.mit.edu/physics/about/history/1940-1945.html
    - sitkack 12y ago
      I think this actually played into Swartz case. That possibly MIT didn't want waken a moral/ethical discussion around technology which is exactly what Aaron was trying to do. His message wasn't dangerous, but the conclusion of it means that the the army of engineers who work on MIT's weapons programs could disrupt a huge cash cow.

kercker 12y ago

The title should be "50 ways that MIT has transformed computer industry". Not too much are about "computer science". To say that MIT has transformed computer industry, it should include include someone like Leslie Lamport.

nkozyra 12y ago

Is there a school that's done more for computer science than MIT? I can think of a few contenders - and obviously this is largely subjective - but when I think computer science in the U.S. I think MIT, Stanford and Cal-Poly in that order.

aroman 12y ago
...you think Cal-Poly over Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley? Really?
- thesimpsons1022 12y ago
  probably went to cal-poly lol.
  - nkozyra 12y ago
    I'm not familiar with the lol campus.
- nkozyra 12y ago
  :shrug: like I said, all subjective.
  - axolotlol 12y ago
    I'm curious what contributions you have in mind with regard to Cal Poly (also, Pomona or SLO?).
    - aroman 12y ago
      This. I agree that there is an element of subjectivity to it (Is Cambridge better than Oxford?), but I think it is simply impossible to successfully defend the claim that (as an example) The University of Phoenix has made more contributions to computer science than, say, Berkeley. One way — not the only way, but a reasonable way — to measure it is by the # of Turing Award laureates[0]. Cal Poly isn't even on the list. (Neither is it on the list of Nobel Prize winners, for what it's worth).

muneeb 12y ago

The title is misleading. It makes you think all this research happened at MIT.

muneeb 12y ago
For example: #12 The PC (1973), this is Butler Lampson's work on Alto while at PARC. MIT (the university) had nothing to do with it. Also, #17 TCP/IP (1977), Bob Kahn was at MIT for 2 years or so a decade before working on TCP/IP. Including such things takes away attention from "pure" MIT inventions e.g., RSA (all of that work was done by Ron Rivest while at MIT).
- dang 12y ago
  That's a fair point, and we edited the title accordingly.

rbanffy 12y ago

So, Lisp machines get a mention, but Lisp itself does not. Who writes these things?

anaphor 12y ago
Well Lisp itself is a Stanford invention. Scheme is an MIT invention. I agree that Scheme deserves a mention though, even though it isn't widely popular, it certainly transformed how people thought about education and things like garbage collection.
- lispm 12y ago
  Sure not. 'Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). '

dmolony 12y ago

Dan may not be happy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin

001sky 12y ago
"While a student at Harvard Business School, Bricklin co-developed VisiCalc in 1979, making it the first electronic spreadsheet readily available for home and office use."
Al__Dante 12y ago
Also because spelling is apparently not one of MIT's 50 achievments...
- Al__Dante 12y ago
  And not mine either :-)

abalone 12y ago

Most of this work is publicly funded. They whole VC industry is built on it. It should return more of its profits to the public, just as it would to early-stage investors.

grinich 12y ago
If you're interested in this, I highly recommend work by the economist Mariana Mazzucato. In particular, her book "The Entrepreneurial State – Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths." http://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Private-Economics/dp/0857282522/ref=la_B001HPNNRO_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400480167&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurial-State-Debunking-Privat...
seanmcdirmid 12y ago
The industries have returned value to the public in the form of taxes, jobs, and improved quality of life. It's already a two way street.
- abalone 12y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. Next time you invest in a startup, or if you ever were to, you agree to forego equity. Instead take a cut of the sales tax, a job, and the opportunity to purchase the product. Fair deal?
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    That's basically what I do as a tax payer anyways...especially when it comes to investing in basic research, I can live with that.
    - abalone 12y ago
      The question is, would an angel investor take that deal? The answer is obvious: no way. An analogy would be if we all belonged to a VC fund, and the fund manager took a deal where instead of equity they take a cut of future sales tax. Imagine that. No way you'd consider that a fair deal, even if the startup produced some nice products and job opportunities. You'd want equity if it was your personal investment. Why should it be any different for taxpayer funds?

madhusudancs 12y ago

I think many of these claims as "MIT's contribution to transform Computer Science" is unjustified. Particularly, wasn't Bob Kahn already out of MIT when Vint Cerf and him created TCP/IP? What was MIT's role here? Just that they paid salary to Bob Kahn in the distant past? On the other hand, when I think of MIT, the most important contribution to Computer Science that comes to my mind is Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch's proof to Brewer's Conjecture, famously called CAP theorem. This proof is so profound, so important to Computer Science and the way we build large-scale computer systems today. And d'uh, it has been left out. This looks like pure marketing to me. And in some sense misleading.

ekianjo 12y ago
Yeah, and if I remember correctly, RMS's work on GNU was not affiliated with MIT and he did it on top of his actual responsibilities in the AI Lab. It's like saying your high school is a great place to be educated because you became famous down the road.

lispm 12y ago

The World Wide Web was INVENTED at CERN in Europe, I thought. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web After that Tim Berners-Lee went to the MIT and founded the W3C.

Create 12y ago
You mean the botched SGML clone sent over RPC clicked together in NextStep?
- Create 12y ago
  dear downvoter: I am happy to counter each and every argument you may have, in case you should have any. Otherwise forget the PR and dig deeper than usual. ps: Actually, this MIT piece is like the CERN web pieces, run by the PR department of said institutions. Such accomplishments are rarely if ever obtained by a single lab, or institution for that matter. They are rather embodiments of the spirit of the times, the effort of many of a given era implemented with the technology then available (see Otlet). The only question is, who gets to win the (often propaganda) fight for the claim and who gets to write history.
  - abalone 12y ago
    You're most likely being downvoted for tone and for lack of any support for your argument. HTML was based on SGMLguid... with one exception. The only radical change was the addition of the all important anchor (<a>) link, without which the WWW wouldn't have taken off. [1] Minor detail. [1] http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/ http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/
    - Create 12y ago
      prewar networked knowledge-base, pre-Bush: https://archive.org/details/paulotlet https://archive.org/details/paulotlet or google youtu.be Paul Otlet, visioning a web in 1934 biased incomplete list of link implementations pre HTML: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations The reason why WWW has taken off is very well described in: High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars. and has very little, if anything to do with the <a> incarnation, which as you say is a minor detail.

randomsearch 12y ago

"50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science" This is really misleading and makes MIT look bad. It's just spin. MIT has done plenty of great work; there is no need to try to take credit for things that they really can't lay claim to. Many examples elsewhere in the comments, but I'll throw in that Ethernet was not invented at MIT. I know the main title now says "MIT-related", but the article is not so modest.

christiansmith 12y ago

#24 caught my attention with the poem/song about the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE_AbM8ZykI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE_AbM8ZykI Somewhere in between music school and programming for a living, I had the superficially nonsensical epiphany that algorithms and data structures were essentially music... just another language for expressing ideas about combinations and time. It's interesting to see this other perspective... an algorithm expressed as a song for the purpose of clearly communicating how it works. The interview with Radia Perlman is a good read too: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-perlman-dont-call-me-the-mother-of-the-internet/284146/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-...