The story of our Red language and the whole DoD-I competition.
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redref/index.htm
I invited Grace to talk to my local area languages group and picked her up at the airport. Her talk is engraven in memory. At the end, the sight of her in uniform - small, straightbacked, saluting - still gets to me. As I drove her back, she explained who was funding her travel and recited the thank you letter I was to write to them. LOVED that woman!
The talk she gave was on the archeology of computer systems. How what she learned for small memories suddenly became relevant again as small computers emerged, and how people should remember the software hacks they used as well as the hardware.
I have a whole YouTube playlist of Computer History. One set of interviews is for an eccentric genius, John Cocke. I put up all the raw footage of the interviews. The others are videos done as significant research was happening in the multimedia field. And there’s a video where I’m crawling around the floor with a camera up into people’s faces during an actual group meeting of John Backus’ group on reduction languages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NQuHpUyZbI&list=PLYTtL1FB2XCphoR3BCIszdSlRFSQAOMPs
But my favorite video is an emotional You Were There memory of what it was like to be part of an all day computer meeting. This was when I was being sec to X3J13. Those are all the major names in the field. MUCH YOUNGER!
I like to teach my geeks some of the history of electronics and computing. Good Lord, it is a short history, really. It is mind-numbing that humankind came so far, so fast. We rode on the shoulders of giants.
I won't be letting you get away. Thank you so very much for sharing these things.