Wow, what a question!
Let me ponder this. I can certainly come up with a few of them. The class was
actually taught starting Jan 1967 (I entered grad school a few months before
this), so all the papers were from 1966 or earlier.
For example, a big deal back then was the design and implementation of
programming languages.
One of the things on his list was to read a book of papers that had been
gathered by (Stanley?) Fox from the UK. I recall that some of the papers in
this
book were classics by Strachey and Landin on foundations of programming
languages, lambda calculus equivalents of Algol, etc. I recall that most of the
papers in this slim book were very good.
Another book on his list was by Iliffe (who among other things was the designer
of the Rice University computer, an early one using "keywords" which were
called
"Descriptors" on the -- even earlier -- B5000). This book was about a new
machine design of his.
Another book on his list was "A Programming Language" by Iverson. This was
before there were any real implementations of what we now call APL, and there
was much discussion about how to implement it in a reasonable way.
McCarthy's "Lisp 1.5 Manual"
van Wijngarten's "A Generalization of Algol"
Wirth's paper of the same name (and drawn from the above),
... and his very good paper with Weber on "Euler" -- which used a B5000-like
byte-coded interpreter (what some would call a "VM" today) -- though it was
anticipated in a much stronger way by the B5000 itself.
The first Simula (I) paper by Nygaard and Dahl (Sept 1966 in CACM -- which was
a
very good source in those days).
The papers by Irons, Floyd, Evans, Shorre, and many others about how to make
syntax directed parsers, and how to think about them.
There were also Wirth's "Systems Programming Notes" from his course at Stanford.
Randall and Russell's classic book about their Algol Compiler/Interpreter
system
for the KDF9 computer (still a very good set of ideas today).
Quite a few papers in "The Annual Review of Automatic Programming".
Knuth's notes and drafts for what was originally planned to be one book.
Anatole Holt's notes on "Petrie Nets" and "Occurrence Systems"
Barton liked to be mysterious about his own work and did not include any of his
own writings in this list. But I tracked much of it down. I also had learned
the
B5000 as my 3rd machine while in the Air Force a few years earlier, so I had
some sense of it. However, I did not appreciate many of the great ideas in it
until I started actually wrestling with systems design (and had Sketchpad and
the first Simula for context). Barton is probably the most deserving computer
scientist who never was given the Turing Award (this was a real miscarriage,
though he did receive the first Eckert-Mauchly Award for HW Architecture).
And tons more! (Many students today would think this to be a lot for a one
semester course -- but this kind of density was pretty common back then where
there was a certain amount of filtering and selection done in grad school).
For a more general idea of what the ARPA research community thought about
computing, take a look at the special issue on Information, Scientific
American,
Sept 1966. Each article was written by the best person in each area -- and the
whole gives a sense of what had been done up to 1966 (and for me, what had been
done by my mentors and inspirators before I went to grad school).
I hope this will serve for now
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________
From: Christopher Bratlien <[email protected]>
To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]>
Cc: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]>
Sent: Sun, July 24, 2011 1:59:02 AM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Re: [squeak-dev] [ANN] Alan Kay to talk about "Next steps
for qualitatively improving programming" at HPI in Potsdam
Dr. Kay,
Thank you for giving this talk. Do you recall the list of papers Bob Barton
instructed you to read, learn, and understand in 1966? Can you share that list
of papers with us?
On Jul 23, 2011, at 1:38, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote:
Converting the file to something generally playable is fine with me, and you
have my permission to do so (insofar as I have any rights to the talk heh heh
...)
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan
>
>
>
>
________________________________
From: Hans-Martin Mosner <[email protected]>
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]>
>Sent: Fri, July 22, 2011 11:27:12 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Re: [squeak-dev] [ANN] Alan Kay to talk about "Next steps
>for qualitatively improving programming" at HPI in Potsdam
>
>Am 23.07.2011 04:47, schrieb Juan Vuletich:
>> Casey Ransberger wrote:
>>> I did this dance too... Hmm... Seems the Mac installer comes with some kind
>>> of
>>>translation tool that's advertised to
>>> be able to output MPEG, maybe we can use that to save others the trouble of
>>>installing the Real client.
>>> If I figure out that I can handle the conversion without spending any
>>> money,
>>>would folks have interest in the
>>> artifact produced?
>>>
>>> This is a fun talk, I'm only about halfway through it, but I must admit
>>> having
>>>cracked up when he said, (and I have
>>> to paraphrase, because I don't have it in front of me,) "...if we were
>>>physicists, and we didn't understand what
>>> Newton did [slight dramatic pause] we should be shot."
>>>
>>> LOL!
>>
>> I'd really like to have it in my local disk, and in any format that lets me
>>pause and resume, or go back to listen to
>> some part again!
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Juan Vuletich
>I'm currently converting it to AVI files, could make them available when that
>is
>ok with HPI (don't want to infringe on
>any rights).
>
>Cheers,
>Hans-Martin
>
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>[email protected]
>http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
>
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>http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
>
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