History of Science

Lecture 4: Computing
crisis

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Overview:
• General remarks
• Agendas
• Real time computing
• Programming languages: ALGOL
• The software crisis
• Haigh & Ceruzzi, chapters 9-13

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General remarks:
• Christopher Strachey and the EDSAC, humming
“God save the queen”
• Manchester baby - EDSAC - Ferranti Mark I
• 1950 - 1951
• Details matter! History is about details, as well as
about the more general picture you may derive
from these details — zooming in, zooming out

General remarks: how metaphors disappear!

Language metaphor: some of the people in the early
computer days, were from the field of
mathematical logic (Von Neumann, Burk; in
Europe: Turing, Dijkstra). To them, the idea of a
language or a grammar was already abstract and
definitely applicable to what you did with a
computer.
Others were from the idealistic constructed languages
to eliminate all problems in the world (Esperanto,
Volapük etc)
Note how easy some of you call assembly a
language! It is no metaphor to us today.

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Agendas
What did people want to achieve:
Selling machines
Academic discipline
Thinking machines

Just phone home?

Telstar (AT&T, 1961)

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Agendas
Even within the academic world there were different
agenda’s:
• cybernetics (Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon etc.)
• logic (Turing, Dijkstra)
• sharing information
• ordening / sorting / processing
• calculations

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Agendas
Definitely people within the “field” of cybernetics had
very diverging agenda’s

Margaret Mead (1901-1978)

1967 keynote ASC

Margaret Masterman (1910-1986)




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Agendas:
Realtime computing really was an agenda.
The desirability of real time computing 1967 (!)
according to Dijkstra and some of the X8 engineers:
Now we have grasped the logic of the processes and
understand the machine as a whole, you would ask us
to spoil that by some extra real time frivolities!?

(note on one of the X8 parts)

Whirlwind - SAGE

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Real time computing
Cash Dispenser (1967) Barclays, London: the robot
cashier.

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Real time computing
Ideal of the “cashless society”
(Diners’ club)

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Real time computing
ATM (1969) and VISA (1974) continuing “real time”

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Real time computing
Barclays, presenting itself as a modern bank.

Batch jobs at the

computer center
since 1961.

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Real time computing
Barclays and Burroughs, 1965, looking ahead to
D-Day (February 15, 1971)

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Real time computing
Burroughs, 1965, D825 SAGE computer.
Started in banking
B5500 / TC500
US Steel - Detroit
NORAD (Colorado springs)

“Company of the future”

“Bringing business
automation to far-sighted
companies”

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Real time computing
Barclays and Burroughs, TC500 and B8500 combi.
Response time
of 2.5 seconds.
1,000,000
transactions
per hour.
Ready: 1969

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Real time computing
A Barclays programmer CUBE meeting, 1968.
Burroughs: production of B8500 is delayed.We will
be installing two B6500’s instead.
B5500 coming ahead
Start testing - communication between machines
End 1968: merger with Martins (732 branches)
1969: production of B8500 cancelled
Problems with the computer center location
Trying to “limp in batch mode”

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Real time computing
Barclays and Burroughs: real time or on time?

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Real time computing
• UPC 1970-1971, formally adopted 1973. Political
feat (illustrating trust in real time computing)
• Effect on society: it became more difficult to enter
the food market

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Real time computing
European Article Number Code (1973-1974), 12
countries in Europe. Meanwhile known as IPC

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Programming languages, producing software
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Programming
Program

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Programming
Program library

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Programming
Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill
(1951): first “programming
manual”

E.W. Dijkstra,
Communication
with an
automatic
computer (1959)

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Programming
What were the alternatives?

Within Whirlwind people were

thinking of setting up the program
in a more efficient way

“autocoding”

FORTRAN (1957); COBOL (1959)

Program started from “flowchart”

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Programming
Programming language ALGOL 60
• elegant
• universal (ideal: both machine and language)
• satisfies “European” sense of clarity and order

Or from a “US” point of view:

• academic
• not flexible (better in theory than in practice)
• difficult to learn

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Programming
IAL (1958), later ALGOL 58 / 60 / 68
Europe’s frustration

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Programming
What was the problem?
• Making existing programs
run on a new machine
• Ease of programming

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Programming
Who had interests (agenda’s)?
• ACM
• IEEE
• IBM
• IFIP
• GAMM
• SHARE (IBM)
• USE (Univac)
• DUO (Datatron)
• CUBE (Burroughs) ….

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Programming
The ALGOL conspiracy: dream of a universal
language. Darmstadt, Dresden, München, Zürich,
Mainz

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Programming
ALGOL 60 in the
making

Backus and Bauer

Van Wijngaarden,
Rutishauer and Bauer

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Programming
ALGOL conspiracy
• SHARE
• IBM
• IFIP: 1962, working group 2.1
• ACM: standard for publication of scientific
algorithms.

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Programming
Rise of a software-industry

Beginning 60s software

alone did not suffice to
uphold a business: a range
of computer services
• maintenance
• machine building / tuning
• batch processing

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Programming
Rise of a software-industry

Delimitation of “software” was vague:

Code produced by one of the companies’
programmers was rarely called “software”. It was
referred to as “code” or “program”.
An external company testing a program or even
just documenting was viewed as a “software
project”

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P. Nauer
Programming
IBM 1968: “unbundling”

From that moment onwards, software

became both soft and ware.

Academics in Europa had some trouble

with that idea

E.W. Dijkstra

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Programming
Rise of a software-industry in Europe

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Software crisis
Problems with “growing” amount of code
SDC, the “university of programmers”
1959: 700 programmers, 1400 support staff
> 1.000.000 instructions

IBM’s OS/360 drama

Was there a crisis in Europe?

NATO? Banks? Companies? Scientists?

Brooks’ crisis or Dijkstra’s crisis?

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Software crisis
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Software crisis

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Software crisis
Garmisch-Partenkirchen October 1968

Stakeholders:
GAMM
universities
IFIP
ACM

Who were there? (and who were not?)

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Software crisis
Garmisch-Partenkirchen October 1968
Ways out suggested:
• universal programming languages?
• structured programming

Style
• system development (methodology)
• project management
Economical
• finding more programmers

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Software crisis
Agenda was set by academics:
software engineering
primarily theoretical.

Programmer became a
profession, also in the
economical sense
Informatics a science, software
engineering being an
important building block (if
not foundation)

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Software crisis
Fred Brooks (1972)

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Software crisis
Structured design

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Software crisis
Use formal methods!

Structured
programming,
proving program
correctness (Turing,
Dijkstra)

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Software crisis
“The end of a vocation“
Dijkstra (1967)

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Software crisis
Development model: software as a management
problem

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Software crisis
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Haigh & Ceruzzi
Chapter 9: graphical tool (odd one out; 4, 8)
Chapter 10: rise of personal computers, i.e.: rise of
Windows, rise of Intel, instead of RISC (7, 8)
Chapter 11: digital media, i.e.: electronic music and
images, but also how to store these (cd, dvd, mp3),
virtual reality and games (3, 7, 8)
Chapter 12: www, browser wars, free software
movement (3, 4, 5, 6)
Chapter 13: data centers, cloud computing,
streaming, web 2.0 - networking “the modern way”
(3, 8, 12)

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THE END (for now)

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● Make the assignment

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(see Canvas!)