The Innovators

cap-talk,

I just finished reading "The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/147670869X/

You might know the author from his biographies of Albert Einstein and/or
Steve Jobbs.  I really enjoyed this book and recommend it, particularly
for anybody with any interest in technology, especially computer and
communication technologies.

Much of the book focuses on teams that complimented each other.  Just to
share one anecdote that surprised me - all the earliest programmers were
women.  It seems this "tradition" started because all the early
"calculators" were women - seemingly a low prestige profession.

The first pairing was Charles Babbage and ada Lovelace.  Babbage
invented the "difference engine" which was built and put to use, but he
then went on to invent an "analytical engine" that was really the first
programmable computer design.  It was Ada Lovelace who realized how to
program that computer.  The notes she left made this clear, e.g.:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html

Of course most of us in the computer field have probably heard this
story.  It's filled in more than I'd previously heard in this book.

What really surprised me, however, were the contributions of the team of
six women who were the first programmers for the Eckert and Mauchly
"ENIAC" machine - the first effective programmable computer.  Especially
Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder.  There's a (for me) fascinating story in
the book about a time in the Fall of 1945 when the ENIAC project was
trying to get ready for a demonstration for the DOD of simulations of
artillery projectiles.  The simulation was getting close, but,
_______________
"There was one stubborn glitch they couldn't figure out: the program did
a wonderful job of spewing out data on the trajectory of artillery
shells, but it just didn't know when to stop.  Even after the shell
would have hit the ground, the program kept calculating its trajectory,
'like a hypothetical shell burrowing through the ground at the same rate
it had traveled through the air', as Jennings describe it.  'Unless we
solved that problem, we knew the demonstration would be a dud, and the
ENIAC inventors and engineers would be embarrassed.'

Jennings and Snyder worked late into the evening before the press
briefing trying to fix it, but they couldn't.  They finally gave up at
midnight when Snyder needed to catch the last train to her suburban
apartment.  But after she went to bed, Snyder figured it out: 'I woke up
in the middle of the night (Valentine's Day night) thinking what that
error was ... I came in, made a special trip on the early train that
morning to look at a certain wire.'  The problem was that there was a
setting at the end of a 'do loop' that was one digit off.  She flipped
the requisite switch and the glitch was fixed.  'Betty could do more
logical reasoning while she was asleep than most people can do awake,'
Jennings later marveled.  'While she slept, her subconscious untangled
the knot that her conscious mind had been unable to.'

At the demonstration, ENIAC was able to spew out in fifteen seconds a
set of missile trajectory calculations that would have taken human
computers, even working with a Differential Analyzer, several weeks.  It
was all very dramatic.  Mauchly and Eckert, like good innovators, knew
how to put on a show. ... the faint light from the neon bulbs, which
served as indicator lights, was barely visible, so Eckert got Ping-Pong
balls, cut them in half, wrote numbers on them, and placed them over the
bulbs.
...
The unveiling of ENIAC made the front page of the New York Times ...
...
Later Jennings complained, in the tradition of Ada Lovelace, that many
of the newspaper reports overstated what ENIAC could do by calling it a
'giant brain', and implying that it could think.'  The ENIAC wasn't a
brain in any sense,' she insisted.  'It couldn't reason, as computers
still cannot reason, but it could give people more data to use in
reasoning.'

Jennings had another complaint that was more personal: 'Betty and I were
ignored and forgotten following the demonstration.  We felt as if we had
been playing parts in a fascinating movie that suddenly took a bad turn,
in which we had worked like dogs for two weeks to produce something
really spectacular and then were written out of the script.'  That night
there was a candle-lit dinner at Penn's venerable Houston Hall.  It was
filled with scientific luminaries, military brass, and most of the men
who had worked on ENIAC.  But Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder were not
there, nor were any of the other women programmers.  'Betty and I
weren't invited,' Jennings said, 'so we were sort of horrified.'  While
the  men and various dignitaries celebrated, Jennings and Snyder made
their way home alone through a very cold February night."
_________________

There are many more marvelous stories in this book, Vannevar Bush, Alan
Turing, Konrad Zuse, Howard Aiken, John Anansoff, Grace Hopper, Noyce
and Moore, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart and the "Mother of all
demonstrations" (I took his class at SRI), Stewart Brand (of The Whole
Earth Catalog fame who plays a fascinating roll, popping up here and
there), Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts, and Steve Crocker on ARPAnet (which I
worked on), Ray Tomlinson (email), Nolan Bushnell (Atari), Alan Kay (who
I begrudgingly came to appreciate a bit more despite considering him an
ass hole), Cerf and Kahn (Internet that I also worked on), Wozniak and
Jobs and their blue boxes, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, Richard Stallman,
Linux Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andressen and the Web (that I
still can't believe I didn't see coming, but after the Mosaic browser
was distributed the future was clear), Steve Case (AOL), Justin Hall
(web log), Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ev Williams (blogging), Jimmy
Wales, and many others.  Really a fascinating story for anybody at all
into the technology.

--Jed
http://www.webstart.com/jed/

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