The oral histories of the pioneers that led to interactive computing have much to offer today's leaders in business, industry, and academia on how to get complex things done. After all, industry, government, and academia working together created the computer industry, which led to the Internet as we know it today. To do so, the pioneers had to get around the various “systems” of the day that are always impediments to implementing new ideas. In their case, it was the voice-dominated communications industry. For example, packet switching was invented to get around such an issue. This was key to allowing incompatible computers to “talk” to each other across academia, and later industry, which would be the key to the Internet. Cullinane Corporation, the computer industry's first successful software products company, benefited from this technology as it focused on database software as the foundation for interactive computer systems for industry, government, and academia. As such, this book is a personal walk through the history that led to interactive computing as John Cullinane witnessed it and participated in it, with the help of the oral histories of some key pioneers, organized and introduced in a way that illustrates the close interaction of the various individuals and organizations involved in the evolution of interactive computing. These oral histories, including John's, were drawn from the archives of over 300 such histories located at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
Some time ago, I did an Internet search on Richard Bloch a true computer industry pioneer as well as a good friend and was surprised to discover there wasn't very much about him available. Wasn't Richard the first programmer of the first programmable computer, the MARK 1 at Harvard under Howard Aiken? Didn't he program atom bomb equations for John Von Neumann, the great mathematician of the era. Didn't he, as a 22 year old ensign, teach, the eventually to be famous, Grace Hopper how to program? Didn't he go on to design the highly successful Honeywell 800, 400, and 200 line of computers? How could there be so little information on him? Then, I came across his oral history at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. It was all there, and better still, in his own words. It was fascinating to read. I realized how little I knew about all that Richard Bloch had done. I noted that there were about 300 other oral histories of computer industry pioneers at CBI, including my own. Most were equally fascinating to read. I was so impressed that I decided to "compile" a book of oral histories of selected industry pioneers whom I knew to have had a big impact on the creation of the computer industry as well as on my own career.
However, most importantly, when I read the oral histories something very significant jumped out at me. The computer industry didn't just happen. It was the unanticipated result of the American government, business, and academia working together to help win WW2. It was also a meritocracy. There was no discrimination of any kind that I could detect. This was particularly true when it came to women. All anyone cared about was whether you could do the job or not. How lucky we were because this was not true of any other industry of the time. As a result, America would become the leader in the world in computer technology, with all the wealth and jobs that would eventually come with it, and still do. Ironically, England could have been the major beneficiary but its key people didn't have the financial support of their government at the critical moment after WW2 as did their contemporaries in America. This is one of the main reasons for the book. I believe that there are very important messages in these oral histories for today's leaders at any level from the President of the United States on down. Despite what many say, it often takes the full involvement of academia, government and business to get important and difficult things done in a democracy, or anywhere else. For example, I witnessed it first hand produce peace in Northern Ireland. Yet, there are always impediments to introducing any new idea and ways have to be found to get around them. Also, just one good person can make an incredible difference. In addition, good ideas are easy to come by, but bringing them to life can be incredibly difficult. Finally, there are always unanticipated results to any action. In this case of the pioneers created an industry that led to the Internet.
Many of the academic pioneers were located at MIT, Harvard, and the "third university" in Cambridge, Bolt, Beranek & Newman. Its fair to say that while Cambridge was the center of computer technology at the time there was very important research going on across America and other parts of the world. Fortunately, the oral histories in the book point to other key pioneers who played equally important roles in creating the computer industry. That's just one reason why they are so valuable. However, it does include those who provided non-peer review funding from the U.S. government via DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which was of critical importance. It also includes the oral histories of individuals from companies such as IBM, Honeywell, GE, University Computing etc. who designed the computers and/or helped move computer technology from academia to mainstream America.This was a true collaborative effort in the grand sense, even though there were individual winners and losers along the way. However, in summary I found many of these oral histories inspiring.
John Cullinane is the author of Smarter than Their Computers -- The Oral Histories of the Pioneers of Interactive Computing, published by the Association for Computing Machinery and based on oral histories archived at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Included are the oral histories of some key pioneers of the computer industry selected by John that led to interactive computing, such as Richard Bloch, Gene Amdahl, Herbert W. Robinson, Sam Wyly, J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Larry Roberts, Robert Kahn, Marvin Minsky, Michael Dertouzos, Joseph Traub, as well as his own. John has woven them together via personal introductions that is, in essence, a personal walk down the computer industry road. What makes the book different is that John had the unique advantage of having been part of, or witness to, much of history contained in these oral histories beginning as a co-op student at Arthur D. Little, Inc. in the 1950’s. Eventually, he would become a pioneer in his own right by creating the industry's first successful software products company (Cullinane Corporation) at a time when industry experts said that it couldn't be done and that others who tried had failed etc. Ironically, work done by industry pioneers such as Robert Kahn with packet switching helped his company succeed.
The wireless medium is a shared resource. If nearby devices transmit at the same time, their signals interfere, resulting in a collision. In traditional networks, collisions cause the loss of the transmitted information. For this reason, wireless networks have been designed with the assumption that interference is intrinsically harmful and must be avoided.
This book takes an alternate approach: Instead of viewing interference as an inherently counterproductive phenomenon that should to be avoided, we design practical systems that transform interference into a harmless, and even a beneficial phenomenon. To achieve this goal, we consider how wireless signals interact when they interfere, and use this understanding in our system designs. Specifically, when interference occurs, the signals get mixed on the wireless medium. By understanding the parameters of this mixing, we can invert the mixing and decode the interfered packets; thus, making interference harmless. Furthermore, we can control this mixing process to create strategic interference that allow decodability at a particular receiver of interest, but prevent decodability at unintended receivers and adversaries. Hence, we can transform interference into a beneficial phenomenon that provides security.
As science becomes increasingly computational, the limits of what is computationally tractable become a barrier to scientific progress. Many scientific problems, however, are amenable to human problem solving skills that complement computational power. By leveraging these skills on a larger scale – beyond the relatively few individuals currently engaged in scientific inquiry – there is the potential for new scientific discoveries.
This book presents a framework for mapping open scientific problems into video games. The game framework combines computational power with human problem solving and creativity to work toward solving scientific problems that neither computers nor humans could previously solve alone. To maximize the potential contributors to scientific discovery, the framework designs a game to be played by people with no formal scientific background and incentivizes long-term engagement with a myriad of collaborative on competitive reward structures. The framework allows for the continual coevolution of the players and the game to each other: as players gain expertise through gameplay, the game changes to become a better tool.
The framework is validated by being applied to proteomics problems with the video game Foldit. Foldit players have contributed to novel discoveries in protein structure prediction, protein design, and protein structure refinement algorithms. The coevolution of human problem solving and computer tools in an incentivized game framework is an exciting new scientific pathway that can lead to discoveries currently unreachable by other methods.
As society rushes to digitize sensitive information and services, it is imperative to adopt adequate security protections. However, such protections fundamentally conflict with the benefits we expect from commodity computers. In other words, consumers and businesses value commodity computers because they provide good performance and an abundance of features at relatively low costs. Meanwhile, attempts to build secure systems from the ground up typically abandon such goals, and hence are seldom adopted. In this book we describe how to resolve the tension between security and features by leveraging the trust a user has in one device to enable her to securely use another commodity device or service, without sacrificing the performance and features expected of commodity systems. At a high level, we support this premise by developing techniques to allow a user to employ a small, trusted, portable device to securely learn what code is executing on her local computer. Rather than entrusting her data to the mountain of buggy code likely running on her computer, we construct an on-demand secure execution environment which can perform security-sensitive tasks and handle private data in complete isolation from all other software (and most hardware) on the system. Meanwhile, non-security-sensitive software retains the same abundance of features and performance it enjoys today.
