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Babbage, A Look Back
A reader writes "System Toolbox just started a new computer history section in an effort to get us geeks in touch with our "roots." The current article in the monthly column focuses on Charles Babbage. The editor and author hope to raise awareness of our past so that scenes like this won't continue to take place. A big hill to climb, but worth the effort."
As far as the history goes though, I suppose you are supposed to be interested in computing, and are supposed to do a lot of background reading, so I suppose it could be argued that you should have built up an amount by yourself...
J-aims
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Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
I also graduated from a university in England, although it was ten years ago now.
I studied a combined degree of biology and computer science, and so I used to take courses from both the biology and the CS schools.
What struck me then was what a bunch of dunderheads the computer scientists where. Sure, they new the finer points of Unix better than I ever will, but if you asked them to write an essay on the importance of computers to society, for instance, they could hardly string two words together - an average biology student could have done a far better job of it. Frankly most of their essays were embarrassing in their childish views, ignorance, poor grammar and spelling.
And my point is? Well, at least in my experience, I think that many people who are hardcore computer enthusiasts generally have a far more myopic view of the world than people from other subject areas. They are socially inept and interested in very little else but computers, and even then in very narrow fields of computers rather than the bigger picture. I don't know if it has changed, but when I graduated many big employeers complained that computer graduates often lacked the most basic skills. Is it like this in the USA too?
For some reason he didn't publish his results. Some believe that he was told not to by the British government, so that they could use his discovery during the Crimean war. Babbage's work on this subject was discovered in his notebooks after his death.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
My advice is to make the effort and go to H2K2 and get a real sample. I think you will find like I did when I spoke at H2K, that the majority are well informed about our history.
Like any culture, our culture needs to be taught! Only so many can have had first hand experience and there are less of us each day. Yet, each day, there are more just coming into interest who need to be taught. If you find such a teacherless group of people interested in computers, you should take it upon yourself to teach who we are.
Show people the first computer you ever programmed. Show them the games you played and wrote. Show them how to say "Hello World!" directly with a Turing Machine or in Java and everything between.
Tell them about Norbert Wiener and Marie Ampere. Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush. Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and David Levy (yes Ken Thompson too and Belle). Scott Adams(all three) and Stanislaw Lem. Joeseph Weizenbaum and Eliza, Alaxander Bain and Donald Hebb. Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney and Larry Bryan. Alan Kay and Steve Russell. David Gottieb, Joel Hochberg and Al Arcorn. Thomas Hobbes and Levithan. Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Aristotle and Lucretius. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles Babbage and Blaise Pascal. B. F. Skinner and Wilhelm Wundt. Robert Tinney and Peter Max. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. Doug Lenat, Push Singh and myself.
We will always need more teachers who know how to both show and to tell!
I interview a lot of co-op students for job placements in the company that I work for now, and for large company in the past. Sometimes, I get some really cocky student who comes in with a smug attitude that he knows it all.
Sure enough, he can answer the technical questions flawlessly just as if he had read it from a textbook. He could show ingenuity for coming up with solutions on the fly as well... And usually when they get that look in their eye: "I know you want to hire me - make me a REALLY good offer, and I might consider working for you." I then ask the killer question:
"Who is Charles Babbage?"
The blank look on their face is priceless. It's a simple curveball. I've received answers ranging from: "I'm not sure - wasn't he featured in PC Magazine last month?" to "Oh - he's the founder of IBM." and "I... I... Don't know..."
I then answer the question with a short history lesson. They of course often recall it - yes, but didn't think that it was important.
I'm amazed at how much computing history has been forgotten from introductory courses in High School. There was an incredible amount of effort and ingenuity required to get us to the place we are today: information available within seconds, toys to entertain, tools to teach and make life easier (mine is easier now because of them), communication barriers broken down, etc... It's caused other problems too, but man - what doesn't. I'll take the benefits over the problems any day.
Hanging up in my office is a picture of Charles Babbage, and one of Ada.
"Who is Grace Hopper?" is my backup question.
Hehehehe...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Of course, that was way back in the 60's, er 1960's. I actually got to work with a computer in 1973 (HP2000 timesharing monstrosity running basic connected to dialup teletypes -- we got a DECwriter the next year, whee, 300 bps!) and experienced punched cards when I started my Comp. Sc. Degree program in 1979 -- we had DECwriters there too, and a few CRT terminals (at the end of current loop lines at, you guessed it, 300 bps), but course work had to be done via punched cards, submitted to the "express" window. You only had to wait 15-30 minutes for your job to get turned around.
I remember those days quite well. Today, I sometimes interview recent grads for software design jobs. One standard problem I pose is "Write a routine, in any programming language of your choice (I've probably seen it), that sorts an array of things according to some ordering scheme. I don't care about efficiency, but I expect the following: (a) that it is correct, (b) that you can explain the complexity of the algorithm in "O(n)" notation." Of course I expect a bubble sort of integers. One smartass did a Shell sort and got it right. But over 90% of the candidates fail this basic test. That's sad.
The scary part is that peer reviewers think this is being "too hard" on a candidate. Or worse, I remember one kid who added "servlets" to an FTP server -- basically he provided an API for command plug-ins that executed server-side and could provide massaged data back to the client. So, for example, you could do back-end SQL queries via FTP. Obviously an excercise in program extensibility. Trouble is, he didn't even get an offer -- a coworker insisted that he must have been "bullshitting" because "everyone knows that servlets are a Java thing and not an FTP thing". My protests got voted down. So, technical ignorance has permeated even the supposed technical interview -- on the part of the interviewers! Shortly after losing that battle, I left the employ of that company.
I remember building memory boards for an old SWTPC computer (none of us geek kids could afford to buy them assembled). I remember lamenting when the IBM PC booted into ROM Basic and displayed "Ready" -- who's gonna know how the computer gets to that point? that was what, almost 20 years ago?
There is hope. I often see young (say, under 20 years old) posters here who do have a clue. I envy that they have far better tools than I did as a kid, but note that these same "better tools" make it no big deal to be a script kiddie techno-vandal. Compare the history of mass computing to the history of the car. Anyone can drive a car today. Few know how to fix one or what makes it run, But, even with the ease of "turn the key, push on the gas, and remember to steer" driving, some still hack their cars. I take that as a sign that hacking doesn't die -- the computer hacker was a rare breed in the 1970s and still is despite the fact that there are a lot of 'leet wannabees around without a clue.
My advice to the young hacker is to seek out other hackers, young and old (say 40 and up), and avoid the wannabees. Of course, this implies a willingness and responsibility on the part of us "old guys" to mentor -- sure, you don't need a fast sort, or balanced tree structure, when you've got a 1 Ghz processor, but imagine how much faster and scalable your code will be if you use one. In my day, RAM was fast, and disk was S L O W, so you carefully designed your algorithms to minimize disk access. These days, you want stuff to stay locked in processor cache 'cause RAM is slow, by comparison. Look at other "hobies", like HAM radio, and see how "the torch gets passed on" there. We should strive for similar effect.
You could've hired me.