Karlssons Computer History

Dennis Ritchie, the creator of C, dies at 70..

2011-10-13T09:14:00.000-07:00

When I first got in touch with C it was in the early 1980's. I was a sysadmin at a Swedish telco operator (then THE Swedish Telco operator, Televerket, nowadays called Telia) for a system used for software development for a PABX system called A345 in Sweden, better known as Meridian in the rest of the world (co-developed by Televrket and Nortel). The Meridian system was the biggest of the non-custom built PABXes in those days. The language used to program it was called SL-1 (Switching Language 1) and the development system, like editors (vi / ined), compilers etc was running on a Unix system.

This sure was one of the earliest commercial uses for Unix, the Unix variant was version 6 and was not a BSD or anything like that, this was way before BSD really. Rather, the system was built by Interactive Systems which was the first commercial Unix vendor. This was version Interactive 2.5, based on Unix version 6, mind you. sh and csh only, no bash. Lot's of hardcoded stuff in the shell etc. The hardware it was runniing on was a PDP-11/70.

I knew a bunch of programmiing languages already, like Pascal, Basic, APL (yes! APL), Fortran etc. Also, I had done my fair share of microcompter assembly (mostly on 6502 and some 6800 CPUs). As the system we were sysadmining was so Unix focused, everyone who got in touch with it had to know some C, so eventually I was sent on a C-class (not a C++-class that is ;-). This changed my life, to a large extent.

Having access to a reasonably high-level language like C, that was still so close to assuembly and hardware (did I tell you I was a hardware geek also?), was just what I wanted. Close to the hardware, but high-level enough so you could write reasonably sized systems with it without spending too much time on individual bits and bytes, except when you wanted / needed to.

Of the things I have learnt over the years in the IT-industry, like Windows, Linux, SQL, database, optimization, multi-threading, you name it, none of them has been even close to being as useful as those C-classes I took nearly 30 years ago.

Dennis Ritchie, the creator of C, really got C completely right. And thing is, C was very close to being perfect even at the first try. Look at "The C programming Language" book, this has to be one of the most concise book on programming I know of. And I still use this book. It's factual, at times funny and always complete. And this in a very small package, really amazing compared to the 650 page books on C# or something of today. They say C is so complex, so why does it take just over 100 pages to explain it? And 600 something to get started with a language that is supposedly "easier to learn"?

Want to know how to write solid code from the ground up? Learn C, even if you will eventually develop in some other laguage. Want to learn hos coomputers work? Learn C. Want to understand how Windows works? Learn C (this is how I learnt Windows some 20 years ago, using Windows 3.1 and 3.11. I was writing Windows apps in C (and this is how I still, to this day, develop Windows apps), and suddenly I knew how Windows worked, without even trying).

Too bad that Dennis Ritchie is dead, but the legacy of the world greatest programming language, C, lives on. C has been used to develop applications on all kinds of levels, from end-user applications to databases and infrastructure to operationg systems. If C++ better that C? Probably so, but some features of C are gone in C++ and some things that C++ adds aren't so great. What about C# then? Same there. What about Java? Nope, it's a good language and a good environment, but I still prefer C, which is not to say that Java doesn't have it's merits. And then we come to things like Tcl/Tk, Perl, PHP, Ruby etc? Useful tools alright, but not really proper programming langauges in my mind, and not proviing the insights you get by understanding C.

Over the years, when I have been with a customer or used some program and something broke, knowing C meant I could much faster diagnose what was wrong and how to fix it. Pascal / Fortran / APL and all those languages never did that for me. C required an understanding of the environment that the code was to execute in, but once you had that understanding, things got A LOT easier, and you suddenly knew things that you didn't before, which weren't directly related to the task at hand, but you knew it.

Rest in peace Dennis, and thank you for bringing C and Unix to the world. I know that my life would have been very different without C and Unix.

/Karlsson
Born to code in C. Using vi (as emacs didn't fit in the memory of that PDP-11/70).

Remember ComputerLand?

2010-11-15T23:21:00.001-08:00

It's soon time to celebrate 30 years of IBM PCs (They were first released in 1981, initially in the US and Canada). Before that, the microcomputer maket was much more diversified, but once IBM released the PC, most of what remained, after a few years, was the PC itself and Apple.

If you remember how it all started though, with the MITS Altair kits, you might also recall the biggest competitor to MITS, IMSAI. IMSAI, big as they were, died off by the early 1980's.

So then, what about the title of this blog? What the heck is ComputerLand? And amusement park? Nope, far from it. Actually, if you were in the US in 1981 and decided you wanted to buy a PC, you had few options of where to get one. Either one of the few Sears stores that had them, but those were very few, or ComputerLand. That was about it, for a while. And ComputerLand was big, real big! And they started growing even bigger, having something that was close to a monopoly on selling the PC was like a license to print your own money. And now they are all gone.

Well, there is a Franchise chain around called ComputerLand to this day, and they have been around a while, but they are not related to the original ComputerLand. And what about IMSAI? Well, Bill Millard, who founded IMSAI also founded ComputerLand. And as he was the person who screwed up IMSAI, he was also the person to screw up ComputerLand.

ComputerLand was an international Franchise chain of Computer stores, stocking just about every personal computer on the market initially. They were the first and went to become the biggest, but the whole operation eventually was killed of by internal battles (among the founders, among others, like Bruce Van Natta and Jack Killian who co-founded IMSAI, which in practice was drained from resources to found and build ComputerLand, of which they got from Millard: Nuthin')

The lesson is that don't think you can get away with just about anything, just because you did it once, history will eventually catch up with you. And although one may discuss of Millard was wrong, or if his intentions were wrong (I'm not so sure they were), but that he was weird and lost track of what was important from IMSAI and ComputerLand, that is pretty clear, in my mind.

By the way, do we still have hunger in the world? Or is World Hunger also History? One of Bill Millards projects that he was part of was to end World Hunger by year 2000. How? By raising consiousness! Oh, of course, why didn't I think of that. Nope, didn't work. But the intentions were good at least.

No, let's forget the old ComputerLand (they were sold and namechanged a few times, and finally went to sleep some 10 years ago or so) and remember the PC. The original clunky, 5 1/4 inch diskette thingy with 16K RAM. (yes, that was it in the original PC. 16K). At lease the PC survived and is with us today, although it didn't end world hunger. And we have something to run Linux and MySQL on! Thank you, IBM!

/Karlsson

A few notes from the History of Database Systems BoF

2010-04-15T09:45:00.001-07:00

I will not write much on what went on at this BoF, but a few words are appropriate I guess.

We were some 10 to 15 people in the room at the end.
I started the thing by talking about the ancient history of databases, and went on to talk a bit on the reasons of the Relational databases appeared on the scene.
We talked more on these reasons. The old Network and Hierarchical were largely tape oriented, even when data was on disk.
My theory on search being a very major factor for adopting the relational database technology in the 1970s and on seemed to be accepted.
As I went on to discuss search in an RDBMS being contextual, and the need for non-contextual search caused quite a few debates.
That non-contextual search will be a factor in moving to NoSQL, as is a theory of mine, was not accepted by anyone else but myself :-)
Contextual and non-contextual serach means, and if this even is search and what these terms mean was discussed in gruesome detail.
This brought on a NoSQL debate that lasted till the end of the BoF.
That NoSQL is about performance was largely accepted.
That key-value storage is a key behind performance was not (and I sure don't see it that way).
The value of a Key-Value store in itself was discussed in detail. Are we just storing any kind unstructured data as a Value, or is it XML (which is most the case currently) or an Instance of an object.
We alsodebated the storing on a set, as in an RDBMS, vs. an Instance, as a key-value store may be seen, was also debated. And if an RDBMS really is set-oriented and if a K-V store stores an instance was a hot topic.
I think we eneded up with a notion that we will probably see a mix of RDBMS and K-V stores in the future, that they are complementary in the short to mid-term.
In the long terms, I claimed that a K-V store will not persist as a generic solution, as it actually has less functionality than an RDBMS, whereas other claimed that a K-V store applied properly with instances and instance pointers ´within values is the way to go.
Whatever happens, it will be interesting.

Thank you everyone for participating in the debate, it was enlightening to me, and I hope you at least had some fun and learnt something also. And I hope I didn't take up too much space myself in this debate.

/Karlsson

BoF only special - See an incredibly ugly Oracle T-Shirt!

2010-04-13T16:13:00.000-07:00

Yes, no kidding, I'll be wearing an old Oracle T-Shirt from my days at Big-O in the 1980's. I was, and your Oracle dudes who has been around for a while might remember these, an Oracle Unix Wizard. Actually I was a Wizard II (I went to the second training), but the T-Shirt I will be wearing is from Oracle Unix Wizards I.

Where will this take place you ask, as you just HAVE to come? Well, no further than my BoF tonite on the History on Databases. And I can tell you, this is not a T-Shirt that I would normally wear in public, but there is a lot of stuff I would do to attract a crowd to a BoF (just to see everyone running away in disgust). So at 7:00 PM tonite, tuesday, in Ballroom C (unless the location changes). Bring your good mood, ideas on the past and on the future, and above all, your barf-bags, to see what an ""Oracle Unix Wizard" looked like in the 1980's, although with a bit less gut..

/Karlsson

Searching in databases - Maybe what will drive the next wave

2010-04-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

In the old days, before SQL and Relational and all that, not when Vikings toured the world, drinking, being violent and causing mayhem, but still in the old days, the databases in use, the first reasonably generic database systems, were Hierarchical or Network based. These had a strict schema and data was extracted by navigation (i.e. Find company X, find orders for company X, find items etc.), and there was no way of searching data (which wasn't much of a problem, as data was largely stored on tape anyway, which isn't really searchable in the now common sense).

When SQL came around, the relations style schema allowed a much more free way of navigating data, and it also allowed searching. The SQL search as we know it is still contextual (i.e. you have to specify what to search, a SELECT from a customer table based on address, will not retrieve employees with a matching address). All the same, when SQL came around, the ability to search and the relatively free structure of data relationships would take database use to a new level.

But searching today is often compared to Google, and this kind of search is really non-contextual. This is an area where the NoSQL movement has an edge on SQL, mostly because of the largely schema-free nature of NoSQL implementations. If search was a main driving force towards SQL, will the same happen with NoSQL? Maybe, I'm not sure. What I AM sure of though, is that we need to develop SQL and the relational model to support more schema-free operations, mainly search, but I think there are other areas where this is relevant. And will this be the final nail in the coffin of true SQL systems? I'm sure it's not, we can enhance the functionality in the SQL-based RDBMS without wreaking havoc with relational algebra, somehow. But any SQL-based RDBMS that will stay around needs to have some support for data that is non-structured.

So why will a SQL based RDBMS with support for unstructured data and searching be better than a plain NoSQL implementation? In my mind, this will be the case as NOT ALL DATA is unstructured. Customer information, credit card payment data, product catalogs and stuff is distinctly structured, and a SQL based RDBMS enhanced to support non-structured data will potentially allow you to work with any kind of data, structured or non-structured.

So, having one piece of software handle different types of data, is that really a good idea? In my mind, it is, as the deal here is that even if this data is a mix of structured and unstructured, the different sets of data is still related, and it is relevant to combine operations of both of them, as one set of data.

/Karlsson

While at the MySQL UC, pop by the Computer History Museum

2010-04-08T19:15:00.001-07:00

If you are coming to the MySQL User Conference, you might want to pop by the Computer History Muesum. The CHM is in Mountain View, jus off the 101. If you have a car, just take the 101 and get off at Shoreline, it's just on the east side of the 101. If you don't have a car, you can get there anyway, from the UC take the light railway to Mountain View and then you can walk (some 20 minutes or so, not the nicest of walks, across the 101, but it's possible, I've done it) or take a bus from Mountain View.

At the CMH, among other cool things, is Babbage's Difference Engine in working order, a mechanical computer. That Babbagewas a smart dude is obvious from the fact that he never finished building the machine, although he designed it, and when now built using his original designs, it actually worked! I mean, the whole concept of designing the thing first, it truly weird, along the lines of code documentation that is actually correct and commented code that is actually helpful, two arcane ideas that I find very hard to grasp. The machine is demonstrated at the museum, and I think there is work in place to make it run Linux. (yes, that is a Joke, it's just barely powerful enough to run DOS).

The PDP-1 restoration project at the CHM is also interesting as is many other things there, so a visit to CHM is recommended.

/Karlsson

The History of Databases at the MySQL UC

2010-04-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

At the UC, I will be moderating a BoF session on the History of Database Systems on Tuesday evening at 19:00 PM. I plan and hope that this will be an open discussion, the topics I would want to discuss are:

The history (I will prepare a few things myself in this area).
The current state of things (SQL, the state of the "old" technologies (Network, File bases, Hierarchical) etc.
"Failed" technologies (ORDBMS, Object databases etc).
What's coming down the road (Specialized database systems, NoSQL, BI orieted systems, Column based stores with SQL or not)

I would be glad f you would attend, I'd really like this discussion and subject, and after it, I'd enjoy a beer in the bar, but that was obvious I guess.

/Karlsson

Computing for peace....

2009-10-03T05:37:00.000-07:00

Does computing play a role in achieving peace, or has it made things worse? In a way, I guess you can say it has made things worse, but at the same time, those same technologies that play a vital part in defence (strangely enough, this is always called "defence", no country admits to having "attcking" armed forces, despite that fact that someone really has to start) has also often benefited society largely.

Although the question is difficult, as compting is so mixed up with outher technological advances in the 20th century, and to a large extent also irrelevant, i.e. computing just will not go away, you can also think of what computing has done in the name of peace and democracy.

Today, Internet, Mobile phones and other messaging systems are being used to drive democratic movements. You might argue that this is also benefiting the evil forces in the same way, and this is true, but here I am about to write about an event in history which was a bit different.

There has always been those who are believers in a cause and a means, to the extent that they, at least seen in hindsight, look incredibly naivë. One such person is H. G. Wells, the well-known "father of Science Fiction", and the author of such well-known novels such as The War of the Worlds, which is usually rememberd for the famous Radio Broadcast in 1938, read by Orson Welles, that caused panic among the listeners, believing that this was for real.

Now, what does this have to do with Computing and Peace you ask? Well, H. G. Wells has. In the 19th Century, the world saw many "universal geniuses", many more than today. Two reasons for were:

It hadn't been the case before, as before the encyclopedia (invented, if you wish, in the 18th century), it was difficult to find the data you needed to ebcome a genius, and in oarticular books became more readily available.
It didn't happen in the next centrury, because as science progressed at break-neck speed in the 19th century, it became real difficult to be an expert in more than a limited number of areas. In the 19th centry, most people with enough time, money (which means most people were out) and the intelligence of a reasonably smart squirrel, could become a genius in some field, just by picking up an encyclopedia.

But there were other views on the encyclopedia than to create loads of world geniuses, and really smart squirrels. No the ambition was set higher than that. Actually, the Encyclopedia was a centerpiece of the Age of Enlightment of the 18th century. The radical, at the time, idea behind the encyclopedia was that if people were knowledged, they would live in peace. Call it naivë, but this was an important part of the ideas at the time.

By the early 20th century, the amount of knowledge of our world had exploded. The encyclopedia, which once could hold a significant fraction of the knowledge of the world was now not able to keep up, for a couple of reasons:

There was just much knowledge to keep in even a large encyclopedia.
The advances in science was getting faster, and printing of encyclopedias just couldn't keep up with the pace of scientific research.
There is just so much data you can pack into the brain of even a very smart squirrel.

So who was there, in the early 29th centrury, to pick up the ideas from the Age of Enlightment? Well, I'm afraid it was, in those days, largely socialists and liberals. Looking at what socialism represented in the early 20th century is interesting, it was an enormous mish mash of different kind of ideas. A rather common theme was the unity of people around the world, one way or the other. This sounds like a weird thing today, I know, but I'm just relating facts here (any complaints can be addressed to my assistant squirrel). H. G. Wells was a socialist, largely, and was an admirerer of Lenin, although less impressed by Stalin. I'm not sure this is a good thing, and where this blogpost is heading now...

Anyway, H. G. Wells picked up the political idea of the encyclopedia, i.e. if we all have knowledge, there will be peace (yeah, right). And H. G. Wells had an idea for solving the issues with the encyclopedia (expect the one involving squirrels, that still remains to be fixed). The idea was that instead of having all that vast amount of knowledge packed in expensive and cumbersome books, give people immediate access to all knowledge in the world by more modern means of communication.

The idea was conceived by Wells in the 1930s (no, this is not a typo), and the idea he had was for a metal clearinghouse for the mind. Also, he determined that this data need not be concentrated in one place, it might well be in the form of a network. You see where I'm getting with this? The idea was that this network would consitute a World Brain (exclduing the squirrel brains).

Now, you might thing that this is just something from a crazed out froot loop of Sci-Fi author. He probably was receiving death rays from his neighbour at regular intervals also. Nope, that isn't so, not at all. In 1937, Wells toured the US with his "The Brain Organization of the Modern World" talk, it was broadcast in Radio and Wells also presented his idea to President Squirrel, no, sorry, President Roosevelt.

What was the result? Well, not much really. The World Brain idea might have influenced by Vannevar Bush when he was working on his idea for a Memex, and Bush in turn influenced most aspects of how we know and work with computers these days.

The closest thing to a World Brain today, as Wells saw it, is probably Wikipedia. For example, this is a quote by Wells on how the Would Brain would work: "A great number of workers would be engaged ... perfecting the index of human knowledge..."

/Karlsson

Why do we interact with computers the way we do?

2009-07-23T13:12:00.000-07:00

Well, I can tell you, I think the answer will a surprise to some of you. Do you like Greateful Dead? Hey, they are part of the story, at least according to some (I have research the subject by reading a bunch of books, but I have not myself interviewed anyone or done any actual research, but that said, I think my sources are credible).

The first real invention that brought things close to todays computers was the flip-flop in the 1920's, this set the scene for binary computers. But this flip-flop was electromechanical, made for relays and such, and although easier to work with than mechanical parts and pretty reliable, it was just to slow and complex, not to mention expensive.

So now we have digital computers, but still rather slow and clunky. We want electronic computers. But electronic in the 1930's and 1940's meant tubes. Which are WAY faster than relays, but a lot less reliable. Despite this, computers were built using tubes, 1000s of them. And they worked, to the surprise of many in those days. In 1946, ENIAC was up and running.

Now, ENIAC was WAY fast (in those days at least), but the problem was, what do you do with them. On the grand scale, there were two lines of thought here:

Office automation - A silly term, but I use it anyway, and not even close to how we know office automation today, with spreadsheets, databases and word processors. Rather, this was batch oriented processing of tax and insurance forms, banking, to an extent airline bookings and so on.
Pure number crunching - This was something new. Not that computers could do them, but that they could do them at such a breathtaking speed, leaving even the best mathematician behind.

But the deal was this: For the first use, the traditional IBM-mainly equipment with punched cards and semi-automated procedures worked fine. For the latter use, there was only so many things to do, mainly in defence.

But the scientists and semi-scientists and the techo-press in the 1950s, completely techo-fied and without any kind of second thoughts to technology. Technology can solve ANY problem! (Like DDT, yeah right. Typical 1950s. Like 1999 - 2001, ANYTHING can be sold on the net, including dog-food. Yeah right).

After a while though, the general view, among most scientists and the public and the press was that in the future we would see tow uses:

Batch oriented office automation, as I have already described. This was boring and uninteresting, and no one cared much, but it needed to be done. But punched cards could do the job as well, so here the technology wasn't really adding much.
Artificial Intelligence - No, I am not talking about a myself on a late night after a truckload of beers, that is just Artificial. No, this was something that the scientists, the press and the public got 100% hooked on. The giant super brain! (Again, this is most definitively not me after that load of beer, ask any woman in the vicinity).

The Giant Superbrain was the concept of future computing, no doubt. You just tell it want you want done, and it does it for you, using some robots and things. We now know that things didn't turn out like this, the Giant Superbrain is still far away.

But between these tow uses of computer power, in the 1950's was envision... Nothing. Well, there was a group of people with a different idea. One where the vision was computing that we humans interacted with, to get more knowledge computing power, but that we control. Note that in the two main projected uses, interaction with the "user" was either non-existing or typically plain-language, just as with a normal person (again except me on a late night then).

This third group of people, thinking of the computer and Augmenting the human bran was actually on to something. And they were not alone. The defence had a problem with soldiers that just got tired of fighting (the Korea had more or less just ended). Also, when tired, they acted irrational and did not do a good "soldier job" in short. Along came, no, not the transistor and not a truckload of Vitamin-B rich beverages, but LSD.

LSD in the 1950's was not considered a recreational drug, but something that could help, or again Augment, the human brain. The same way as the small group, lead by no one else than the inventor of, among many other things, the mouse, Doug Engelbart, was looking to Augment the human using computers. And although one means of augmentation was chemical and one was electronic, the group that was experimenting with LSD, in a true psychedelic environment with flashing light and all that, was linking up with Engelbarts group. One reason was that these two groups were both located in the Valley, that was not yet Silicon Valley.

The LSD group were testing LSD on people in weirdo environments, apparently Engelbart tried it also, but it backfired on him and he would not do it more than once. These "Acid tests" as they were called, were supported for a long time by US Army, and also by, (hey, this is getting really weird now), L Run Hubbard! And house band at the Acid Tests were the highest ranking psychedelia band in SF at the time, the Dead!

The two groups were close for a long while, but eventually the Acids tests stopped, as the results weren't were consistent, and the drug had been found to have negative issues also (you didn't expect that, did you? The defence getting into a new technology that backfires on them).

In the end, Doug Engelbart want on to invent much of the computer as we see it today, from a user interface technology POV. An influence wes, to a large extent, Vannevar Bush (more on him later). But Engelbart never got much credibility for his work and never made any money on it. But most of how we interact with computer can be traced back to Bush, Engelbart orTed Nelson.

And remember that just using a terminal to interact with a computer was something unheard of in the 1950s when this happened, and no one envisioned that to happen anyway. The computer had to be kept busy all the time, with by processing income tax report and controlling the robot that was cleaning the house. But waiting for a user to press the next key in the URL he is looking for on the internet? No way!

/Karlsson

Introduction to my Computer History blog

2009-07-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

I am a software guy, I admit that, but I have also worked with Hardware, way back. The reason I say this is that most history on Computers are related to hardware, and there is some good reason this is so. Mainly, the history of computer hardware is older, much older, than the history on Software.

This said though, Software and the Software industry is old enough (speaking of software as an entity of it's own, not related to Hardware, it is approaching 50 years) to start telling the History of software.

But for myself, even though I am a Software guy, Computer Hardware has at the moment a much more intriguing and interesting history. Being a MySQLer though, I will make an attempt to blog about as much Software History as I can. And I can tell you I have a few interesting stories on the issue of computer, and computing, history up my sleeves, including Software history. But I am not a researcher in the field myself, I just read on stuff, as much as I can actually, and there are some good books on the history of software coming out.

What are my sources then? I try to collect and read as much as I can. IEEE publishes a magazine on computer history, and there are a bunch of books on the subject. Among the books, I can see three kinds of books that provide me with material:

Books on the explicit subject of Computer History. This is obvious, and I have a bunch of these books.
Books on specific attributes of computing. These are books that do not set out to document computer history, but do so anyway. Examples are books on .com era, books about the crypto computers during the war and books on the Unix crowd and other similar subjects.
Thirdly, we have biographies and such books. Some of these are very specific, such as books on IBM, books about Eniac and on DEC, Sun etc.

All these books are valuable, I own a bunch of them and I like to read and talk on them. I am preparing a talk on Computer History now, and as this is still early days in this particular subject, and it is still difficult to see all the implications of what happened, I will present this in a different manner (a manner that suits blogging quite well, incidentally). I plan to have a script and a talk on a bunch of subjects, each talk around 20 minutes or so, and then provide these as mini-dramas. I know this might not be scientific for enough for everybody, but my aim is to make this interesting for a larger crowd, not to smooch a few scientists.

So, now you know what I am about to blog about here, broadly. And before I finish up, any stories, suggestions, facts, fun ideas etc. that you have on this subject, let me hear them, I am open for suggestion.

And before I leave you, I will end with a tip for my next blog post on this subject. Drugs, today, illegal, the US army and the completely insane and innocent view on the technology of the 1950's. That's a subject for you!

/Karlsson