I came upon this video recently titled “Dangerous Knowledge”, produced by the BBC. It profiles the life and times of three mathematicians (Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing) and one scientist (Ludwig Boltzmann). For some reason it drew me in.
The show makes allusions to an atheism which I find difficult to relate to this [...]
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
The death of certainty and the birth of computer science
Posted in History, Math & Science, computer science, tagged Alan Turing, computer science, Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, mathematics on August 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Does computer science have a future?
Posted in Analysis, Education, History, Information Technology, Math & Science, flame, tagged alan kay, computer science, data processing, science, scientific computing on August 12, 2009 | 12 Comments »
Update 8-17-09: I’ve revised this post a bit to clarify some points I made.
I received a request 2-1/2 weeks ago to write a post based on video of a speech that Alan Kay gave at Kyoto University in February, titled “Systems Thinking For Children And Adults”. Here it is. The volume in the first 10 [...]
Our economic future
Posted in Analysis, Government policy, History, tagged economics, federal budget, policy, TARP on March 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“We all believed in socialism because we were children of a different generation. Then I realized that if you want to irradicate poverty you don’t do it by redistribution of existing wealth. You have to create new wealth.”
— Narayana Murthy, Chairman and CEO of Infosys, circa. 2002
I’m stepping into an area fraught with politics, which I [...]
My journey, Part 5
Posted in History, Programming, tagged C++, career, civilization, simulation, technology on January 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Moments of inspiration
It was sometime in 1997, I think. One day I was flipping channels on my TV, and I happened upon an interview with a man who fascinated me. I didn’t recognize him. It was on a local cable channel. I caught the interview in the middle, and [...]
My journey, Part 4
Posted in History, Programming, Technology and Software, tagged Alto, Apple, career, computer history, Macintosh, Smalltalk, software development, Xerox PARC on January 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The real world
Each year while I was in school I looked for summer internships, but had no luck. The economy sucked. In my final year of school I started looking for permanent work, and I felt almost totally lost. I asked CS grads about it. They told me “You’ll never find [...]
My journey, Part 3
Posted in Education, History, Programming, tagged computer as medium, computer history, computer science on December 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
See Part 1, Part 2
College
I went to Colorado State University in 1988. As I went through college I forgot about my fantasies of computers changing society. I was focused on writing programs that were more sophisticated than I had ever written before, appreciating architectural features of software and emulating them in my own projects, and learning [...]
My journey, Part 2
Posted in History, Programming, tagged american computer science league, computer history, fizzbuzz, Programming, the computer generation, women in computer science on December 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
See Part 1
A sense of history
“Computer Generation”, May 3, 1982, Time Magazine
I had never seen a machine before that I could change so easily (relative to other machines). I had this sense that these computers represented something big. I didn’t know what it was. It was just a general feeling I got from reading computer [...]
The computer as medium
Posted in Education, History, Programming, Squeak, Technology and Software, tagged alan kay, chris crawford, computer, culture, etoys, gutenberg, History, media, medium, printing press, Programming, societal influence, Squeak, squeakers, squeakland, writing on September 14, 2008 | 13 Comments »
In my guest post on Paul Murphy’s blog called “The PC vision was lost from the get go” I spoke to the concept, which Alan Kay had going back to the 1970s, that the personal computer is a new medium, like the book at the time the technology for the printing press was brought to Europe, [...]
A history of the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga
Posted in History, Technology and Software, tagged 16bit, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, History, ST on May 16, 2008 | 2 Comments »
A while back I wrote my “Reminiscing” series of posts talking about the history of the machines I used growing up, as I remembered it. I came upon a few materials on reddit over a period of about a month that gave more authoritative histories of the Atari ST and Amiga. They’re really neat to [...]
