## Link https://youtu.be/dDsWTyLEgbk ## Clips ### What surprised you the most? "Just the speed of change is appalling." (Lesson: We're not "technologists," we're looking for something timeless.) start = 0:28 end = 1:18 ### How wired of a guy are you these days? How connected? "Not very. Fumbling around trying to find my way in this mess." (Lesson: We're not technologists. Technologists like it when technology advances.) start = 1:40 end = 2:35 ### It would make an errors about every three minutes and then you'd have to stop (Smiling) start = 4:15 end = 4:40 ### Wasn't looking for a job, randomly asked for one, they said come up and see the boss, he said no I've got holes in my sleeves, they gave him a puzzle and hired him on the spot start = 5:25 end = 6:05 ### At Columbia, was getting a master's in mathematics start = 6:03 end = 6:20 ### Was in WW2 around 1945 start = 6:20 end = 6:50 ### Was training to go to medical school. Sent to Atlantic City to train at this hospital. Stayed there working 12 hours a day and living in a hotel. While he was there, working in the neurosurgery ward, they noticed he had a huge bump on his head that they noticed was a bone tumor, so he went from working to being a patient with no duties and then he could wander around Atlantic City at night and sleep in the hospital. start = 8:15 end = 9:45 ### Discovered pretty quickly he didn't like medical school because all you had to do was memorize stuff start = 9:42 end = 10:00 ### My second wife, I was introduced to by my first wife, around the time we were about to split start = 13:15 end = 13:40 ### What did you get hired to do? "Programming! What else?" What did programming mean then? You had the whole machine to yourself for months! I imagine the room got a little warm too. No it was air conditioned. start = 13:40 end = 14:35 ### I was never a mathematician. I never liked to study or learn anything start = 15:15 end = 15:50 ### Went on to produce speed coding. Why? Well programming in machine code was pretty lousy to engage in, trying to figure out how to do stuff. It was a rotten design if I may say so, but it was better than coding in machine language. start = 15:50 end = 16:35 ### This was around the same time as Grace Hopper's COBOL work but that was a little bit later. The interviewer says "I still have my nanosecond From Grace." Whenever Grace used to lecture she used to give people in her audience a nanosecond which was a piece of telephone wire cut to 11 and a quarter inches, which is the distance that light would travel in a nanosecond and she offered that as a visual metaphor of "This is why machines are shrinking." start = 17:20 end = 18:12 ### From the experience of the speed coding work, he got this idea for a higher order computer language. Also because they were moving to the 704 which had built in floating point registers which was all that speed coding was supposed to supply. 704 was the first machine with core memory as well. start = 18:10 end = 19:00 ### Management of IBM was of mixed feelings with regard to the utility of the 704. start = 19:00 end = 19:25 ### Wasn't this around the time Tom Watson Sr said the world market for computers is about 1 or 2? That was based on the 704. start = 19:25 end = 19:45 ### Were you involved with the machine designers or was it just sort of handed to you? Before the 704 was the 701, which had no floating point, no index registers. I was involved with the design. I sort of credit myself with getting floating point and index registers into the 704. The designers were totally preoccupied with getting this crazy magnetic drum unit designed which would have had maybe 1000 words maybe 10000 of storage. (Lesson: Programmers want different things than hardware people think they want.) start = 19:40 end = 21:00 ### So you actually influenced the design of those machines? Yeah I was on the design team for awhile. Was the notion of bringing index registers and floating point in viewed as radical by the design team? Well I kept sort of suggesting that they do this, and they kept talking about this damn drum. In the design meetings I kept bringing it up and bringing it up and they kept talking about the drum. And finally I decided there's only one way to get their attention. So I spent an hour designing some cockamamie scheme to trick them into giving us what we needed. (Lesson: Nerd love to be right more than they like to help. If you need the right answer from a group of nerds, propose an answer you know to be wrong.) start = 21:00 end = 23:00 ### Fortran was created with one goal: Reduce the cost of programming. Backus wrote a memo to his boss and said hey we've gotta make it easier to program this thing. start = 23:00 end = 24:20 ### "The assumptions under which we created Fortran really aren't valid anymore." What were the assumptions it was created under? Reduce the cost of programming. start = 23:30 end = 24:30 ### Cost of computing was like $400/hour or $1 million a year or something start = 24:00 end = 25:00 ### What were some of the ideas swirling around the community that led you to the idea of Fortran start = 24:45 end = 25:55 ### Grace Hopper was talking about compilers and things like that, but her ideas were just such cockamamie stuff. Her scheme was part machine code part this part that and just unworkable. start = 25:10 end = 25:55 ### Grace Hopper really talked up what became Cobol start = 24:45 end = 25:55 ### There were a lot more computer companies then than there are today start = 25:50 end = 26:20 ### First formulation of Fortran was his, but very quickly began assembling a team of 13, which was really more like 8 start = 26:22 end = 26:52 RESUME around 28:15 with "The management touch around you was very light" and "You probably succeeded because you were left alone." 💯🎉