The History of Computing

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Today’s episode is on one of the finest minds in the history of computing: Grace Brewster Murray Hopper. Rear Admiral Hopper was born on December 9th, 1906 in New York City.   She would go on to graduate from Vassar College in 1928, earn a master’s degree at Yale in 1930, and then a PhD from Yale in 1933, teaching at Vassar from 1931 until 1941. And her story might have ended there.

But then World War Two happened. Her great-grandfather was an admiral in the US Navy during the Civil War, and so Grace Hopper would try to enlist. But she was too old and a little too skinny. And she was, well, a she. So instead she went on to join the women’s branch of the United States Naval Reserve called WAVES, or Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, at the time. She graduated first in her class and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships project at Harvard as a Lieutenant where she was one of the original programmers of the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, better known as the Mark I. 

The Mark I did what the analytical engine tried to do but using electromechanical components. Approved by the original IBM CEO Thomas Watson Sr, the project had begun in 1937 and was shipped to Harvard in 1944. If you can imagine, Hopper and the other programmers did conditional branching manually. Computers played a key role in the war effort and Hopper played a key role in the development of those computers. She co-authored three papers on the Mark I during those early days. She also found a moth in the Mark II in 1947, creating a term everyone in software uses today: debugging. 

When peace came, she was offered a professorship at Vassar. But she had a much bigger destiny to fulfill. Hopper stayed on at Harvard working on Navy contracts because the Navy didn’t want her yet. Yet. She would leave Harvard to go into the private sector for a bit. At this point she could have ended up with Remington Rand designing electric razors (yes, that Remington), or working on the battery division, which would be sold to Rayovac decades later. But she ended up there as a package deal with the UNIVAC. And her destiny began to unfold. 

You see, writing machine code sucks. She wanted to write software, not machine language. She wanted to write code in English that would then run as machine code. This was highly controversial at the time because programmers didn’t see the value in allow what was mainly mathematical notation for data processing to be available in a higher level language, which she proposed would be English statements. She published her first paper on what she called compilers in 1952. 

There’s a lot to unpack about what compilers brought to computing. For starters, they opened up programming to people that would otherwise have seen a bunch of mathematical notations and run away. In her words:  “I could say "Subtract income tax from pay" instead of trying to write that in octal code or using all kinds of symbols.” This opened the field up to the next generation of programmers. It also had a second consequence: the computer was no longer just there to do math. Because the Mark I had been based on the Analytical Engine, it was considered a huge and amazing calculator.  But putting actual English words out there and then compiling (you can’t really call it converting because that’s an oversimplification) those into machine code meant the blinders started to come off and that next generation of programmers started to think of computers as… more. 

The detractors had a couple of valid points. This was the early days of processing. The compiler created code that wasn’t as efficient as machine code developed by hand. Especially as there were more and more instructions you could compile. There’s really no way around that. But the detractors might not have realized how much faster processors would get. After all they were computing with gears just a few decades earlier. The compiler also opened up the industry to non-mathematicians. I’m pretty sure an objection was that some day someone would write a fart app. And they did. But Grace Hopper was right, the compiler transformed computing into the industry it is today. We still compile code and without the compiler we wouldn’t be close to having the industry we have today. In 1954 she basically became the first director of software development when she was promoted to the Director of Automatic Programming.

Feeling like an underachiever yet? She was still in the Navy Reserve and in 1957 was promoted to Commander. But she was hard at work at her day job as she and her team at Remington Rand developed a language called FLOW-MATIC the first natural language programming language. In 1959, a bunch of computer nerds were assembled in a conference called CODASYL, or Conference on Data Systems Languages for short. Here, they extended FLOW-MATIC into COBOL making Hopper the mother of compilers and thus the grandmother of COBOL. Picking up a bunch of extra names to add to the end of your title doesn’t necessarily mean a dragon flies away with you though. She retired from the Navy in 1966. 

But again, her story doesn’t end there. Hopper went back to the Navy in 1967 after a very successful career with Remington Rand, overseeing the Navy Programming Languages Group. After all, putting language into programming was something she, um, pioneered. She was promoted to a Captain in the Navy in 1973.

Here, she directed and developed validation software for COBOL and its compiler through much of the 70s. Armed with those standards, she was then able to go to the Defense Department and push for more computers that were smaller. The rest of the world had no idea the mini-computer (or PC revolution) was coming but she did. Her standards would evolve into the standards managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, today. You know those NIST configuration guides for configuring a Mac or Windows computer? They do that. The Navy promoted her to a commodore in 1983, a rank renamed to rear admiral just before her retirement in 1986. She earned her Defense Distinguished Service Medal after coming home to the Navy time and time again during her 42 year career there. I guess the meaning of her life was computers and the US Navy. 

After her retirement, she wasn’t ready to slow down. She went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) speaking at conferences and industry forums and traveling to the DEC offices. At the time, DEC was the number two computer company in the world. She stayed there until she passed away in 1992. Since her death, she has had a college at Yale renamed in her honor, had a destroyer named after her, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor by then US president Barack Obama. If you don’t yet have a spirit animal, you could do worse than to pick her. 

Severe Tire Damage. Like many things we cover in this podcast, the first streaming rock band on the Interwebs came out of Xerox PARC. 1993 was a great year. Mariah Carey released Dreamlover, Janet Jackson released That’s The Way Love Goes. Boyz II Men released In The Still of the Nite. OK, so it wasn’t that great a year. But Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train. That was some pretty good stuff out of Minnesota. But Severe Tire Damage was named after They Might Be Giants and a much more appropriate salvo into the world of streaming media. The members were from DEC Systems Research Center, Apple, and Xerox PARC. All members at the time and later are pretty notable in their own right and will likely show up here and there on later episodes of this podcast. So they kinda’ deserved to use half the bandwidth of the entire internet at the time. 

The first big band to stream was the Rolling Stones, the following year. Severe Tire Damage did an opening stream of their own. Because they’re awesome. The Stones called the stunt a “good reminder of the democratic nature of the Internet.” They likely had no clue that the drummer is the father of ubiquitous computing, the third wave of computing. But if they have an Apple Watch, a NEST, use an app to remotely throw treats to their dog, use a phone to buy a plane ticket, or check their Twitter followers 20 times a day, they can probably thank Mark Weiser for his contributions to computing. They can also thank Steve Rubin for his contributions on the 3D engine in the Mac. Or his wife Amy for her bestselling book Impossible Cure. 

But back to streaming media. Really, streaming media goes back to George O Squier getting patents for transmitting music over electrical lines in the 1910s and 1920s. This became Muzak. And for decades, people made fun of elevator music. While he originally meant for the technology to compete with radio, he ended up pivoting in the 30s to providing music to commercial clients. The name Muzak was a mashup of music and Kodak, mostly just for a unique trademark. By the end of the 30s Warner Brothers had acquired Muzak and then it went private again when George Benton, the  chairman and publisher of the Encyclopædia Britannica pivoted the company into brainwashing for customers, alternating between music and silence in 15 minute intervals and playing soft tones to make people feel more comfortable while waiting for a doctor or standing in an elevator. Makes you wonder what he might have shoved into the Encyclopedia! Especially since he  went on to become a senator. At least he led the charge to get rid of McCarthy who referred to him as “Little Willie Benton.” I guess some things never change. Benton passed away in 1973, but you can stream an interview with him from archives.org ( https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.95761 ).

Popularity of Muzak waned over the following decades until they went bankrupt in 2009. After reorganization it was acquired in 2011 and is now Mood Media, which has also gone bankrupt. I guess people want a more democratic form of media these days. I blame the 60s.  Not much else happened in streaming until the 1990s. A couple of technologies were maturing at this point to allow for streaming media. The first is the Internet. TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 but public commercial use didn’t really kick on until the late 1980s. We’ll reserve that story for another episode. The next is MPEG.

MPEG is short for the Moving Picture Experts Group. MPEG is a working group formed specifically to set standards for audio and video compression and the transmission of that audio and video over networks. The first meeting of the group was in 1988. The group defined a standard format for playing media on the Internet, soon to actually be a thing (but not yet). And thus the MPEG format was born. MPEG is now the international standard for encoding and compressing video images. Following the first release they moved quickly. In 1992, the MPEG-1 standard was approved at a meeting in London. This gave us MPEG Layer 3, or MP3 as well as video CDs.  At the Porto meeting in 1994, we got MPEG-2 standard, thus DVDs, DVD players and AAC standard a long standard for iTunes and used for both television and audio encoding. MPEG-4 came in 1999, and the changes began to slow as adoption increased. Today, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 are under development.

Then came the second wave of media. In 1997, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev built WinAmp. A lot of people had a lot of CDs. Some of those people also had WinAmp or other MP3 players and rippers. By 1999 enough steam bad been built up that Sean Parker, Shawn Fanning, and John Fanning built a tool called Napster that allowed people to trade those MP3s online. At their height, 80 million people were trading music online. People started buying MP3 players, stereos had MP3 capabilities, and you could find and download any song you could think of easier and cheaper than you could get them at a music store. Brick and mortar music stores began to close their doors and record labels saw a huge drop in profits. I knew people with terabytes of music, where each song was about 3 megs. 

The music industry had suffered a massive blow. After a long court battle, the RIAA obtained an injunction that forced Napster to shut down in 2001. The music industry thought maybe they were saved. But by then other sites like Limewire and many other services had popped up and to shut pandora’s box, we needed innovation,  

The innovation was making it simple to buy music. Sure, people could continue to steal music if they wanted, but it turned out that if a song was a buck, people were likely to just go out and buy it. Other vendors followed suit and before long the tide of stealing music was turned back. 

Another innovation had occurred in 2001 but hadn’t really caught steam yet. Rhapsody (originally TuneTo.com) was launched in December of 2001. Rhapsody slowly built up a catalog of 11 million songs and 750,000 subscribers. Rhapsody worked kinda’ like Radio. Pandora Radio, launched in 2005, allowed users to create their own stations. With 66 million active users, Pandora was bought by Sirius XM for 3.5 Billion dollars. But if these were the only vendors that were in this space, it might not be what it is today. I remember in about 2010, I asked my niece about buying a song. She looked at me like I was stupid. Why would you buy a song. I asked her about downloading them for free. Black stare. That’s when I realized the third wave of streaming music was on us.

Spotify, originally created in 2006, allowed users to build their own stations of songs and now has 217 million users with nearly half paying for the subscription so they don’t get ads, with revenue of nearly $6 Billion dollars. Apple Music was late to the party, arriving in 2015, because Steve Jobs wasn’t into music subscription services. But since the launch they are up to 60 million users in 2019. Apple’s services revenue though is over a quarter trillion dollars a year. Google has 15 million streaming subscribers and with the emergence of their Echo’s Amazon is poised to garner a lot of streaming music subscribers. 

Music isn’t the only business that has been disrupted. You see, the innovation that iTunes and the popularization of the iPod created also made us rethink other business models. Television and movie consumption has shifted to streaming platforms. And Apps. The iOS App Store was released in 2008. The App Stores have shifted many an enterprise software into smaller workflows strung together with apps. There are now 1.8 million apps on that App Store and 2.1 available for Android users. These apps have led to ride sharing services and countless other apps displacing businesses that have operated the same way for sometimes hundreds of years. Yes, this story is about streaming music. But the movement that started with Severe Tire Damage combined with other technologies to have a resounding impact to how we live our lives. It’s no wonder that their drummer, Mark Weiser, is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing. 

PASCAL was designed in 1969 by the Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth and released in 1970, the same year Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Patton, and Love Story was released. The Beatles released Let It Be, Three Dog Night was ruling the airwaves with Mama Told Me Not To Come, and you could buy Pong and Simon Says for home. Wirth had been a PhD student at Berkeley in the early 1960s, at the same time Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix and author of the Go programming language was in school there. It’s not uncommon for a language to kick around for a decade or more gathering steam, but PASCAL quickly caught on. In 1983, PASCAL got legit and was standardized, in ISO 7185. The next year Wirth would win the 1984 Turing Award. Perhaps he listened to When Doves Cry when he heard. Or maybe he watched Beverly Hills Cop, Indiana Jones, Gremlines, Red Dawn, The Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, or Terminator on his flight home. Actually, probably not. 

PASCAL is named after Blaise Pascal, the French Philosopher and Mathemetician. As with many programmers, PASCAL built THE WORLD’S FIRST FULLY FUNCTIONAL MECHANICAL CALCULATOR because he was lazy and his dad made him do too many calculations to help pay his bills. 400 years later, we still need calculators here and there, to help us with our bills.  As with many natural scientists of the time, Blaise Pascal contributed to science and math in a variety of ways:

• PASCAL’S LAW IN HYDROSTATICS
• PASCAL’S THEOREM TO THE EMERGING FIELD OF PROJECTIVE GEOMETRY
• IMPORTANT WORK on ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE AND VACUUM including that REDISCOVERing THAT ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE DECREASES WITH HEIGHT
• A pioneer in THE THEORY OF PROBABILITY
• While Indian and Chinese mathematicians had been using it for centuries, PASCAL POPULARIZED THE PASCAL’S TRIANGLE and was credited with providing PASCAL’s Identity
• As with many in the 1600s he was deeply religious and dedicated the later part of his life to religious writings including Pensees, which helped shape the French Classical Period. Perhaps he wrote it while listening to Bonini or watching The History of Sir Francis Drake

The PASCAL programming language was built to teach students to program, but as with many tools students learn on, it grew in popularity as those students graduated from college throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I learned PASCAL in high school computer science in 1992. Yes, Kris Kross was making you Jump and Billy Ray Cyrus was singing Achy Breaky Heart the same year his daughter was born.  I learned my first if, then, else, case, and while statements in PASCAL. 

PASCAL is a procedural programming language that supports structured data structures and structured programming.At the time I would write programs on notebook paper and type them in next time I had a chance to play with a computer. I also learned enumerations, pointers, type definitions, and sets. PASCAL also gave me my first exposure to integers, real numbers, chars, and booleans. I can still remember writing the word program at the top of a piece of paper, followed by a word to describe the program I was about to write. Then writing begin and end. Never forgetting the period after the end of course. The structures were simple. Instead of echo you would simply use the word write to write text to the screen, followed by hello world in parenthesis wrapped in single quotes. After all, there are special characters if you use a comma and an exclamation point in hello word. 

I also clearly remember wrapping my comments in {} because if you didn’t comment what you did it was assumed you stole your code from Byte managize. I also remember making my first procedure and how there was a difference between procedures and functions. The code was simple and readable.  Later I would use AmigaPascal and hate life. 

PASCAL eventually branched out into a number of versions including Visual PASCAL, Instant PASCAL, and Turbo PASCAL. There are still live variants including the freepascal compiler available at freepascal.org. PASCAL was the dominant language used in the early days of both Apple and Microsoft. So much so that most of the original Apple software was written in PASCAL, including Desk Accessories, which would later become Extensions. Perhaps the first awesome computer was the Apple II, where PASCAL was all over the place. Because developers knew PASCAL, it ended up being the main high-level language for the Lisa and then the Mac. In fact, some of the original Mac OS was hand-translated to assembly language from PASCAL. PASCAL wasn’t just for parts of the operating system. It was also used for a number of popular early programs, including Photoshop 1.

PASCAL became object-oriented first with Lisa Pascal, Classcal then with Object PASCAL in 1985. That year Apple released MacApp, which was an object oriented API for the classic Mac Operating system. Apple stuck with Object PASCAL until the beginning of the end of mainline PASCAL in 1991, when it transitioned to C++ for System 7. MacApp would go on to burn a fiery death when Apple acquired NeXT. Perhaps it was due to Terminator 2 being released that year and developers figured things had gone full circle. Or maybe it was because REM caused them to Lose Their Religion. 

PASCAL wasn’t just for Apple. Universities all over the world were using PASCAL, including the University of California San Diego, which introduced UCSD Pascal, which was a branch of Pascal-P2. UCSD p-System was one of three operating systems you could run on the original IBM Personal Computer. Microsoft would then implement the Object Pascal compiler, which caught on with developers that wanted to get more than what BASIC offered. Around this time, people were actually making real money and BORLAND released Turbo Pascal, making it cheap to grab big marketshare. Object PASCAL also begat Delphi, still used to write programs by people who refuse to change today. 

Wirth himself was fascinating. He not only wrote The Pascal User Manual and Report but also went on to write an article called Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, about how to teach programming and something all computer science teachers and aficionados should read. His book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs helped shape how I think of computers even today, because it turns out the more things change the more they stay the same. 

He also coined Wirth’s law, which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. Every time I see a beachball or hourglass on my laptop I think of that. This could be initially from his work on building a compiler into the ALGOL language, which resulted in ALGOL W and watching that turn into the swamp thing that was ALGOL X and then ALGOL 68, which became so complex and difficult that writing good compilers became out of the question. Due to this ALGOL languished, making room for PASCAL in the hearts of early programmers. 

While PASCAL is his most substantial contribution to computing, he also designed parts of Algol, Modula and Oberon, and did two sabbaticals at Xerox PARC,  the first from 1976–1977 and the second from 1984–1985. Here, he would have been exposed to a graphical operating system  and the mouse, before Apple popularized them. 

Perhaps one of the most enduring legacies of PACAL though, is A. A is a computer pogromming language that was originally written as a hoax. Dennis Richie had just finished reading a National Lampoon parody of the Lord of the Rings called “Bored of the Rings.” Unix as a parody of Multics mean to “to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels” Ken Thompson would go on to describe A this way “Dennis and Brian worked on a warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. 'A' looked a lot like Pascal, but elevated the notion of the direct memory address (which Wirth had banished) to the central concept of the language. This was Dennis's contribution, and he in fact coined the term "pointer" as an innocuous sounding name for a truly malevolent construct.” Anyone who has gotten a null pointer exception should know that their pain is intentional. The prank evolved into B and then C. By the way, the hoax is a hoax. But there is a little truth to every lie. The truth here is that in many ways, C is the anti-pascal. I blame Berkeley in the 60s. But not for wasting your time with the hoax. For that I blame me. I mean, first I blame the creators of Unix, then me. 

PASCAL has all but been replaced by a multitude of languages starting with the word Visual, Objective-C, Java, Go, Ruby, Python, PHP, and other more “modern” languages. But it is still, as they said in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, it is “Another lovely souvenir from the 20th Century.”

PASCAL was designed in 1969 by the Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth and released in 1970, the same year Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Patton, and Love Story was released. The Beatles released Let It Be, Three Dog Night was ruling the airwaves with Mama Told Me Not To Come, and you could buy Pong and Simon Says for home. Wirth had been a PhD student at Berkeley in the early 1960s, at the same time Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix and author of the Go programming language was in school there. It’s not uncommon for a language to kick around for a decade or more gathering steam, but PASCAL quickly caught on. In 1983, PASCAL got legit and was standardized, in ISO 7185. The next year Wirth would win the 1984 Turing Award. Perhaps he listened to When Doves Cry when he heard. Or maybe he watched Beverly Hills Cop, Indiana Jones, Gremlines, Red Dawn, The Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, or Terminator on his flight home. Actually, probably not. 

PASCAL is named after Blaise Pascal, the French Philosopher and Mathemetician. As with many programmers, PASCAL built THE WORLD’S FIRST FULLY FUNCTIONAL MECHANICAL CALCULATOR because he was lazy and his dad made him do too many calculations to help pay his bills. 400 years later, we still need calculators here and there, to help us with our bills.  As with many natural scientists of the time, Blaise Pascal contributed to science and math in a variety of ways:

• PASCAL’S LAW IN HYDROSTATICS
• PASCAL’S THEOREM TO THE EMERGING FIELD OF PROJECTIVE GEOMETRY
• IMPORTANT WORK on ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE AND VACUUM including that REDISCOVERing THAT ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE DECREASES WITH HEIGHT
• A pioneer in THE THEORY OF PROBABILITY
• While Indian and Chinese mathematicians had been using it for centuries, PASCAL POPULARIZED THE PASCAL’S TRIANGLE and was credited with providing PASCAL’s Identity
• As with many in the 1600s he was deeply religious and dedicated the later part of his life to religious writings including Pensees, which helped shape the French Classical Period. Perhaps he wrote it while listening to Bonini or watching The History of Sir Francis Drake

The PASCAL programming language was built to teach students to program, but as with many tools students learn on, it grew in popularity as those students graduated from college throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I learned PASCAL in high school computer science in 1992. Yes, Kris Kross was making you Jump and Billy Ray Cyrus was singing Achy Breaky Heart the same year his daughter was born.  I learned my first if, then, else, case, and while statements in PASCAL. 

PASCAL is a procedural programming language that supports structured data structures and structured programming.At the time I would write programs on notebook paper and type them in next time I had a chance to play with a computer. I also learned enumerations, pointers, type definitions, and sets. PASCAL also gave me my first exposure to integers, real numbers, chars, and booleans. I can still remember writing the word program at the top of a piece of paper, followed by a word to describe the program I was about to write. Then writing begin and end. Never forgetting the period after the end of course. The structures were simple. Instead of echo you would simply use the word write to write text to the screen, followed by hello world in parenthesis wrapped in single quotes. After all, there are special characters if you use a comma and an exclamation point in hello word. 

I also clearly remember wrapping my comments in {} because if you didn’t comment what you did it was assumed you stole your code from Byte managize. I also remember making my first procedure and how there was a difference between procedures and functions. The code was simple and readable.  Later I would use AmigaPascal and hate life. 

PASCAL eventually branched out into a number of versions including Visual PASCAL, Instant PASCAL, and Turbo PASCAL. There are still live variants including the freepascal compiler available at freepascal.org. PASCAL was the dominant language used in the early days of both Apple and Microsoft. So much so that most of the original Apple software was written in PASCAL, including Desk Accessories, which would later become Extensions. Perhaps the first awesome computer was the Apple II, where PASCAL was all over the place. Because developers knew PASCAL, it ended up being the main high-level language for the Lisa and then the Mac. In fact, some of the original Mac OS was hand-translated to assembly language from PASCAL. PASCAL wasn’t just for parts of the operating system. It was also used for a number of popular early programs, including Photoshop 1.

PASCAL became object-oriented first with Lisa Pascal, Classcal then with Object PASCAL in 1985. That year Apple released MacApp, which was an object oriented API for the classic Mac Operating system. Apple stuck with Object PASCAL until the beginning of the end of mainline PASCAL in 1991, when it transitioned to C++ for System 7. MacApp would go on to burn a fiery death when Apple acquired NeXT. Perhaps it was due to Terminator 2 being released that year and developers figured things had gone full circle. Or maybe it was because REM caused them to Lose Their Religion. 

PASCAL wasn’t just for Apple. Universities all over the world were using PASCAL, including the University of California San Diego, which introduced UCSD Pascal, which was a branch of Pascal-P2. UCSD p-System was one of three operating systems you could run on the original IBM Personal Computer. Microsoft would then implement the Object Pascal compiler, which caught on with developers that wanted to get more than what BASIC offered. Around this time, people were actually making real money and BORLAND released Turbo Pascal, making it cheap to grab big marketshare. Object PASCAL also begat Delphi, still used to write programs by people who refuse to change today. 

Wirth himself was fascinating. He not only wrote The Pascal User Manual and Report but also went on to write an article called Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, about how to teach programming and something all computer science teachers and aficionados should read. His book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs helped shape how I think of computers even today, because it turns out the more things change the more they stay the same. 

He also coined Wirth’s law, which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. Every time I see a beachball or hourglass on my laptop I think of that. This could be initially from his work on building a compiler into the ALGOL language, which resulted in ALGOL W and watching that turn into the swamp thing that was ALGOL X and then ALGOL 68, which became so complex and difficult that writing good compilers became out of the question. Due to this ALGOL languished, making room for PASCAL in the hearts of early programmers. 

While PASCAL is his most substantial contribution to computing, he also designed parts of Algol, Modula and Oberon, and did two sabbaticals at Xerox PARC,  the first from 1976–1977 and the second from 1984–1985. Here, he would have been exposed to a graphical operating system  and the mouse, before Apple popularized them. 

Perhaps one of the most enduring legacies of PACAL though, is A. A is a computer pogromming language that was originally written as a hoax. Dennis Richie had just finished reading a National Lampoon parody of the Lord of the Rings called “Bored of the Rings.” Unix as a parody of Multics mean to “to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration levels” Ken Thompson would go on to describe A this way “Dennis and Brian worked on a warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. 'A' looked a lot like Pascal, but elevated the notion of the direct memory address (which Wirth had banished) to the central concept of the language. This was Dennis's contribution, and he in fact coined the term "pointer" as an innocuous sounding name for a truly malevolent construct.” Anyone who has gotten a null pointer exception should know that their pain is intentional. The prank evolved into B and then C. By the way, the hoax is a hoax. But there is a little truth to every lie. The truth here is that in many ways, C is the anti-pascal. I blame Berkeley in the 60s. But not for wasting your time with the hoax. For that I blame me. I mean, first I blame the creators of Unix, then me. 

PASCAL has all but been replaced by a multitude of languages starting with the word Visual, Objective-C, Java, Go, Ruby, Python, PHP, and other more “modern” languages. But it is still, as they said in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, it is “Another lovely souvenir from the 20th Century.”

Welcome to the History of computing podcast. Today we’re going to review A Brief History of Time - no, not that brief history of time. But instead how time has evolved in computing. 

We love old things still being used on this podcast. Time is important; so important that it’s epic! Or epoch more specifically. The epoch is a date and time from which a computer measures the time on the system. Most operating systems derive their time from the number of seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970 when the clock struck midnight, when time began - likely the Catch-22 that the movie was made based on, later that year. This queue is taken from Unix Epoch time. 

Different systems use different time as their epoch. MATLAB uses January 0, 1BC - which is all you need to know about Matlab developers, really. COBOL used January 1, 1601, likely indicating that was the year Cobol was written. OK so it isn’t - but I’m guessing it’s when many of the philosophies of the language were first conceived. Time must seem like it started on January first 2001 to Apple’s Cocoa framework, which began epoch then. My least favorite would be AmigaOS, which started Epoch time on January first 1978 - Nothing good happened in 1978. Jaws 2 and Halloween were released that year. Yuck. Well, Animal House was pretty good. But I could do without Boogie Oogie Oogie. And I could do without Andy Gib’s Shadow Dancing. Disco died the next year. As did the soul of anyone that had to use an Amiga. 

Due to how many modern encryption protocols work, you want to keep time in sync between computers. A skew, or offset in that time, by even microseconds can impact the ability to decrypt data. This lead to the Network Time Protocol, or NTP for short. NTP NTP was designed by David L. Mills of the University of Delaware. It is a networking protocol that provides for clock synchronization between computer systems over standard data networks. NTP has been running since 1985, making it one of the oldest Internet protocols still in use today, with the most updated specs defined in RFC 958. 

`date +%s`

NTP has had a number of updates over the years, although they have slowed as it became more popular. NTP 0 was released in 1985, the same year as the Goonies, Pale Rider, the Breakfast Club and ironically Back to the Future. Given that NTP was free, it’s also ironic that Dire Straits released Money for Nothing the same year it was released. Simple Minds, Aha, and Tears for Fears ruled the airwaves that year, with Tears for Fears proving that Everyone wants to rule the world, but despite being free, NTP is the one on all computers, thus outlasting the rest and being the one that ended up ruling the world. 

Version 1 came in 1988, 2 in 1989, , 3 in 1992, and NTPv4 was drafted in 2010 but has not yet been published given how dependent we as an IT industry now is on NTP. To better understand how dependent we are, let’s look at the three main platforms:

• In Windows, you can just “Double-click the system clock and then click on the Internet Time tab.” 
• On Mac, open System Preferences > Date & Time which configures the /usr/libexec/timed launchdaemon
• And on Linux, open System > Admin >Time and Date. These screens allow you to enter an NTP Server. NTP is short for Network Time Protocol. 

NIST Internet Time Service (ITS) provides 24 names of Network Time Servers, and each vendor often operates their own, such as time.apple.com. Each machine then operates a time zone offset. You know Apple’s time servers because you can read them plain as day by default if you cat /private/etc/ntp.conf - it just outputs server time.apple.com. I’d tell you how to do it in Windows but it would blow your mind. OK, I’ll do it anyways: Just reg query HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parameters and then read the value of the NtpServer field in the output. OK, not mind blowing. But what is mind blowing?

The Big Bang is mind blowing. Not the TV show; that’s not.

NTP uses 64-bit timestamps. Those consist of a 32-bit portion used for seconds and a 32-bit portion used for a fraction of a second, meaning that it rolls every 232 seconds, which is 136 years. NTPv4 will still need to get ratified by February 7th, 2036, if only to cover the first rollover. NTPv4 moving to a 128-bit date format should take us until the next Big Bang when this stuff won’t matter any more. 

Mills was an interesting cat. He got his PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1971, where he worked on ARPA projects wrote terminal software that provided connections to the IBM360 mainframe. He also worked on the Exterior Gateway Protocol. He initially invented NTP in 1981 and was a professor in computer science at the University of Delaware from 1986 to 2008. He’s still an emeritus professor at the University of Delaware. 

In 1610 (a few years after the COBOL epoch), the English naval officer Samuel Argall named the Delaware River and Delaware Bay after then governor of Virginia, Thomas West. West happened to be the 12th Baron De La Warr. Did you know that Delaware was the first state to ratify the constitution on December 7th 1787? Delaware is the diamond state, and the second smallest state in the Union. The state insect is a lady bug. Ryan Phillippe is probably more famous than NTP, even though he killed disco with his awful acting in Studio 54. Henry Heimlich is from Delaware. Hopefully you don’t need to use his infamous maneuver as often as NTP gets updated. Elisabeth Shue is also from Delaware. The Karate Kid was awesome. But that’s it. No one else of note. Joe Biden, Senator from Delaware from 1973-2009 and Vice President from 2009 to 2017 - he’s not from Delaware, he’s from Scranton. In case you’re curious, that’s not in Delaware. 

Following the retirement of Mills from the University of Delaware, the reference implementation is currently maintained as an open source project led by Harlan Stenn, who has submitted bug fixes and portability improvements to the NTP codebase since the 1980s. He’s been allowed to focus on time because of the Network Time Foundation, which can be found at https://www.nwtime.org. What’s next for NTP? For one, ratifying NTS. 

Network Time Security (NTS), draft RFC 7384, lets users or servers authenticate to the Network Time Protocol (NTP). This involves a key exchange over TLS that protects against man in the middle attacks, using standard PKI as well as a TLS handshake that then allows time synchronization via extension fields. 

One of the earliest computing devices was the abacus. This number crunching device can first be found in use by Sumerians, circa 2700BC. The abacus can be found throughout Asia, the Middle East, and India throughout ancient history. Don’t worry, the rate of innovation always speeds up as multiple technologies can be combined. Leonardo da Vinci sketched out the first known plans for a calculator. But it was the 17th century, or the Early modern period in Europe, that gave us the Scientific Revolution. Names like Kepler, Leibniz, Boyle, Newton, and Hook brought us calculus, telescopes, microscopes, and even electricity. The term computer is first found in 1613, describing a person that did computations. Wilhelm Schickard built the first calculator in 1623, which he described in a letter to Kepler. Opening the minds of humanity caused people like Blaise Pascal to theorize about vacuums and he then did something very special: he built a mechanical calculator that could add and subtract numbers, do multiplication, and even division. And more important than building a prototype, he sold a few! His programming language was a lantern gear. It took him 50 prototypes and many years, but he presented the calculator in 1645, earning him a royal privilege in France for calculators. That’s feudal French for a patent. Leibniz added repetition to the mechanical calculator in his Step Reckoner. And he was a huge proponent of binary, although he didn’t use it in his mechanical calculator. Binary would become even more important later, when electronics came to computers. But as with many great innovations it took awhile to percolate. In many ways, the age of enlightenment was taking the theories from the previous century and building on them. The early industrial revolution though, was about automation. And so the mechanical calculator was finally ready for daily use in 1820 when another Frenchman, Colmar, built the arithmometer, based on Leibniz’s design. A few years earlier, another innovation had occurred: memory. Memory came in the form of punchcards, an innovation that would go on to last until World War II. The Jacquard loom was used to weave textiles. The punch cards controlled how rods moved and thus were the basis of the pattern of the weave. Punching cards was an early form of programming. You recorded a set of instructions onto a card and the loom performed them. The bash programming of today is similar. Charles Babbage expanded on the ideas of Pascal and Leibniz and added to mechanical computing, making the difference engine, the inspiration of many a steampunk. Babbage had multiple engineers building components for the engine and after he scrapped his first, he moved on to the analytical engine, adding conditional branching, loops, and memory - and further complicating the machine. The engine borrowed the punchcard tech from the Jacquard loom and applied that same logic to math. Ada Lovelace contributed the concept of Bernoulli numbers in algorithms giving us a glimpse into what an open source collaboration might some day look like. And she was in many ways the first programmer - and daughter of Lord Byron and Anne Millbanke, a math whiz. She became fascinated with the engine and ended up becoming an expert at creating a set of instructions to punch on cards, thus the first programmer of the analytical engine and far before her time. In fact, there would be no programmer for 100 years with her depth of understanding. Not to make you feel inadequate, but she was 27 in 1843. The engine was a bit too advanced for its time. While Babbage is credited as the father of computing because of his ideas, shipping is a feature. Having said that, it has been proven that if the build had been completed to specifications the device would have worked. Sometimes the best of plans just can’t be operationalized unless you reduce scope. Babbage added scope. Despite having troubles keeping contractors who could build complex machinery, Babbage first looked to tree rings to predict weather and he was a mathematician who worked with keys and ciphers. As with Isaac Newton 150 years earlier, the British government also allowed a great scientist/engineer to reform a political institution: the Postal System. You see, he was also an early proponent of applying the scientific method to the management and administration of governmental, commercial, and industrial processes. He also got one of the first government grants in R&D to help build the difference engine, although ended up putting some of his own money in there as well, of course. Babbage died in 1871 and thus ended computing. For a bit. The typewriter came in 1874, as parts kept getting smaller and people kept tinkerating with ideas to automate all the things. Herman Hollerith filed for a patent in 1884 to use a machine to punch and count punched cars. He used that first in health care management and then in the 1890 census. He later formed Tabulating Machine Company, in 1896. In the meantime, Julius E. Pitrap patented a computing scale in 1885. William S Burroughs (not that one, the other one) formed the American Arithmometer Company in 1886. Sales exploded for these and they merged, creating the Computing-Tabulation-Recording Company. Thomas J Watson, Sr joined the company as president in 1914 and expanded business, especially outside of the United States. The name of the company was changed to International Business Machines, or IBM for short, in 1924. Konrad Zuse built the first electric computer from 1936 to 1938 in his parent’s living room. It was called the Z1. OK, so electric is a stretch, how about electromechanical… In 1936 Alan Turing proposed the Turing machine, which printed symbols on tape that simulated a human following a set of instructions. Maybe he accidentally found one of Ada Lovelace’s old papers. The first truly programmable electric computer came in 1943, with Colossus, built by Tommy flowers to break German codes. The first truly digital computer came from Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and his grad student Cliff Berry from Iowa State University. The ABC, or Atanasoff-Berry Computer took from 1937 to 1942 to build and was the first to add vacuum tubes. The ENIAC came from J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly from the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1946. 1,800 square feet and ten times that many vacuum tubes, ENIAC weighed 50 tons. ENIAC is considered to be the first digital computer because unlike the ABC it was fully functional. The Small-Scale Experimental Machine from Frederic Williams and Tom Kilburn from the University of Manchester came in 1948 and added the ability to store and execute a program. That program was run by Tom Kilburn on June 21st, 1948. Up to this point, the computer devices were being built in universities, with the exception of the Z1. But in 1950, Konrad Zuse sold the Z4, thus creating the commercial computer industry. IBM got into the business of selling computers in 1952 as well, basically outright owning the market until grunge killed the suit in the 90s. MIT added RAM in 1955 and then transistors in 1956. The PDP-1 was released in 1960 from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). This was the first minicomputer. My first computer was a DEC. Pier Giorgio Perotto introduced the first desktop computer, the Programmer 101 in 1964. HP began to sell the HP 9100A in 1968. All of this steam led to the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, to be released in 1971. The first truly personal computer was released in 1975 by Ed Roberts, who was the first to call it that. It was the Altair 8800. The IBM 5100 was the first portable computer, released the same year. I guess it’s portable if 55 pounds is considered portable. And the end of ancient history came the next year, when the Apple I was developed by Steve Wozniak, which I’ve always considered as the date that the modern era of computing be.