Oral history – Dusty Decks: Preserving historic software

Liz Bond Crews; Desktop Publishing Meeting

May 2017 Desktop Publishing Pioneers meeting, Computer History Museum. Liz Bond Crews is third from left in the front row. © Douglas Fairbairn Photography; courtesy of the Computer History Museum

On May 22 and 23, 2017, the Computer History Museum held a two-day meeting with more than 15 pioneering participants involved in the creation of the desktop publishing industry. There were a series of moderated group sessions and one-on-one oral histories of some of the participants, all of which were video recorded and transcribed.

Building on this meeting, three special issues of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing were published, telling the stories of people, technologies, companies, and industries — far too much for me to cover here, so I will provide these links:

Annals vol. 40, no. 3 (Jul-Sep 2018): “Desktop Publishing: Laying the Foundation” (Rocappi, Atex (more), Xerox Alto publishing platform, modeless editing, PUB, and Gypsy, Postscript, TeX part 1, Charles Bigelow interview).
Annals vol. 41, no. 2 (Apr-Jun 2019): TeX part 2.
Annals vol. 41, no. 3 (Jul-Sep 2019): “Desktop Publishing: Building the Industry” (Seybold, Adobe, Aldus, Macintosh, Tim Gill interview (Quark), Frame, Ventura).
Annals vol. 42, no. 1 (Jan-Mar 2020): “Etc.” (font technology and marketing, font wars parts 1 and 2, Liz Bond Crews interview, Larry Bohn interview, Interleaf).
Web extras: Dave Walden’s page of corrections, links to the original video recordings and transcriptions, and legend for the group photograph heading this post.

Last but not least, I had the pleasure of interviewing Liz Bond Crews, who worked first at Xerox and then Adobe to forge relationships and understanding between the purveyors of new technology (laser printers and PostScript) and the type designers, typographers, and designers who adopted that technology. An edited version of that interview appears in the third special issue of Annals:

The Advent of Digital Typography: Oral history of Liz Bond Crews. Annals of the History of Computing, vol 42, no. 1 (Jan-Mar 2020) (open access).
Crews, Liz oral history. May 24, 2017, Computer History Museum: transcript, catalog number 102738271; video recording, catalog number 102738272.

Oral history of Bjarne Stroustrup

Update 5/14/2015: Here is a short video that was made for the Fellow Award Ceremony.

Update 4/9/2015: A video of the interview is now available. It’s searchable via the synchronized transcript.

In February I had the honor of conducting an oral history of Bjarne Stroustrup for the Computer History Museum, on the occasion of his being one of three 2015 Fellow Awards Honorees (the other two being Evelyn Berezin and Charles Bachman).

Programming languages have emerged over the last fifty or so years as one of the most important tools allowing humans to convert computers from theoretical curiosities to the foundation of a new era. By inventing C++ and working tirelessly to evolve, implement, standardize, and propagate it, Bjarne has provided a foundation for software development across the gamut from systems to applications, embedded to desktop to server, commercial to scientific, across CPUs and operating systems.

C was the first systems programming language to successfully abstract the machine model of modern computers. It contained a simple but expressive set of built-in types and structuring methods (structs, arrays, and pointers) allowing efficient access to both the processor and the memory. C++ preserves C’s core model, but adds abstraction mechanisms allowing programmers to maintain efficiency and control while extending the set of types and structures.

While several of the individual ideas in C++ occurred in earlier research or programming languages, Bjarne has synthesized them into an industrial-strength language, making them available to production programmers in an coherent language. These ideas include type safety, abstract data types, inheritance, parametric polymorphism, exception handling, and more.

In addition to its synthesis of earlier paradigms, C++ pioneered a thorough and robust implementation of templates and overloading. This has enabled the field of generic programming to advance from early research to sufficient maturity for inclusion in the C++ standard library in the form of STL. Additional generic libraries for graphs, matrix algebra, image processing, and other areas are available from other sources such as Boost.

By combining efficiency and powerful abstraction mechanisms in a single language, and by achieving ubiquity across machines and operating systems, C++ has replaced a variety of more specialized languages such as C, Ada, Smalltalk, and even Fortran. Programmers need to learn fewer languages; platform providers need to invest in fewer compilers. Even newer languages such as Java and C# are clearly influenced by the design of C++.

C++ has been the major focus of Bjarne’s career, and he has had unprecedented success at incremental development of C++, keeping it stable enough for use by real programmers while gradually evolving the language to serve the broadest possible audience. As he evolved the language, Bjarne took on many additional roles in order to make C++ successful: author (books, papers, articles, lectures, and more), teacher, standardization leader, and marketing person.

Bjarne started working on C with Classes, a C++ precursor, in 1979; the first commercial release of C++ was in 1985; the first standard was in 1998, and a major revision was completed in 2011. C++ was mature enough by 1993 to be included in the second History of Programming Languages conference, and a follow-on paper focusing on standardization appeared in the third HOPL conference in 2007.

I hope you enjoy reading the oral history as much as I did interviewing Bjarne.

See also: C++ Historical Sources Archive, Dusty Decks, 11 June 2007.

Update 1/30/2016: Updated URL for C from http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/index.html to https://9p.io/cm/cs/cbook/index.html.

Update 9/10/2024: Updated several more URLs.

Don Chamberlin and the origin of SQL

Tonight Don Chamberlin will receive a 2009 Fellow Award of the Computer History Museum “for his fundamental work on structured query language (SQL) and database architectures”. The other awardees for 2009 are Robert R. Everett (M.I.T. Whirlwind and SAGE) and Federico Faggin, Marcian (Ted) Hoff, Stanley Mazor and Masatoshi Shima (Intel 4004).

In a recent oral history I conducted for the Computer History Museum, Don put into context his work designing SQL in collaboration with Ray Boyce. Don described the pre-relational database management systems, Ted Codd’s development of the relational model, various implementation projects at IBM culminating in System R, which was the first RDBMS to support SQL. Don went on to describe other pioneering relational systems, including Ingres and Oracle. He also described his subsequent work on text processing, DB/2, and XQuery.

For further historical information about Don and his work, see:

Burt Grad, Moderator. RDBMS Workshop: Technology Through 1983, Computer History Museum, June 12, 2007. http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658267
Donald D. Chamberlin, OH 329. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 3 October 2001, San Jose, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107215
Paul McJones, editor. The 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics. Technical Note 1997-018, Systems Research Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, August 1997. https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/tech_reports/SRC-TN-1997-018.pdf

Update 2018/04/21: updated URL at Charles Babbage Institute.

Update 2023/02/28: updated URLs for 2009 CHM Fellow Awards and SRC-TN-1997-18

Update 2024/05/08: updated URL for SRC-TN-1997-18 again.

Oral history of Robert W. Taylor

Robert W. Taylor directed external research at NASA, where he funded early work by Douglas Engelbart, and at the ARPA IPTO, where he initiated the ARPANET project. He also founded the Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory and later the DEC Systems Research Center. Last fall I interviewed him for the Computer History Museum‘s Oral History Collection. The transcript, based on two afternoons of interviewing captured on six videotapes, has been edited and is now online: catalog entry; transcript (PDF).

Here are summaries of the contents (corresponding to the six videotapes):

Taylor’s childhood, education, military service in the US Navy during the Korean War, and his first positions after graduating from college: teaching at a prep school in Florida, and systems engineering at The Martin Company in Orlando, Florida; managing research at NASA and at ARPA IPTO.
The ARPANET project, the founding of the graphics work at the University of Utah; his own brief stay at the University of Utah; the founding and early history of the Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory (CSL); Xerox’s purchase of Scientific Data Systems (SDS), and CSL’s MAXC, Alto, and EARS projects.
More on the Alto system and what it influenced (including TCP/IP); the Future Day held by PARC for Xerox executives; the Dorado project.
His departure from Xerox; the founding of the DEC Systems Research Center (SRC); the Firefly, Alpha Demonstration Unit, Autonet, AN2, and Petal projects; the founding of the DEC Paris Research Laboratory and its collaboration with SRC; the nearby DEC Western Research Laboratory (WRL) and its Titan project; a recap of the commercialization of Ethernet.
Wes Clark, his TX-2 work, his LINC work, and his suggestion of decentralizing control for the ARPANET via a small computer (IMP) at every host; Taylor’s work in Vietnam at the end of his ARPA tenure; his approach to research management, including recruiting, interviewing, and performance appraisals.
More on research management: informal celebrations, and the importance of a college intern program; reminiscences about people who worked at Xerox PARC CSL or DEC SRC or both.

Update 2024/05/08: Updated URL for IPTO.