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Philip Greenspun
Philip Greenspun is Researcher at MIT Laboratory
for Computer Science. MIT is a leading school in the academic excellence
that it provides. Mr. Greenspun contributes to the Computer
Science field with his brilliant teaching methods and personal creations.
Mr. Greenspun provides us with his intelligent view of the computer industry
today.
What do you think is the most important component
of the computer industry today?
The most important component is the collective agreement
of human beings to make services available to each other via the World
Wide Web.
If you could choose one important innovation for
the future surrounding computers, what would it be?
Technology that would let computers exchange structured
data without human intervention. This is currently impossible except
in the degenerate case where the data happen to be in identical formats.
What do you think is the most revolutionary invention
for the computer industry?
It is tough for me to choose between the network and the
microprocessor. Without the network (Internet), computers are essentially
useless. But without the microprocessor we could never afford enough
computers to do anything very interesting.
How do you see yourself involved in the computer
industry?
My personal goal is to develop a toolkit that enables groups
of people to operate the Web-based collaboration environments that they
need to work together, educate each other, and entertain each other.
Toward that end, I'm developing software, supervising 30 programmers, and
writing textbooks and course materials that teach people how to use the
software.
What do you think is the most important trend
to watch in the development of computers?
Open-source. Large groups of people all over the world
are finally realizing that we can't move forward unless we work together.
Working together on software means open-source.
What is your favorite aspect of today's technology?
The death of the desktop computer. Why should large
elements of society have to waste their lives installing, reinstalling,
and upgrading software on desktop computers. People have finally
realized that, "Hey, if Version 7.0 of this commercial software package
is so advanced, how come it can't upgrade itself by grabbing bits off the
Internet?"
Do you credit anyone in particular for leading
the computer industry to where it is today?
Dave Clark is a good example. He was instrumental
in developing the TCP/IP protocol that ties together computers on the Internet.
The system scaled from two computers on his desktop in the early 1980s
to tens of millions of computers in 1999. If the Internet were like
commercial software, you'd have to completely change the protocol every
time the number of connected computers doubled. On the backbone of
reliable networking, society can build the services that it needs.
Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement, had
the prescience to realize that software technology would stagnate without
programmers building on each other's source code. Stallman founded
the movement with Project GNU in the early 1980s and nurtured it 80 hours
per week for more than 15 years. In 1999, with RedHat about to sell
shares in an IPO, it is tough to imagine that industry pundits dismissed
open-source as an idealistic fantasy. Yet most of the code on the
RedHat Linux CD-ROM was either written by Richard's Project GNU hackers
or inspired by them.
Who do you think will be the prominent figures
in the computer industry in the future?
Science and, especially, engineering are cooperative disciplines
where clear thinkers tend to come to the same conclusions independently
and simultaneously. Journalists like to have poster children for
each new development, but really it is kind of pointless to worship one
person when hundreds of other engineers were working on the same innovation.
That said, the "prominent figures" will probably be chief executives
or chief technologists at companies with large public relations budgets.
They'll get credit for work that might have been done first at a university
in the 1960s or 1970s.
What would you refer to as the first "computer"?
There have been computing machines throughout history.
The first modern design was probably Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine,
designed in the 1830s to accept punch-card programs. Augusta Ada
Lovelace was the first modern computer programmer, having written a program
to compute Bernoulli numbers on Babbage's machine, which sadly wasn't constructed
within their lifetimes. (Note: John Walker maintains an extensive
site on the Analytical Engine at http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/
)
My vote for the first computer would be the Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), which was the first computer that operated
on modern principles: the program is loaded into the same memory as the
data. The EDSAC project was led by Maurice Wilkes at Cambridge University
in England. The computer ran its first program on May 6,
1949.
See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/UoCCL/misc
/EDSAC99/
for more info on the EDSAC.
Do you have any further points of interest you
would like to share to the readers?
For those interested in the Web, I invite them to read Philip
and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, available online at http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/
Philip Greenspun
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