In article ,
says...
Kevin Willoughby wrote:
In article ,
says...
But don't leave out Admiral
Hopper. She was a major player in getting those electronical
thinkums to do useful work. I'd hate to be in a command bunker
somewhere trying to calculate an incoming missile's impact point by
hand.
??
Hopper is best known for her work in implementing and, especially,
evangelizing COBOL, a language poorly suited to real-time,
physics-heavy programs.

Hopper was involved with computing and computers (as a machine, rather
than a job description)

That's the distinction between "computer" and "computor".


She played a big part in
the Navy's Mark I, II, and III projects,

[insert obligatory anecdote about her tapeing a moth into the log of
Harvard's early computers, creating the neologism of a "bug" for a
misbehaving computer.]


She was a problem solver, who saw computers as a tool for easing
people's work first, and as a nifty toy second. (A useful
characteristic in this profession, and all too rare.)

Yes, agreed. I've had the pleasure of being in her audience a few times.
Once, back when the Computer Museum was located in the next town over
from my town (I.e., back when it was still in one of DEC's buildings in
Marlboro Massachusetts, USA), I wandered around the museum, accidently
entering the room where Grace Hopper was chatting with the museum staff.
To my dismay, she was a smoker. She was *short*, maybe 5 foot tall. Yet
she had a sense of presence, a --something-- that made it clear that she
was in charge despite the fact that she was in civilian dress and seated
while others were standing.


Those achievements, and the environment that they led to, created an
atmosphere receptive to the next big step, which was:

SAGE was an Air Force/IBM project, using, iirc, machine language.
SAGE was the brainchild of George Valley.

The time I wandered into her presence was during the time when Ronald
Reagan was talking about his "Star Wars" system for an impenetrable
shield against attack by the USSR. In one of those "my hero has feet of
clay" moments, I sat in the audience while Hopper explained how to test
programs based on various lists that the early COBOL compilers would
generate. To see one one of my software-engineering heros stumble,
failing to understand the complexity of a real time "it has to work
correctly the very first time" system was devasting. She really didn't
understand what people like Dijkstra
(http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/) and Parnas
(http://klabs.org/richcontent/softwar...nas_acm_85.pdf)
were saying about the complexity that realtime issues impose upon a
program. I left that lecture in a very sober mood.


It was, IIRC, the first application of modems.

Anybody who has any claim of being a software engineer knows about SAGE.
Not just because it was the first use of modems, but because it was the
first big distributed real-time system.


It compared these tracks to known flight plans, and
assigned ranking to the targets.

Yep. Also, it had one of the first graphical displays of information and
the first "pointing device" for interacting with those flight plans as
displayed on a screen.

That "pointing device" would later be recognised by Douglas Engelbart.
He created a "variation on a theme" that he called the "mouse". Apple
picked up the idea, and then Microsoft stole it and now we all have a
mouse or a trackball or some such device on our computers.


A SAGE sector also monitored the information and intercepts of all
the sectors around it - if a sector went down during an attack, it
automatically failed-over to the adjoining sectors. (Data sharing and
networking)

I've had to design and implement fail-over systems. It's hard enough to
do it with today's technology. To do it with 1950's technology is
amazing.


Oh, and it wasn't entirely machine language.
MIT/Lincoln (Later Mitre) developed an Assembly language early on, and
there was a FORTRAN-like high level language.

This is news to me. Do you have any references?
--
Kevin Willoughby lid

The loss of the American system of checks and balances
is more of a security danger than any terrorist risk.
-- Bruce Schneier