The History of Computing

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on Agile Software Development. Agile software development is a methodology, or anti-methodology, or approach to software development that evolves the requirements a team needs to fulfill and the solutions they need to build in a collaborative, self-organized, and cross-functional way. Boy, that’s a lot to spit out there. I was in an elevator the other day and I heard someone say: “That’s not very agile.” And at that moment, I knew that I just couldn’t help but do an episode on agile. I’ve worked in a lot of teams that use a lot of variants of agile, scrum, Kanban, scrumban, Extreme Programing, Lean Software Development. Some of these are almost polar opposites and you still hear people talk about what is agile and if they want to make fun of people doing things an old way, they’ll say something like waterfall. Nothing ever was waterfall, given that you learn on the fly, find re-usable bits or hit a place where you just say that’s not possible. But that’s another story. The point here is that agile is, well, weaponized to back up what a person wants someone to do. Or how they want a team to be run. And it isn’t always done from an informed point of view. Why is Agile an anti-methodology? Think of it more like a classification maybe. There were a number of methodologies like Extreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, Feature Driven Development, Adaptive Software Development, RAD, and Lean Software Development. These had come out to bring shape around a very similar idea. But over the course of 10-20 years, each had been developed in isolation. In college, I had a computer science professor who talked about “adaptive software development” from his days at a large power company in Georgia back in the 70s. Basically, you are always adapting what you’re doing based on speculation of how long something will take, collaboration on that observation and what you learn while actually building. This shaped how I view software development for years to come. He was already making fun of Waterfall methodologies, or a cycle where you write a large set of requirements and stick to them. Waterfall worked well if you were building a computer to land people on the moon. It was a way of saying “we’re not engineers, we’re software developers.” Later in college, with the rapid proliferation of the Internet and computers into dorm rooms I watched the emergence of rapid application development, where you let the interface requirements determine how you build. But once someone weaponized that by putting a label on it, or worse forking the label into spiral and unified models, then they became much less useful and the next hot thing had to come along. Kent Beck built a methodology called Extreme Programming - or XP for short - in 1996 and that was the next hotness. Here, we release software in shorter development cycles and software developers, like police officers on patrol work in pairs, reviewing and testing code and not writing each feature until it’s required. The idea of unit testing and rapid releasing really came out of the fact that the explosion of the Internet in the 90s meant people had to ship fast and this was also during the rise of really main-stream object-oriented programming languages. The nice thing about XP was that you could show a nice graph where you planned, managed, designed, coded, and tested your software. The rules of Extreme Programming included things like “Code the unit test first” - and “A stand up meeting starts each day.” Extreme Programming is one of these methodologies. Scrum is probably the one most commonly used today. But the rest, as well as the Crystal family of methodologies, are now classified as Agile software development methodologies. So it’s like a parent. Is agile really just a classification then? No. So where did agile come from? By 2001, Kent Beck, who developed Extreme Programming met with Ward Cunningham (who built WikiWikiWeb, the first wiki), Dave Thomas, a programmer who has since written 11 books, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, who designed Scrum. Jim Highsmith, who developed that Adaptive Software Development methodology, and many others were at the time involved in trying to align an organizational methodology that allowed software developers to stop acting like people that built bridges or large buildings. Most had day jobs but they were like-minded and decided to meet at a quaint resort in Snowbird, Utah. They might have all wanted to use the methodologies that each of them had developed. But if they had all been jerks then they might not have had a shift in how software would be written for the next 20+ years. They decided to start with something simple, a statement of values; instead of Instead of bickering and being dug into specific details, they were all able to agree that software development should not be managed in the same fashion as engineering projects are run. So they gave us the Manifesto for Agile Software Development… The Manifesto reads: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: * Individuals and interactions over processes and tools * Working software over comprehensive documentation * Customer collaboration over contract negotiation * Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. But additionally, the principles dig into and expand upon some of that adjacently. The principles behind the Agile Manifesto: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. Working software is the primary measure of progress. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. Many of the words here are easily weaponized. For example, “satisfy the customer.” Who’s the customer? The product manager? The end user? The person in an enterprise who actually buys the software? The person in that IT department that made the decision to buy the software? In the scrum methodology, the customer is not known. The product owner is their representative. But the principles should need to identify that, just use the word so each methodology makes sure to cover it. Now take “continuous delivery.” People frequently just lump CI in there with CD. I’ve heard continuous design, continuous improvement, continuous deployment, continuous podcasting. Wait, I made the last one up. We could spend hours going through each of these and identifying where they aren’t specific enough. Or, again, we could revel in their lack of specificity by pointing us into the direction of a methodology where these words get much more specific meanings. Ironically, I know accounting teams at very large companies that have scrum masters, engineering teams for big projects with a project manager and a scrum master, and even a team of judges that use agile methodologies. There are now scrum masters embedded in most software teams of note. But once you see Agile on the cover of The Harvard Business Review, you hate to do this given all the classes in agile/XP/scrum - but you have to start wondering what’s next? For 20 years, we’ve been saying “stop treating us like engineers” or “that’s waterfall.” Every methodology seems to grow. Right after I finished my PMP I was on a project with someone else that had just finished theirs. I think they tried to implement the entire Project management Body of Knowledge. If you try to have every ceremony from Scrum, you’re not likely to even have half a day left over to write any code. But you also don’t want to be like the person on the elevator, weaponizing only small parts of a larger body of work, just to get your way. And more importantly, to admit that none of us have all the right answers and be ready to, as they say in Extreme Programming: Fix XP when it breaks - which is similar to Boyd’s Destruction and Creation, or the sustenance and destruction in Lean Six-Sigma. Many of us forget that last part: be willing to walk away from the dogma and start over. Thomas Jefferson called for a revolution every 20 years. We have two years to come up with a replacement! And until you replace me, thank you so very much for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to look at the emergence of the cloud. As with everything evil, the origin of the cloud began with McCarthyism. From 1950 to 1954 Joe McCarthy waged a war against communism. Wait, wrong McCarthyism. Crap. After Joe McCarthy was condemned and run out of Washington, **John** McCarthy made the world a better place in 1955 with a somewhat communistic approach to computing. The 1950s were the peak of the military industrial complex. The SAGE air defense system needed to process data coming in from radars and perform actions based on that data. This is when McCarthy stepped in. John, not Joe. He proposed things like allocating memory automatically between programs, quote “Programming techniques can be encouraged which make destruction of other programs unlikely” and modifying FORTRAN to trap programs into specified areas of the storage. When a person loading cards or debugging code, the computer could be doing other things. To use his words: “The only way quick response can be provided at a bearable cost is by time-sharing. That is, the computer must attend to other customers while one customer is reacting to some output.” He posited that this could go from a 3 hour to day and a half turnaround to seconds. Remember, back then these things were huge and expensive. So people worked shifts and ran them continuously. McCarthy had been at MIT and Professor Fernando Corbato from there actually built it between 1961 and 1963. But at about the same time, Professor Jack Dennis from MIT started doing about the same thing with a PDP-1 from DEC - he’s actually probably one of the most influential people many I talk to have never heard of. He called this APEX and hooked up multiple terminals on TX-2. Remember John McCarthy? He and some students actually did the same thing in 1962 after moving on to become a professor at Stanford. 1965 saw Alan Kotok sell a similar solution for the PDP-6 and then as the 60s rolled on and people in the Bay Area got really creative and free lovey, Cobato, Jack Dennis of MIT, a team from GE, and another from Bell labs started to work on Multics, or Multiplexed Information and Computing Service for short, for the GE-645 mainframe. Bell Labs pulled out and Multics was finished by MIT and GE, who then sold their computer business to Honeywell so they wouldn’t be out there competing with some of their customers. Honeywell sold Multics until 1985 and it included symmetric multiprocessing, paging, a supervisor program, command programs, and a lot of the things we now take for granted in Linux, Unix, and macOS command lines. But we’re not done with the 60s yet. ARPAnet gave us a standardized communications platform and distributed computing started in the 60s and then became a branch of computer science later in the late 1970s. This is really a software system that has components stored on different networked computers. Oh, and Telnet came at the tail end of 1969 in RFC 15, allowing us to remotely connect to those teletypes. People wanted Time Sharing Systems. Which led Project Genie at Berkely, TOPS-10 for the PDP-10 and IBM’s failed TSS/360 for the System 360. To close out the 70s, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIllroy, Mike Lesk, Joe Assana, and of course Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs hid a project to throw out the fluff from Multics and build a simpler system. This became Unix. Unix was originally developed in Assembly but Ritchie would write C in 72 and the team would eventually refactor Unix in C. Pretty sure management wasn’t at all pissed when they found out. Pretty sure the Uniplexed Information and Computing Services, or eunuchs for short wasn’t punny enough for the Multics team to notice. BSD would come shortly thereafter. Over the coming years you could create multiple users and design permissions in a way that users couldn’t step on each others toes (or more specifically delete each others files). IBM did something interesting in 1972 as well. They invented the Virtual Machine, which allowed them to run an operating system inside an operating system. At this point, time sharing options were becoming common place in mainframes. Enter Moore’s Law. Computers got cheaper and smaller. Altair and hobbyists became a thing. Bill Joy ported BSD to Sun workstations in 77. Computers kept getting smaller. CP/M shows up on early microcomputers at about the same time up until 1983. Apple arrives on the scene. Microsoft DOS appears in 1981 and and In 1983, with all this software you have to pay for really starting to harsh his calm, Richard Stallman famously set out to make software free. Maybe this was in response to Gates’ 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists asking pc hobbyists to actually pay for software. Maybe they forgot they wrote most of Microsoft BASIC on DARPA gear. Given that computers were so cheap for a bit, we forgot about multi-user operating systems for awhile. By 1991, Linus Torvalds, who also believed in free software, by then known as open source, developed a Unix-like operating system he called Linux. Computers continued to get cheaper and smaller. Now you could have them on multiple desks in an office. Companies like Novell brought us utility computers we now refer to as servers. You had one computer to just host all the files so users could edit them. CERN gave us the first web server in 1990. The University of Minnesota gave us Gopher in 1991. NTP 3 came in 1992. The 90s also saw the rise of virtual private networks and client-server networks. You might load a Delphi-based app on every computer in your office and connect that fat client with a shared database on a server to, for example, have a shared system to enter accounting information into, or access customer information to do sales activities and report on them. Napster had mainstreamed distributed file sharing. Those same techniques were being used in clusters of servers that were all controlled by a central IT administration team. Remember those virtual machines IBM gave us: you could now cluster and virtualize workloads and have applications that were served from a large number of distributed computing systems. But as workloads grew, the fault tolerance and performance necessary to support them became more and more expensive. By the mid-2000s it was becoming more acceptable to move to a web-client architecture, which meant large companies wouldn’t have to bundle up software and automate the delivery of that software and could instead use an intranet to direct users to a series of web pages that allowed them to perform business tasks. Salesforce was started in 1999. They are the poster child for software as a service and founder/CEO Marc Benioff coined the term platform as a service, allowing customers to build their own applications using the Salesforce development environment. But it wasn’t until we started breaking web applications up and developed methods to authenticate and authorize parts of them to one another using technologies like SAML, introduced in 2002) and OAuth (2006) that we were able to move into a more micro-service oriented paradigm for programming. Amazon and Google had been experiencing massive growth and in 2006 Amazon created Amazon Web Services and offered virtual machines on demand to customers, using a service called Elastic Compute Cloud. Google launched G Suite in 2006, providing cloud-based mail, calendar, contacts, documents, and spreadsheets. Google then offered a cloud offering to help developers with apps in 2008 with Google App Engine. In both cases, the companies had invested heavily in developing infrastructure to support their own workloads and renting some of that out to customers just… made sense. Microsoft, seeing the emergence of Google as not just a search engine, but a formidable opponent on multiple fronts also joined into the Infrastructure as a Service as offering virtual machines for pennies per minute of compute time also joined the party in 2008. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon still account for a large percentage of cloud services offered to software developers. Over the past 10 years the technologies have evolved. Mostly just by incrementing a number, like OAuth 2.0 or HTML 5. Web applications have gotten broken up in smaller and smaller parts due to mythical programmer months meaning you need smaller teams who have contracts with other teams that their service, or micro-service, can specific tasks. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft see these services and build more workload specific services, like database as a service or putting a REST front-end on a database, or data lakes as a service. Standards like OAuth even allow vendors to provide Identity as a service, linking up all the things. The cloud, as we’ve come to call hosting services, has been maturing for 55 years, from shared compute time on mainframes to shared file storage space on a server to very small shared services like payment processing using Stripe. Consumers love paying a small monthly fee for access to an online portal or app rather than having to deploy large amounts of capital to bring in an old-school JDS Uniphase style tool to automate tasks in a company. Software developers love importing an SDK or calling a service to get a process for free, allowing developers to go to market much faster and look like magicians in the process. And we don’t have teams at startups running around with fire extinguishers to keep gear humming along. This reduces the barrier to build new software and apps and democratizes software development. App stores and search engines then make it easier than ever to put those web apps and apps in front of people to make money. In 1959, John McCarthy had said “The cooperation of IBM is very important but it should be to their advantage to develop this new way of using a computer.” Like many new philosophies, it takes time to set in and evolve. And it takes a combination of advances to make something so truly disruptive possible. The time-sharing philosophy gave us Unix and Linux, which today are the operating systems running on a lot of these cloud servers. But we don’t know or care about those because the web provides a layer on top of them that obfuscates the workload. Much as the operating system obfuscated the workload of the components of the system. Today those clouds obfuscate various layers of the stack so you can enter at any part of the stack you want whether it’s a virtual computer or a service or just to consume a web app. And this has lead to an explosion of diverse and innovative ideas. Apple famously said “there’s an app for that” but without the cloud there certainly wouldn’t be. And without you, my dear listeners, there wouldn’t be a podcast. So thank you so very much for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of Wikipedia. The very idea of a single location that could store all the known information in the world began with Ptolemy I, founder of the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt following the death of Alexander the great. He and his son amassed 100s of thousands of scrolls in the Library and Alexandria from 331 BC and on. The Library was part of a great campus of the Musaeum where they also supported great minds starting with Ptolemy I’s patronage of Euclid, the father of geometry, and later including Archimedes, the father of engineering, Hipparchus, the founder of trigonometry, Her, the father of math, and Herophilus, who gave us the scientific method and countless other great hellenistic thinkers. The Library entered into a slow decline that began with the expulsion of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145BC. Ptolemy VIII was responsible for that. Always be weary of people who attack those that they can’t win over especially when they start blaming the intellectual elite for the problems of the world. This began a slow decline of the library until it burned, first with a small fire accidentally set by Caesar in 48BC and then for good in the 270s AD. In the centuries since there have been attempts here and there to gather great amounts of information. The first known encyclopedia was the Naturalis Historiae by Pliny the Elder, never completed because he was killed in the eruption of Vesuvius. One of the better known being the Encyclopedia Britannica, starting off in 1768. Mass production of these was aided by the printing press but given that there’s a cost to producing those materials and a margin to be made in the sale of those materials that encouraged a somewhat succinct exploration of certain topics. The advent of the computer era of course led to encyclopedias on CD and then to online encyclopedias. Encyclopedias at the time employed experts in certain fields and paid them for compiling and editing articles for volumes that would then be sold. As we say these days, this was a business model just waiting to be disrupted. Jimmy Wales was moderating an online discussion board on Objectivism and happened across Larry Sanger in the early 90s. They debated and became friends. Wales started Nupedia, which was supposed to be a free encyclopedia, funded by advertising revenue. As it was to be free, they were to recruit thousands of volunteer editors. People of the caliber that had been previously hired to research and write articles for encyclopedias. Sanger, who was pursuing a PhD in philosophy from Ohio State University, was hired on as editor-in-chief. This was a twist on the old model of compiling an encyclopedia and a twist that didn’t work out as intended. Volunteers were slow to sign up, but Nupedia went online in 2000. Later in the year there had only been two articles that made it through the review process. When Sanger told Ben Kovitz about this, he recommended looking at the emerging wiki culture. This had been started with WikiWikiWeb, developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994, named after a shuttle bus that ran between airport terminals at the Honolulu airport. WikiWikiWeb had been inspired by Hypercard but needed to be multi-user so people could collaborate on web pages, quickly producing content on new patterns in programming. He wanted to make non-writers feel ok about writing. Sanger proposed using a wiki to be able to accept submissions for articles and edits from anyone but still having a complicated review process to accept changes. The reviewers weren’t into that, so they started a side project they called Wikipedia in 2001 with a user-generated model for content, or article, generation. The plan was to generate articles on Wikipedia and then move or copy them into Nupedia once they were ready. But Wikipedia got mentioned on Slashdot. In 2001 there were nearly 30 million websites but half a billion people using the web. Back then a mention on the influential Slashdot could make a site. And it certainly helped. They grew and more and more people started to contribute. They hit 1,000 articles in March of 2001 and that increased by 10 fold by September, By And another 4 fold the next year. It started working independent of Nupedia. The dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and by 2002 Nupedia had to lay Sanger off and he left both projects. Nupedia slowly died and was finally shut down in 2003. Eventually the Wikimedia Foundation was built to help unlock the world’s knowledge, which now owns and operates Wikipedia. Wikimedia also includes Commons for media, Wikibooks that includes free textbooks and manuals, Wikiquote for quotations, Wikiversity for free learning materials, MediaWiki the source code for the site, Wikidata for pulling large amounts of data from Wikimedia properties using APIs, Wikisource, a library of free content, Wikivoyage, a free travel guide, Wikinews, free news, Wikispecies, a directory containing over 687,000 species. Many of the properties have very specific ways of organizing data, making it easier to work with en masse. The properties have grown because people like to be helpful and Wales allowed self-governance of articles. To this day he rarely gets involved in the day-to-day affairs of the wikipedia site, other than the occasional puppy dog looks in banners asking for donations. You should donate. He does have 8 principles the site is run by: 1. Wikipedia’s success to date is entirely a function of our open community. 2. Newcomers are always to be welcomed. 3. “You can edit this page right now” is a core guiding check on everything that we do. 4. Any changes to the software must be gradual and reversible. 5. The open and viral nature of the GNU Free Documentation License and the Create Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License is fundamental to the long-term success of the site. 6. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. 7. Anyone with a complaint should be treated with the utmost respect and dignity. 8. Diplomacy consists of combining honesty and politeness. This culminates in 5 pillars wikipedia is built on: 1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. 2. Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view. 3. Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute. 4. Wikipedia’s editors should treat each other with respect and civility. 5. Wikipedia has no firm rules. Sanger went on to found Citizendium, which uses real names instead of handles, thinking maybe people will contribute better content if their name is attached to something. The web is global. Throughout history there have been encyclopedias produced around the world, with the Four Great Books of Song coming out of 11th century China, the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity coming out of 10th century Persia. When Wikipedia launched, it was in English. Wikipedia launched a German version using the deutsche.wikipedia.com subdomain. It now lives at de.wikipedia.com and Wikipedia has gone from being 90% English to being almost 90 % non-English, meaning that Wikipedia is able to pull in even more of the world’s knowledge. Wikipedia picked up nearly 20,000 English articles in 2001, over 75,000 new articles in 2002, and that number has steadily climbed wreaching over 3,000,000 by 2010, and we’re closing in on 6 Million today. The English version is 10 terabytes of data uncompressed. If you wanted to buy a printed copy of wikipedia today, it would be over 2500 books. By 2009 Microsoft Encarta shut down. By 2010 Encyclopedia Britannica stopped printing their massive set of books and went online. You can still buy encyclopedias from specialty makers, such as the World Book. Ironically, Encyclopedia Britannica does now put real names of people on articles they produce on their website, in an ad-driven model. There are a lot of ads. And the content isn’t linked to as many places nor as thorough. Creating a single location that could store all the known information in the world seems like a pretty daunting task. Compiling the non-copywritten works of the world is now the mission of Wikipedia. The site receives the fifth most views per month and is read by nearly half a billion people a month with over 15 billion page views per month. Anyone who has gone down the rabbit hole of learning about Ptolemy I’s involvement in developing the Library of Alexandria and then read up on his children and how his dynasty lasted until Cleopatra and how… well, you get the point… can understand how they get so much traffic. Today there are over 48,000,000 articles and over 37,000,000 registered users who have contributed articles meaning if we set 160 Great Libraries of Alexandria side-by-side we would have about the same amount of information Wikipedia has amassed. And it’s done so because of the contributions of so many dedicated people. People who spend hours researching and building pages, undergoing the need to provide references to cite the data in the articles (btw wikipedia is not supposed to represent original research), more people to patrol and look for content contributed by people on a soapbox or with an agenda, rather than just reporting the facts. Another team looking for articles that need more information. And they do these things for free. While you can occasionally see frustrations from contributors, it is truly one of the best things humanity has done. This allows us to rediscover our own history, effectively compiling all the facts that make up the world we live in, often linked to the opinions that shape them in the reference materials, which include the over 200 million works housed at the US Library of Congress, and over 25 million books scanned into Google Books (out of about 130 million). As with the Great Library of Alexandria, we do have to keep those who seek to throw out the intellectuals of the world away and keep the great works being compiled from falling to waste due to inactivity. Wikipedia keeps a history of pages, to avoid revisionist history. The servers need to be maintained, but the database can be downloaded and is routinely downloaded by plenty of people. I think the idea of providing an encyclopedia for free that was sponsored by ads was sound. Pivoting the business model to make it open was revolutionary. With the availability of the data for machine learning and the ability to enrich it with other sources like genealogical research, actual books, maps, scientific data, and anything else you can manage, I suspect we’ll see contributions we haven’t even begun to think about! And thanks to all of this, we now have a real compendium of the worlds knowledge, getting more and more accurate and holistic by the day. Thank you to everyone involved, from Jimbo and Larry, to the moderators, to the staff, and of course to the millions of people who contribute pages about all the history that makes up the world as we know it today. And thanks to you for listening to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. Have a great day! Note: This work was produced in large part due to the compilation of historical facts available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia

FORTRAN Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re better prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on one of the oldest of the programming languages, FORTRAN - which has influenced most modern languages. We’ll start this story with John Backus. This guy was smart. He went to med school and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He didn’t like the plate that was left behind in his head. So he designed a new one. He then moved to New York and started to work on radios while attending Columbia for first a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in math. That’s when he ended up arriving at IBM. He walked in one day definitely not wearing the standard IBM suit - and when he said he was a grad student in math they took him upstairs, played a little stump the chump, and hired him on the spot. He had not idea what a programmer was. By 1954 he was a trusted enough resource that he was allowed to start working on a new team, to define a language that could provide a better alternative to writing code in icky assembly language. This was meant to boost sales of the IBM 704 mainframe by making it easier to hire and train new software programmers. That language became FORTRAN, an acronym for Formula Translation. The team was comprised of 10 geniuses. Lois Haibt, probably one of the younger on the team said of this phase: "No one was worried about seeming stupid or possessive of his or her code. We were all just learning together." She built the arithmetic expression analyzer and helped with the first FORTRAN manual, which was released in 1956. Roy Nutt was also on that team. He wrote an assembler for the IBM 704 and was responsible for the format command which managed data as it came in and out of FORTRAN programs. He went on to be a co-founder of Computer Science Corporation, or CSC with Fletcher Jones in 1959, landing a huge contract with Honeywell. CSC grew quickly and went public in the 60s. They continued to prosper until 2017 when they merged with HP Enteprirse services, which had just merged with Silicon Graphics. Today they have a pending merger with Cray. David Sayre was also on that team. He discovered the Sayre crystallography equation, and molter moved on to pioneer electron beam lithography and push the envelope of X-ray microscopy. Harlan Herrick on the team invented the DO and GO TO commands and ran the first working FORTRAN program. Cuthbert Herd was recruited from the Atomic Energy Commission and invented the concept of a general purpose computer. Frances Allen was a math teacher that joined up with the group to help pay off college debts. She would go on to teach Fortran and in 1989 became the first female IBM Fellow Emeritus. Robert Nelson was a cryptographer who handled a lot of the technical typing and designing some of the more sophisticated sections of the compiler. Irving Ziller designed the methods for loops and arrays. Peter Sheridan, aside from having a fantastic mustache, invented much of the compiler code used for decades after. Sheldon Best optimized the use of index registers, along with Richard Goldberg. As Backus would note in his seminal paper, the History Of FORTRAN I, II, and III, the release of FORTRAN in 1957 changed the economics of programming. While still scientific in nature, the appearance of the first true high-level language using the first real compiler meant you didn’t write in machine or assembly, which was hard to teach, hard to program, and hard to debug. Instead, you’d write machine independent code that could perform complex mathematical expressions and once compiled it would run maybe 20% slower, but development was 5 times faster. IBM loved this because customers needed to buy faster computers. But customers had a limit for how much they could spend and the mainframes at the time had a limit for how much they could process. To quote Backus “To this day I believe that our emphasis on object program efficiency rather than on language design was basically correct.” Basically they spent more time making the compiler efficient than they spent developing the programming language itself. As with the Constitution of the United States, simplicity was key. Much of the programming language pieces were designed by Herrick, Ziller, and Backus. The first release of FORTRAN had 32 statements that did things that might sound similar today like PRINT, READ, FORMAT, CONTINUE, GO TO, ASSIGN and of course IF. This was before terminals and disk files so programs were punched into 80 column cards. The first 72 columns were converted into 12 36 bit words. 1-5 were labels for control statements like PRINT, FORMAT, ASSIGN or put a C in column 1 to comment out the code. Column 6 was boolean where a 1 told it a new statement was coming or a 0 continued the statement from the previous card. Columns 7 through 72 were the statement, which ignored whitespace, and the other columns were ignored. FORTRAN II came onto the scene very shortly thereafter in 1958 and the SUBROUTINE, FUNCTION, END, CALL, RETURN, and COMMON statements were added. COMMON was important because it gave us global variables. FORTRAN III came in 1958 as well but was only available for specific computers and never shipped. 1401 FORTRAN then came for the 1401 mainframe. The compiler ran from tape and kept the whole program in memory, allowing for faster runtime. FORTRAN IV came in the early 60s and brought us into the era of the System/360. Here, we got booleans, logical IF instead of that used in arithmetic, the LOGICAL data type, and then came one of the most important versions, FORTRAN 66 - which merged all those dialects from IV into not quite a new version. Here, ANSI, or the American National Standards Institute stepped in and started to standardize. We sill use DO for loops, and every language has its own end of file statement, commenting structures, and logical IFs. Once things get standardized, they move slower. Especially where compiler theory is concerned. Dialects had emerged but FORTRAN 66 stayed put for 11 years. In 1968, the authors of BASIC were already calling FORTRAN old fashioned. A new version was started in 66 but wasn’t completed until 1977 and formally approved in 1978. Here, we got END IF statements, the ever so important ELSE, with new types of I/O we also got OPEN and CLOSE, and persistent variable controls with SAVE. The Department of Defense also insisted on lexical comparison strings. And we actually removed things, which these days we call DEPRECATE. 77 also gave us new error handling methods, and programmatic ways to manage really big programs (because over the last 15 years some had grown pretty substantial in size). The next update took even longer. While FORTRAN 90 was released in 1991, we learned some FORTRAN 77 in classes at the University of Georgia. Fortran 90 changed the capitalization so you weren’t yelling at people and added recursion, pointers, developer-controlled data types, object code for parallelization, better argument passing, 31 character identifiers, CASE, WHERE, and SELeCT statements, operator overloading, inline commenting, modules, POINTERs (however Ken Thompson felt about those didn’t matter ‘cause he had long hair and a beard), dynamic memory allocation (malloc errors woohoo), END DO statements for loop terminations, and much more. They also deprecated arithmetic IF statements, PAUSE statements, branching END IF, the ASSIGN statement, statement functions, and a few others. Fortran 95 was a small revision, adding FORALL and ELEMENTAL procedures, as well as NULL pointers. But FORTRAN was not on the minds of many outside of the scientific communities. 1995 is an important year in computing. Mainframes hadn’t been a thing for awhile. The Mac languished in the clone era just as Windows 95 had brought Microsoft to a place of parity with the Mac OS. The web was just starting to pop. The browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft were starting to heat up. C++ turned 10 years old. We got Voice over IP, HTML 2.0, PHP, Perl 5, the ATX mother board, Windows NT, the Opera browser, the card format, CD readers that cost less than a grand, the Pentium Pro, Java, JavaScript, SSL, the breakup of AT&T, IBM’s DEEP BLUE, WebTV, Palm Pilot, CPAN, Classmates.com, the first Wiki, Cygwin, the Jazz drive, Firewire, Ruby, and NumPy kickstarted the modern machine learning era. Oh and Craigslist, Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon.com. Audible was also established that year but they weren’t owned by Amazon just yet. Even at IBM, they were buys buying Lotus and trying to figure out how they were going to beat Kasparov with Deep Blue. Hackers came out that year, and they were probably also trying to change their passwords from god. With all of this rapid innovation popping in a single year it’s no wonder there was a backlash as can be seen in The Net, with Sandra Bullock, also from 1995. And as though they needed even more of a kick that this mainframe stuff was donezo, Konrad Zuse passed away in 1995. I was still in IT at the university watching all of this. Sometimes I wonder if it’s good or bad that I wasn’t 2 or 3 years older… Point of all of this is that many didn’t notice when Fortran continued on becoming more of a niche language. At this point, programming wasn’t just for math. Fortran 2003 brought object oriented enhancements, polymorphism, and interoperability with C. Fortran 2008 came and then Fortran 2018. Yes, you can still find good jobs in Fortran. Or COBOL for that matter. Fortran leaves behind a legacy (and a lot of legacy code) that established many of the control statements and structures we use today. Much as Grace Hopper pioneered the idea of a compiler, FORTRAN really took that concept and put it to the masses, or at least the masses of programmers of the day. John Backus and that team of 10 programmers increased the productivity of people who wrote programs by 20 fold in just a few years. These types of productivity gains are rare. You have the assembly line, the gutenberg press, the cotton gin, the spinning Jenny, the watt steam engine, and really because of the derivative works that resulted from all that compiled code from all those mainframes and since, you can credit that young, diverse, and brilliant team at IBM for kickstarting the golden age of the mainframe. Imagine if you will, Backus walks into IBM and they said “sorry, we don’t have any headcount on our team.” You always make room for brilliant humans. Grace Hopper’s dream would have resulted in COBOL, but without the might of IBM behind it, we might still be writing apps in machine language. Backus didn’t fit in with the corporate culture at IBM. He rarely wore suits in an era where suit makers in Armonk were probably doing as well as senior management. They took a chance on a brilliant person. And they assembled a diverse team of brilliant people who weren’t territorial or possessive, a team who authentically just wanted to learn. And sometimes that kind of a team lucks up and change sthe world. Who do you want to take a chance on? Mull over that until the next episode. Thank you so very much for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. Have a great day! The History of FORTRAN I, II, and III :: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/paper/p165-backus.pdf

The History of DEF CON Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of DEF CON. I have probably learned more about technology in my years attending Blackhat and DEF CON than from any other source other than reading and writing books. But DEF CON specifically expanded my outlook on the technology industry and made me think of how others might consider various innovations, and sometimes how they might break them. DEF CON also gave me an insight into the hacker culture that I might not have gotten otherwise. Not the hacker culture many think of, but the desire to just straight up tinkerate with everything. And I do mean everything, sometimes much to the chagrin of the Vegas casino or hotel hosting the event. The thing that I have always loved about DEF CON is that, while there is a little shaming of vendors here and there, there’s also a general desire to see security research push the envelope of what’s possible, making vendors better and making the world a more secure place. Not actually trying to back things in a criminal way. In fact, there’s an ethos that surrounds the culture. Yes, you want to find sweet, sweet o days. But when you do, you disclose the vulnerability before you tell the world that you can bring down any Cisco firewall. DEF CON has played a critical role in the development and remediation of rootlets, trojans, viruses, forensics, threat hunting research, social engineering, botnet detection and defeat, keystroke logging, DoS attacks, application security, network security, and privacy. In 2018, nearly 28,000 people attended Def Con. And the conference shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the number of people with tattoos of Jack, the skull and crossbones-esque logo, only seems to be growing. As does the number of people who have black badges, which give them free access to DEF CON for life. But where did it get its start? The name is derived from WarGames, a 1983 movie that saw Matthew Broderick almost start World War III by playing a simulation of a nuclear strike with a computer. This was obviously before his freewheeling days as Ferris Bueller. Over the next decade, Bulletin Board Networks had become a prime target for hackers in it for the lolz. Back then, Bullet Boards were kinda’ like what Reddit is today. But you dialed a network and then routed through a hierarchical system, with each site having a coordinator. A lot of Fido hacking was trying to become an admin of each board. If this sounds a lot like the Internet of today, the response would be “ish”. So Jeff Moss, also known as Dark Tangent, was a member of a group of hackers that liked to try to take over these bulletin boards called “Platinum Net”. He started planning a party for a network that was shut down. He had graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in Criminal Justice a few years earlier, and invited #hack to join him in Vegas. Moss had graduated from Gonzaga University in Criminal Justice and so why not have 100 criminals join him in Vegas at the Sands Hotel and Casino! He got a little help from Dead Addict, and the event was a huge success. The next year, Artimage, Pappy Ozendorph, Stealth, Zac Franken, and Noid threw in to help coordinate things and the attendees at the conference doubled to around 200. They knew they had something special cookie’ up. Def Con two, which was held at the Sahara, got mentions by Business Week and the New York Times, as well as PC Magazine, which was big at the time. DEF CON 3 happened right after the Hackers movie at the Tropicana, and DEF CON 4 actually had the FBI show up to to tell the hackers all the things at the Monte Carlo. DEF CON 4 also saw the introduction of Black Hat, a conference that runs before DEF CON. DEF CON 5 though, saw ABC News ZDNet, Computer World, and saw people show up to the Aladdin from all over the world, which is how I heard of the conference. The conference continued to grow. People actually started waiting to release tools until DEF CON. DEF CON 6 was held at the Plaza and then it went to the Alexis Park Resort from DEF CON 7 to DEF CON 13. DEF CON 7 will always be remembered for the release of Back Orifice 2000, a plugin based remote admin tool (or RAT) that I regrettably had to remove from many a device throughout my career. Of course it had an option for IRC-based command and control, as did all the best stuff on the Silk Road. Over the next few years the conference grew and law enforcement agents started to show up. I mean, easy pickings, right? This led to a “spot the fed” contest. People would of course try to hack each other, which led to maybe the most well-known contest, the scavenger hunt. I am obviously a history nerd so I always loved the Hacker Jeapoardy contest. You can also go out to the desert to shoot automatic weapons, participate in scavenger hunts, pick all the locks, buy some shirts, and of course, enjoy all the types of beverages with all the types of humans. All of these mini-events associated with DEF CON have certainly helped make the event what it is today. I’ve met people from the Homebrew Computer Club, Anonymous, the Legion of Doom, ShadowCrew, the Cult of the Dead Cow, and other groups there. I also met legends like Captain Crunch, Kevin Poulsen, Kevin Mitnick, L0pht (of L0phtcrack, and many others. By DEF CON 7 in 2000, the conference was getting too big to manage. So the Goons started to take over various portions of the con. People like Cjunky, Agent X, CHS, Code24, flea, Acronym, cyber, Gattaca, Froggy, Lockheed, Londo, Major Malfunction, Mattrix, G Mark, JustaBill, helped me keep from getting by eyebrows shaved off and were joined by other goons over the years. Keep in mind there are a lot of younger script kiddies who show up and this crew helps keep them safe. My favorite goon might be Noid. This was around the time the wall of sheep appeared, showing passwords picked up on the network. DEF CON 11 saw a bit of hacktivism when the conference started raising money for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. By 2005 the conferences had grown enough that Cisco even tried to shut down a talk from Michael Lynn that could basically shut down the Internet as we know it. Those pages mentioning the talk had to be torn out of the books. In one of the funner moments I’ve seen Michell Madigan was run out of the con for trying to secretly record one of the most privacy oriented groups I’ve ever been a part of. Dan Kaminsky rose to prominence in 2008 when he found some serious flaws in DNS. He was one of the inaugural speakers at Def Con China 1 in 2018. 2008 also saw a judge order a subway card hacking talk be cancelled, preventing three MIT students from talking about how they hacked the Boston subway. 2012 saw Keith Alexander, then director of the NSA give the keynote. Will Smith dropped by in 2013, although it was just to prepare for a movie. Probably not Suicide Squad. He didn’t stay log. Probably because Dark Tangent asked the feds to stay away for awhile. DARPA came to play in 2016 giving out a 2 million dollar prize to the team that could build an autonomous AI bot that could handle offense and defense in a Capture the Flag style competition. 2017 made the news because they hosted a voting machine hacking village. Cambridge Global Advisors was a sponsor. They have no connection with Cambridge Analytica. No matter how you feel about politics, the hallmark of any democracy is certifying a fair and, um, democratic election. Jimmy Carter knows. He was 92 then. 2019 saw 30,000 people show up in Vegas for DEF CON 27. At this point, DEF CON has been on the X-Files, Mr. Robot, and given a node in the movie Jason Bourne. It is a special event. Being surrounded by so many people with unbridled curiosity is truly inspiring. I doubt I would ever have written my first book on security if not for the opportunity they gave me to speak at DEF CON and Blackhat. Oh, recording this episode just reminded me - I need to go book my room for next year! If you want to learn more about DEF CON, we’ll include a link to the documentary from 2013 about it in the show notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ctQOmjQyYg