Mercurial > hg > BCS

comparison CR_preface.txt @ 46:fd066d630735

Find changesets by keywords (author, files, the commit message), revision number or hash, or revset expression.
main done through start at MIT
author Henry Thompson <ht@markup.co.uk>
date Mon, 18 Nov 2024 11:20:57 +0000
parents 8d2fbd093ff3
children 206f4ebc817c
comparison
equal deleted inserted replaced
45:ce64af000711 46:fd066d630735
1 Born December 1949. 1 Born December 1949.
2 2
3 After starting a degree at Oberlin in 1967, dropped out without 3 After starting a degree at Oberlin in 1967, dropped out without
4 completing 3rd year. 4 completing 3rd year. Torn between religion and physics as an
5 5 undergraduate.
6 Out to BC with Katy in the fall of 1969, back to Cambridge and 6
7 Philadelphia to see respective families. 7
8 Out to BC with Katy Tolles (Father Frederick Barnes Tolles,
9 Philadelphia Quaker / historian) in the fall of 1969, visited Argenta,
10 a Quaker settlement in Argenta BC, back to Cambridge and Philadelphia
11 to see respective families.
8 12
9 Had to get out of the US (draft), so that winter took over the old job 13 Had to get out of the US (draft), so that winter took over the old job
10 of his brother Arnold in an NRC high-energy Physics lab, living with 14 of his brother Arnold in an NRC high-energy Physics lab, living with
11 Katy and Arnold in an old farmhouse in a posh neighbourhood in Ottawa. 15 Katy and Arnold in an old farmhouse in a posh neighbourhood in Ottawa.
12 Very snowy winter, record-breaking, 18 feet?, long driveway and a lot 16 Very snowy winter, record-breaking, 18 feet?, long driveway and a lot
75 [CSLI not particularly relevant] 79 [CSLI not particularly relevant]
76 80
77 [CPSR?] 81 [CPSR?]
78 82
79 ---------- 83 ----------
80 Torn between religion and physics as an undergraduate.
81
82 MIT, 1974++ MSc thesis _Levels, Layers and Planes_, about 84 MIT, 1974++ MSc thesis _Levels, Layers and Planes_, about
83 architectural properties of computer science 85 architectural properties of computer science
84 There are no particulars in physics [ref. deiexis discussion, where is 86 There are no particulars in physics [ref. deiexis discussion, where is
85 it] 87 it]
86 WHat drove me out of social inquiry and back to department 6 was 88 WHat drove me out of social inquiry and back to department 6 was
239 important to you does mean that that claim deserves our attention. 241 important to you does mean that that claim deserves our attention.
240 242
241 A delicagte dance -- why have I asked you [HST] to write this, not 243 A delicagte dance -- why have I asked you [HST] to write this, not
242 someone else. Because you were there from the beginning. 244 someone else. Because you were there from the beginning.
243 245
246 NB on p. 24 of CR 0.93:
247
248 Inevitably, as noted in the Preface, it follows that all statements
249 made here are vulnerable to being differentially interpreted by
250 diverse audiences—even those to which the book is primarily
251 addressed.
252
244 ------------ 253 ------------
245 Foundations of/Philosophy of Computation 254 Foundations of/Philosophy of Computation
246 255
247 Lisp was 'broken', 2-Lisp was a flawed attempt to fix it, 3-Lisp takes 256 Lisp was 'broken', 2-Lisp was a flawed attempt to fix it, 3-Lisp takes
248 us in to new territory. 257 us in to new territory.
251 260
252 Effective vs non-Effective is actually new: at the book boundaries, 261 Effective vs non-Effective is actually new: at the book boundaries,
253 project onto the effective [? - it's not that everything is 262 project onto the effective [? - it's not that everything is
254 term-rewriting, it's more like ]. 263 term-rewriting, it's more like ].
255 264
256 265 -------------------
257 266
267 On first reading, before even finishing the introduction, as asked
268 Brian what "effective" meant, since it seemed very important, and
269 appeared to be being used in some technical sense, and it was not
270 immediately obvious to me how that related to my understanding(s) of
271 the word as used in ordinary language.
272
273
274 ------------
275
276 BCS was born in Montreal, Canada, on 1 December 1949, growing up there
277 and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he remains a Canadian citizen.
278 Multiple allegiances, sometimes conflicting but mostly complementary,
279 have characterized both his personal and intellectual life ever since.
280
281 He started undergraduate study at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1967,
282 where his interests included both physics and religion but left after
283 only two years, travelling first to visit the Quaker community Argenta,
284 British Columbia, and ending up in Ottawa where he started work as a
285 programmer at the Division of Physics laboratory of the National
286 Research Council of Canada, working on a project jointly involving
287 Fermilab in Chicago and the Lawrence Research Laboratory in Berkeley.
288 Working at all three sites, he programmed PDP 9 and PDP 15
289 microcomputers, in machine language, for experimental control and data
290 gathering.
291
292 When the project ended he moved back to the family home in Cambridge,
293 and began taking classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
294 (MIT), with an interest in what was then knows as Social Inquiry, in
295 particular the politics of high technology. But in quickly became
296 clear to him that the understanding of computing that the social
297 scientists were critiquing was not the computing that I knew as a
298 programmer, what he later came to refer to as "computing in the wild".
299 He realised that he needed to get clear on what computing really is,
300 so that I could legitimately critique it. He thought he had to go into
301 the heart of the beast, as it were, so applied for the PhD program in
302 Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and began taking
303 classes.
304
305 When the MIT administration discovered he didn't have an undergraduate
306 degree, Patrick Winston, the newly-appointed head of the Artificial
307 Intelligence Laboratory, gave Smith an informal oral exam in topics
308 from the MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum and awarded him
309 the credits necessary for a degree, clearing the way for his admission
310 to the graduate program.
311