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Category Archives: General
Remembering Jim Gray
Jim Gray’s professional contributions to the theory and practice of transactions, databases, and scientific applications of large databases, coupled with his teaching, mentoring, and warm friendships made a tremendous impact on the world. When he failed to return from sailing … Continue reading
Posted in General, Software history
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Chinese translation of Elements of Programming
In addition to the English, Japanese, and Russian editions, Elements of Programming is now available in a Chinese edition translated by Professor Qiu Zongyan (裘宗燕) of Peking University and published by China Machine Press. It’s interesting that every translation has … Continue reading
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Russian translation of Elements of Programming
In addition to the English and Japanese editions, Elements of Programming is now available in a Russian edition translated by Konstantin Ptitsyn (Константин Птицын) and published by Williams Publishing House. The publisher’s web page has links to booksellers.
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Vintage Computer Festival East 7.0
Evan Koblentz just sent me a link to the flyer for the Vintage Computer Festival East 7.0, which is scheduled for May 14-15, 2011, in Wall, New Jersey. Lectures in the mornings; exhibits in the afternoons; see the flyer for … Continue reading
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Japanese translation of Elements of Programming
Elements of Programming is now available in a Japanese edition published by Pearson Kirihara and translated by Yoshiki Shibata. It is available via Amazon.jp.
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Elements of Programming video
On November 3, 2010, we presented a lecture on Elements of Programming to the Department of Electrical Engineering Computer Systems Colloquium (EE380) at the Stanford University. While we both take responsibility for the contents, Alex Stepanov lectured. A video of … Continue reading
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Robert L. Patrick on eMuseums
Bob Patrick is a friend of mine who entered the computer field in 1951, and whose hands-on experience running programs on an IBM 701 led him to conceive of the architecture for the General Motors/North American Monitor for the IBM … Continue reading
Posted in General, Oral history, Software history
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Bob Taylor on CHM’s YouTube channel
Bob Taylor was the featured guest at a recent Computer History Museum event: “Net@40: Robert W. Taylor in Conversation with Guy Raz”. The video of that event is now online. (See here and here for earlier postings about Bob on … Continue reading
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Don Chamberlin and the origin of SQL
Tonight Don Chamberlin will receive a 2009 Fellow Award of the Computer History Museum “for his fundamental work on structured query language (SQL) and database architectures”. The other awardees for 2009 are Robert R. Everett (M.I.T. Whirlwind and SAGE) and … Continue reading
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Elements of Programming
Elements of Programming, by Alexander Stepanov and Paul McJones, was published this month by Addison-Wesley Professional. From the preface: This book applies the deductive method to programming by affiliating programs with the abstract mathematical theories that enable them to work. … Continue reading
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Oral history of Robert W. Taylor
Robert W. Taylor directed external research at NASA, where he funded early work by Douglas Engelbart, and at the ARPA IPTO, where he initiated the ARPANET project. He also founded the Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory and later the DEC … Continue reading
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Lisp’s 50th Birthday Celebration
A celebration of the 50th anniversary of Lisp is taking place in October at OOPSLA 2008. John McCarthy will give a talk about the early history of Lisp. Also Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel will repeat their 1992 HOPL-II talk … Continue reading
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Computer History Museum videos coming to YouTube
The Computer History Museum has just launched a partnership with YouTube to provide a ComputerHistory “channel”. Right now it has 23 videos from various events and lectures at the museum; if you subscribe (via the orange button), you’ll be notified … Continue reading
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C++ Historical Sources Archive
Observant audience members at Bjarne Stroustrup’s HOPL-III C++ talk this past weekend may have noticed on the last slide a mention of the C++ Historical Sources Archive at the Computer History Museum. This is a project Bjarne and I have … Continue reading
Posted in General, Repositories, Software history
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Remembering John Backus
As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, I first learned of John Backus and his work on Fortran, BNF, and Algol. Around 1972 or 1973 I attended a talk John gave on “variable-free … Continue reading
Posted in FORTRAN, General, Software history
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Upgraded to WordPress 2.1
This blog is now running on WordPress 2.1. I’d like to thank the friendly staff at my ISP, meer.net, for moving my account to a new server with PHP 4.1.21. Please let me (paul at mcjones dot org) know if … Continue reading
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A report and a request from Al Kossow
Many people know of Al Kossow through his work on bitsavers.org, which I mentioned in a previous post. I’m very pleased to mention here Al’s recent appointment as the Robert N. Miner Software Curator at the Computer History Museum. Al … Continue reading
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TENEX Interlisp
Tom Rindfleisch kindly supplied a set of TENEX Interlisp files from a system dump of the SUMEX-AIM <lisp> directory as of January 31, 1982. Tom notes: This version of Interlisp should be both TENEX and TOPS20 compatible. It came at … Continue reading
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Progress with Lisp 1.5 source
Rich Cornwell (some of whose work I reported on earlier) and Bob Abeles (who was the first to point out to me the existence of the Fortran II sources) have recently completed a reconstruction of the card deck for the “Bonnie’s Birthday Assembly” … Continue reading
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Upgraded to WordPress 1.5
I recently upgraded the WordPress server this blog runs on from version 1.2 to version 1.5, which has many internal improvements, and I decided to switch to a new visual “theme” rather than figure out how to upgrade the one … Continue reading
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