Augmented Post

Sometimes I have more to say. From a previous post:


We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. - Maria Montessori 

Remember Computer Science is indeed a science.


I started at the university in 1967. In my General Engineering class we were privileged to have a class or two using the spiffy new analog computer. It had a bunch of op-amps, capacitors, resisters, voltmeters (analog dials of course), an osciiiscope and a patch panel not unlike the first telephone operators had with wires you could strech from device to device. It was by way of these wires that you "programmed" this computer. This machine had no memory as such - if you don't define a voltage across a capacitor as memory.


About this same time a lab partner had access to the IBM 1600 which was in the basement of the engineering bluilding. It consisted of three upright piano sized units; card punch, card line printer, card eader/cpu. Output  of the cpu was by way of punched cards. It , if I remember correctly, had 1,400 bits of core, was programmable only in asembly language via punch-cards.


There was a debate going on at the time: digital or analog? Analog computers were pretty good at solving differential equations. While they were a little short on accuracy they at least provided an answer; digital machines like the 1600 just didn't have the RAM needed to provide any answer at all. (Even in 1972 I took a grad course on Numerical Methods where the text book was "Numerical Methods that (usually) Work". No kidding!). Four years later (1971) the CDC 3300 and the computer department had its own building and there was a terminal in every building on campus. Needless to say the CDC 3300 was digital. The argument had been settled. The 3300 had something like 56k of RAM and was as slow as bejesus if there was more than a few dozen users on at any one time. If your program used many resources you would have to submit it to run overnight.


By that time I was working for EPA and we were also using the IBM 360 in Bethesda Maryland (at NIH). We used our card reader and 300 bit/second modem to submit jobs using JCL (Job Control Language) the most arcane, frustrating, evil, operating system ever devised by demons - I mean humans. If the card reader didn't fail then your JCL probably would and it would take a day to find out. I firmly believe the reason there are so many religious people in the world is because of JCL and card readers. Talk about the power of prayer! One got to where anything was worth a try! 


But I digress. My point here is we didn't have a clue what was going to become of the computer industry. We could not conceive of the utility of a personal computer. Gigabyte was beyond our imagination (I don't even know if the word existed at the time). There were very, very few who had the imagination to even hazard a guess at the future of computing. Most were science fiction writers and they were dismissed as crackpots out to make a buck writing fiction.


Pay attention to the crackpots. Don't swallow everything they say but somewhere within all that noise may be a fragment of an idea that may change the future.