thursday, june 01, 2006
Weird computery stuff and things
I like the UNIX issue of the Bell System Technical Journal: published in 1978, about 400 pages long, checked out from the Davidson Library 13 times (mostly in 1985-1986), bright green, and modern/relevant to a degree that surprised me. There used to be links to some of the articles in this bibliography, but they’re broken now and I don’t think the articles are online anywhere else. I had hoped that this was one of the issues my grandpa worked on, but he stopped being the journal’s associate editor in 1972 or so.
From the preface:
Because computer science is still in an early stage of development, no well-formulated theoretical structure exists around which problems can be defined and results organized. “Elegance” is of prime importance, but is not easily defined or described. Reliability and maintainability are important, but they also are neither precisely defined nor easily measured.
The epigraph on the foreword: “Intelligence…is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools. — Bergson”
The best article is “Statistical Text Processing”, about using UNIX for linguistic analysis and spell-checking. I like to think that computers are just built for words.
The list of contributors includes one woman, Helen D. Rovegno, but Google doesn’t say anything about her.
On the inside back cover:
This issue of the Bell System Technical Journal was composed, including all tabular and displayed material and final page makeup, using the document preparation software described on pages 2115-2135. It was phototypeset using the
troffprogram, which was written by the late Joseph F. Ossanna, Jr.
comments (3)
Hmm, I get the feeling that I've heard this somewhere else before...
– Douglas Thrift on 6/1/2006 00:15:46
beware, it's just your imagination!!!
– britta on 6/1/2006 00:55:51
I read that book as a kid. A lot of the old computer books published around that time are rather timeless. I can only assume that the author(s) recognized the fact that most of what they'll write about will be outdated quickly and that would kill their book sales & usefullness. You should check out Mike Zabinski's book one of these days and write an entry reguarding its assumed attention to inane jibberish.
– pokey on 6/2/2006 15:54:09
comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.
