Posted on 05/03/2017 2:36:41 PM PDT by mairdie
"John Cocke: A Retrospective by Friends" was a work of love for John Cocke, an eccentric genius in IBM. This video was made from interviews with prominent IBMers - Fran Allen, Joel Birnbaum, Lewis Branscomb, Fred Brooks, Brad Dunham, Red Dunwell, Ed Fredkin, Ralph Gomory, Ian Gunn, Andy Heller, Harwood Kolsky, Abe Peled, Jack Schwartz, and Ed Sussenguth - sharing their memories of John.
I have never heard the word "gentleman" used by so many disparate people. As these people talk about John, they're also talking about the history of computers. I let John ramble for a full minute near the end to demonstrate the way he thought. He often seemed incoherent, but that seemed mostly because he was so far ahead of everyone else. IBM asked people, including my husband, to take on the job of following John and writing down what he said. Paul chose not to do it as he wanted to do his own work. Everyone who did take the job went on to become famous.
It breaks my heart that the original 1" source tapes were erased. I begged Fran to take them to her office after I took early retirement, but she trusted the video studio to care for them. Bad mistake. I have only window dubs of some of the footage that I had already excerpted in preparation for making this. The most marvelous stories of John carving original formulas into bar tops, and beam walking, might well be gone forever.
Really, I'm sorry....just couldn't resist!
That was the most AWFUL thing. And to think that he won’t be ruined for saying that! I can’t believe the FCC is going to do anything about it. And it infuriates me.
Never trust others with your source tapes.
Seriously, sounds like you had the opportunity to work with & know a very interesting fellow. In my time at IBM (as a lowly coop), I found the experience so underwhelming I applied somewhere else when I graduated. Guess I was in one of the less interesting parts of the company.
I was chair of ACM’s SIGPLAN, programming languages, when I hired in, and started the Lisp and Ada newsletters, and ran a bunch of language conferences. That let me get to know a lot of wonderfully interesting people. Jean Sammet, the Tower of Babel author and a former ACM president was another Star Trek fan. I got into video making by talking an IBM VP into giving me something more interesting to do and got an international multimedia magazine before we even had video running on a computer screen. They were such lovely days. The VP never wanted to oversee me, so I got to do just about anything I wanted. I could take or reject projects and got to hire a steadicam operator and work with a graphics studio and have a musician and do all the fun things. Every time we finished early, I made the shooting crew stay and teach me. Wrote a white paper on non-linear editing back when Avid was a hole in the wall and got invited to visit studios in Hollywood to see how they differed from the computer world. In one editing site they let me copy from all the notebooks so I could follow the data through their process. It was the most wonderful times. My husband used to come over from the Yorktown lab to help me edit on the 1” and they let him build a whole video studio around my project.
Also wealthy, with the most beautiful young wife you could imagine!
Thanks for a great post on an important piece of history - those that started the “technology” industrial revolution.
Just reading your post, and watching the video, and then taking just one figure, like Jean Sammet, and discovering all her history, is like being an observer to a great “birthing” with tons of “midwives” figuring out how to get it out of our creative brains into reality.
Did he get “RA’d”? lol . Just kidding. Video brings back memories of days gone by at the Boulder plant. Thanks for posting.
I encourage everyone to collect their memories and make them available for computer historians. We’re getting computer history museums and keeping things is important.
I put up my memories of the Ada DoD-I contest.
The competition for Ada eventually pared down to the Red, Blue, Green and Yellow languages. Then to Red and Green. We were the Red team at Intermetrics, and this was our second language design. Unlike Green (which won), we threw out our language completely from the 4 language contest and came up with this design just at the deadline for the 2 language contest. Unfortunately, everyone spent that part of the design phase assuming Green would win and preparing the textbooks and college classes. At the vote, which was required to be unanimous, the AF sent someone with no knowledge of the contest who was instructed to vote for Green and not to change their vote. The member from Defense Communications was physically shaking because he, and many others who read our book when it came out, were for Red.
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redref/index.htm
This was our reference manual.
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redref/toc.htm
And this was our rationale document
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redrat/toc.htm
And these were the requirements we worked to:
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/requirements/strawman.htm
Now get your own historical memories out so they won’t be lost!!!!!
You should share those memories of the Boulder plant. As we lose people who were there, we lose something vital. History of computers should be just as important as history of other things. WRITE!!!!
I unfortunately entered the field unschooled and without any sheepskins in a from the frying pan to the fire conditions at a place where I worked. With no education, training or experience I became 1st a coordinator, then a manager and eventually a director of a small IT staff of mostly programmers and beginning with almost all consultant-programmers to eventually a staff split pretty even between employees and programmers.
It was a small staff with a huge job with a boss, my boss, the CEO a believer that no one outside of our organization had invented or ever would invent the software and applications we needed, so everything was built in-house. But some consultants early on really screwed up,kept messing up, and we needed some things fixed quickly.
I have the ability to learn just about anything new to me, quickly. When the fires - problems, stalled projects, mainframe down, network down, major system changes, wholesale new systems - I had to step up where ever I was short, and became a better programmer in all our programming languages than just about everyone that worked for me - to get the job done.
In some ways, being in management, I lost my calling, but it through me into more programming areas than I could afford any of my staff to get into, in order to keep them on the timelines of what I needed them for. Everyone I hired later told me they were kind of afraid to work for me - I knew too much, they couldn’t screw up, I’d know it even if no one else did. One of my best consultants was offered to go work for an outfit working on an artificial intelligence project. He told me what it was and what they offered. I told him he’d be crazy not to take the offer. He decided he’d rather work with me. I never felt more blessed on the job.
So I never built any programming language, but I learned a lot of them, from Fortran and Assembler to Cobol and CICS, to C, to all the languages grown up around the Internet and PC-Network based client-server computing. (Taught myself HTML in one week)
But the whole field of people that created the field I worked in, at the applied level, has always made me feel I worked on the shoulders of giants. I would have liked to have been among them, but never was.
When we started, we didn’t need CS degrees. They trained us for just what they needed. It was that second computer language that was so hard to learn. Everything in the first one was written on stone tablets. For the second we were forced to generalize and that was HARD. But once we had the languages as concepts and not as stone tablets, we just looked for each concept in each new language. Voila!
And EVERYONE designed computer languages. As soon as anyone programmed, they saw the problems and felt they could do better. For DoD-I, every service was allowed to have 2 languages in addition to Ada. The Army only had one - TACPOL - because they couldn’t find any other computer language that was used on two projects. Oh, and the simulations. People lost the card decks and all they had was object code, so you couldn’t throw out the program so you bought a new computer that would simulate your old computer so you could run the old object code. And it happened over and over again, with everything slowing down as the stack of simulations grew.
I keep thinking that we shouldn’t worry at all about how the future makes use of our memories. We just need to push out all the notes and designs and whatever that we did and let the data diggers of the future figure out how to make use of it.
Time well spent watching very enjoyable video about a true genius.
Thank you.
Oh, thank you, Grunt. I loved making it. Working at a computer company and ignoring their laughter as I made it on index cards that I arranged by crawling around on the floor. They were all so afraid they were losing John. He was just back from bypass surgery and fragile. They needed so badly to be able to tell him what he meant to them all. At the party there was just pure joy in the room when everyone could actually tell him that. I’ve never had the good fortune before to see people gather to celebrate someone they loved so much.
Something about your video had me thinking.
Everyone was so excited, did not appear to be about money or power?
Happy yes, but also something else.
Today’s WSJ had a review of a book by David McCullough, looked interesting.
Looking around, I saw this quote:
“Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.”
David McCullough
There it is!
You and your coworkers found something very special in your work.
It comes across in your video.
Thank you for sharing.
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