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Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM

(spectrum.ieee.org)
169 points rbanffy | 1 comments | 08 Apr 25 07:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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EncomLab ◴[08 Apr 25 11:20 UTC] No.43620394[source]▶
Alan Kay has promulgated many famous truths about computer science - one of them being that among all fields of study, it has the least regard for the people and discoveries that brought it to where it is today. Maybe it's just my own sense of history as I move into my 4th and likely last decade of working with computers, but I find this to be both true and lamentable.

This was a great article - thanks for sharing!

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bluGill ◴[08 Apr 25 13:17 UTC] No.43621464[source]▶
How many of the people who made the steam engine possible do we remember? James Watt of course, but many many people were making contributions in material science, needed to make them useful. Not to mention many advances in values. No doubt lots of other areas as well, but I'm no expert in the steam engine.
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EncomLab ◴[08 Apr 25 15:03 UTC] No.43622617[source]▶
Not sure what you mean by this - it's not as if steam engines are an extensive technology today, and certainly no university is teaching "steam science", while nearly every school is teaching "computer science".

Perhaps this is just the attitude that drives Mr. Kay's point home - do individuals who are interested in CS have little value for who and what has come before them?

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1. CamperBob2 ◴[08 Apr 25 17:11 UTC] No.43624069[source]▶
To be fair, everybody who takes a thermodynamics course owes 90% of it to the 'steam science' pioneers. Understanding what determines and limits the efficiency of heat engines was as big a deal in its day as the WWW is in ours, but unlike our own era, a lot of brand-new science and math had to be discovered by those engineers.

Steam tech is much, much more interesting than it appears at first.