This is a presentation from Fernando CorbatĂł from the 1990 ACM Turing Award lectures. CorbatĂł was one of the creators of both the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT and Multics, the operating system that influenced Unix.
He describes the challenges in those programs with their novel approaches: you always encounter failure states when pushing the edge. His takeaways in his experience building “ambitious systems”:
First, the evolution of technology supports a rich future for ambitious visions and dreams that will inevitably involve complex systems.
Second, one must always try to learn from past mistakes, but at the same time be alert to the possibility that new circumstances require new solutions.
And third, one must remember that ambitious systems demand a defensive philosophy of design and implementation. Or in other words, “Don’t wonder if some mishap may happen, but rather ask what one will do about it when it does occur.”
I love these stories from the early days of computers. Already the creators were encountering problems similar to those we still deal with today:
One important consequence of developing CTSS was that for the first time users had persistent on-line storage of programs and data. Suddenly the issues of privacy, protection and backup of information had to be faced. Another byproduct of the development was that because we operated terminals via modems, remote operation became the norm. Also the new-found freedom of keeping information on-line in the central file system suddenly made it especially convenient for users to share and exchange information among themselves.
And there were surprises too. To our dismay, users who had been enduring several hour waits between jobs run under batch processing, were suddenly restless when response times were more than a second. Moreover many of the simplifying assumptions that had allowed CTSS to be built so simply such as a one level file system, suddenly began to chafe. It seemed like the more we did, the more users wanted.
Boy, does that sound familiar!
Here’s a version from the MIT website with his slides included.
J.C.R. Licklider’s seminal 1960 paper on what would eventually become the personal computer.
Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this paper are to present the concept and, hopefully, to foster the development of man-computer symbiosis by analyzing some problems of interaction between men and computing machines, calling attention to applicable principles of man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few questions to which research answers are needed. The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
A beautiful visualization project from Nature converts 150 years of scientific papers into a 3-dimensional network diagram, making concrete the network of citations and references linking together the history of discoveries.
I’ve been reading some of Hayek’s famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a central thesis for most of his works. His argument was for bottoms-up, decentralized systems of decision-making instead of centralized, top-down systems:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
This short film of drone footage showcases the amazing, almost-alien, landscapes of Iceland. This guy’s channel has a lot of interesting quick films like this.
A fuzzy finder for the command line. Just install it from Homebrew with brew install fzf and improve your file searching on the shell. No more having to remember find command syntax.