HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ ncmncm

Hal Laning really has been neglected. This is the first place I have seen his work mentioned in public. He did the compiler for Whirlwind, the first actual compiler ever. Knuth notes here it compiled to a series of subroutine calls.

Hal gets first credit on the Apollo 11 moon landing not failing when operator error (a switch in wrong position, missed on the pre-landing checklist), causing the program to be unable to complete all its work on schedule, failed "soft" without losing control of the spacecraft. On each fault, it rebooted and resumed the high-priority processes with all of their important state preserved. Don Eyles, who coded most of the actual landing process, explains in detail in his book "Sunburst and Luminary". Recommended. (People often give Margaret Hamilton credit for this, but her involvement came after this work was done.)

http://www.sunburstandluminary.com

Hal died in 2012, passed over for a Turing award, decade after decade.

⬐ ncmncm

... "did a compiler for the Whirlwind". I think the Whirlwind was a precursor for the heavily networked real-time fire-control computers installed, at breakneck speed, in all US Navy ships of any size in the early '60s.

⬐ janvdberg

Computer History Museum uploaded a bunch of interesting new videos from the The First International Research Conference on the History of Computing.

⬐ svat

Wow, this is a talk from June 1976. After this talk he published it as “The early development of programming languages” with Luis Trabb Pardo as a Stanford report in August 1976 (available online e.g. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA032123), then "for real" as a contribution to a 1977 encyclopedia, and the definitive version collected as Chapter 1 of his "Selected Papers on Computer Languages". When that collection came out in 2003, he gave a talk at the Computer History Museum, under the title "A Dozen Precursors of Fortran", available here: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10262213... as a .wmv file; I've also reuploaded to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGt86UHRAXY

Talk description:

> The history of a subject helps us not only to understand how the important ideas were born but also to appreciate the amount of progress that has been made. The history of programming languages is a striking example, because basic concepts that we now regard as self-evident were by no means obvious a priori; many years of hard work by brilliant and dedicated people were necessary before these basic principles were learned.

> This talk will discuss contributions of Zuse (1945), Goldstine and von Neumann (1946), Curry (1948), Mauchly et al (1949), Burks (1950), Wheeler (1951), Rutishauser (1951), Böhm (1951), Glennie (1952), Hopper et al (1953), Laning and Zierler (1953), Brooker (1954), Kaminynin and Ljubimskiy (1954), Ershov (1955), Grems and Porter (1955), Elsworth et al (1955), Blum (1956), Perlis et al (1956), Katz et al (1956), Bauer and Samelson (1956), Melahn et al (1956), as well as the prototype of FORTRAN developed by Backus et al from 1954 to 1957. At least a dozen of these efforts will be illustrated by showing how a particular procedure called the TPK algorithm might have been coded at the time.

It may be interesting to watch this 1976 talk and the 2003 talk, and see if anything has changed in the history. :-)