Browsing by Subject "Computer programming."

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Oral history interview with Ben Persons and Herb Pelnar
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2001-07-17) Persons, Ben; Pelnar, Herb
    In this oral history Ben Persons, most recently Technical Assistant to the Lab Director at IBM Rochester, and Herb Pelnar, retired AS/400 System Administrator, talk about their careers at IBM, focusing in particular on the development of System/38. Persons shares his experiences repairing World Trade equipment, contributing to the design of an underground command and control system for the Pentagon, and his work on TSS at IBM’s Yorktown research facility. Pelnar discusses his employment as a SAGE display system technician and in coordinating the RETAIN maintenance system. Pelnar also speaks about about his work coding System/32, and on the role and environment of the programmer within IBM before 1980.
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    Oral history interview with Carl Machover
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2002-06-20) Machover, Carl.
    Carl Machover is computer graphics pioneer and president of Machover Associates Corporation (MAC), a computer graphics consultancy founded in 1976. MAC provides a broad range of management, engineering, marketing, and financial services to computer graphics users, suppliers, and investors worldwide. In this oral history Machover describes his upbringing in Iowa and training in the Eddy radar and radio program and other Navy service schools in Mississippi and Texas. He also provides details of his education under the G.I. Bill at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Machover notes his employment at Norden Laboratories Corporation in White Plains, NY, and his publication of the primer Basics of Gyroscopes (1960), intended initially for the Norden sales force. He then describes his move to Skiatron Electronics & Television Corporation where he helped form a subcontractor RMS Associates to build and market CRT character generators. RMS later changed its name to Information Displays, Inc. (IDI) and created the stand-alone computer-aided design (CAD) platform the IDIIOM (IDI Input-Output Machine). IDIIOM had its own operating system based on the Varian 620-I computer, a DEC PDP competitor. Machover also comments on TV scan versus vector scan, the relative merits of color and 3D information displays, potential health problems related to flickering display and jitter, interaction with the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. (Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology, and Other Research Subjects), and the adoption of CAD/CAM (Computer-Aided Design/Computer-Aided Manufacturing) and a SIGGRAPH 'CORE' graphics standard in the 1970s.
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    Oral history interview with Charles Antony Richard Hoare
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2002-07-17) Hoare, C. A. R. (Charles Antony Richard), 1934-
    Sir Antony Hoare is Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, and Research/Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford. Hoare is the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages. He has also been awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for pioneering and fundamental contributions to software science. In this oral history Hoare recounts his personal involvement in the development of academic computing science and education at The Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and at the University of Oxford. He discusses his long-time interest in building bridges between university computing science departments and industry. Hoare also details his current work at Microsoft Research in applying assertions and other scientific techniques and theory to industrial operations. He discusses his advocacy of assertions in the maintenance and transformation of legacy code. Hoare also comments on a number of other subjects, including machine translation of languages, artificial intelligence, reasoning under uncertainty, software design and reliability, and project management. The interview includes a discussion of the problem of the preservation and interpretation of code.
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    Oral history interview with David L. Schleicher
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2006-01-24) Schleicher, David L.
    David Schleicher begins with a description of his background and education at Mankato State University (Minnesota), and provides details of his first professional job. He describes his early tasks at IBM, his move to IBM Rochester, and the management structure of which he was a part. Among the technical projects he discusses are the Fort Knox project, the System/38 computer system, the Silverlake project, and the various aspects of AS/400 development, including RISC processing and the AS/400. He describes programming at IBM Rochester over many years, including support software for manufacturing, integrated data bases on the System/38 and the AS/400, microcoding, and the Rochester Programming Center. Concerning management, he discusses the management styles of Tom Furey and Glenn Henry, and in a broader context, compares evaluation of personnel by managers at Bell Laboratories and IBM. There is some discussion of the patenting process at IBM Rochester. He ends by describing his role in the coordination of programming in IBM, his move to Austin, Texas, and back to Rochester, and his work on OS/2.
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    Oral history interview with Douglas T. Ross
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 1984-02-21) Ross, Douglas T.; Aspray, William
    Ross, the founder of SofTech Corporation, recounts some of his early experiences working on MIT's Whirlwind computer in the 1950s. He explains how a summer job at MIT's Servomechanisms Laboratory operating a Marchant calculator led him to use the Whirlwind for greater computing power--and to seventeen years in the MIT computer labs. Ross reports on his first use of Whirlwind for airborne fire control problems. Soon after that the Whirlwind was used for the Cape Cod early warning system, a precursor to the SAGE Air Defense System. Ross describes improvements made to Whirlwind, including the introduction of the first light pen and the replacement of the paper tape reader with a photoelectric tape reader (PETR). Ross also discusses some of the programs he wrote or used on Whirlwind, such as the Initial Data Processing Program (IDPP), the Servo Lab Utility Program (SLURP), and the Mistake Diagnosis Routine (MDR). He describes the IDPP as particularly interesting, because it involved pattern recognition and was thus an early example of artificial intelligence research.
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    Oral history interview with Frances E. Holberton
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 1983-04-14) Holberton, Frances E.
    Holberton discusses her education from 1940 through the 1960s and her experiences in the computing field. These include work with the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, David Taylor Model Basin, and the National Bureau of Standards. She discusses her perceptions of cooperation and competition between members of these organizations and the difficulties she encountered as a woman. She recounts her work on ENIAC and LARC, her design of operating systems, and her applications programming.
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    Oral history interview with Gary Durbin
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2002-05-03) Durbin, Gary
    Gary Durbin is a software pioneer and entrepreneur with over thirty-five years of experience. He began his career specializing in operating systems and database systems. His first company, started in 1970, developed operating system improvements for IBM machines. That company introduced Secure, an early software security product. Secure was sold to Boole & Babbage in 1978. Durbin then founded Tesseract Corporation, a human resources software company that introduced the Time Relational Database. Tesseract was sold to Ceridian in 1993. Durbin founded Seeker Software in 1996, which was acquired by Web application company Concur Technologies in 1999. In this oral history Durbin recounts his education at the University of California at Berkeley and early Wells Fargo jobs programming the IBM 650, 1400, and 360 mainframes for online branch banking. He describes his activity in the consulting firm Cybernetic Systems Incorporated, his sole proprietorship of the Institute for Cybernetic Development, and the founding and financing of Tesseract. He also notes his role in the founding of parallel processing software firm Primrose Software and in marketing the Web application system Seeker. Durbin explains the core characteristics of good programming, software engineering, and management. He describes his work in developing network and relational database management systems, and the hegemony of the hierarchical IBM database system IMS (Information Management System). Durbin also explains the importance of integrity in a business prone to marketing vaporware, the impact of IBM's unbundling decision, and the recruiting and retention of women by software firms. He notes the role of the software industry in jobs creation and in endorsing the Black/Scholes options pricing model. Durbin also relates the importance of user groups like ADAPSO to the development of the independent software industry, including ADAPSO’s financial accounting committee and the special interest group Software Industry Association (SIA). This oral history was co-sponsored by CBI, through a National Science Foundation grant project, "Building a Future for Software History," and the Software History Center in conjunction with the Center's ADAPSO reunion (3 May 2002).