William, Thank you for this detailed answer!
For my talk to the group of engineers I mentioned, it is more than perfect.But I am also involved a bit in the history of computing: I think we must keep track of the different developments and writing history without such documents is very difficult.
Thank you again. t. Le 03/10/2015 19:52, William Stein a écrit :
On Sat, Oct 3, 2015 at 8:35 AM, Thierry Dumont <tdum...@math.univ-lyon1.fr> wrote:Hello, I am preparing a talk I will give to a group of engineers, about "Notebooks". I mean web technology based notebooks (not java, qt or something else, but notebooks which use your web browser); so I will speak about Sage Notebook, Ipython and Jupyter notebooks. My question is: -> Was Sage notebook at the origin of all ?As you define it above, yes, I think it was the origin of all... but it was also *very* heavily influenced by many other things. I wrote the first version with help from Tom Boothby and Alex Clemesha in 2006. Our motivation was (1) A failed summer attempt by two students in San Diego to provide a GUI for iPython, which was not web based, but was demoed in a talk at Sage Days 1. I instantly started prototypingvery crappy approachs to the same problem, maybe minutes after that talk. (2) Mathematica, obviously. Alex Clemesha was a UCSD physics undergrad who like/used Mathematics notebooks. Of course, I had used Maple/Mathematica notebooks myself too back in 1993 as an undergrad. (3) Gmail and Google maps, which pioneered use of "AJAX" = web applications that don't have to refresh the whole page every time you do anything. I clearly remember standing in my office in 2006 and trying to figure out solutions to problems like "make the output appear as it is produced when you run this code: for i in range(10): sleep(1) print i" I demoed the first public web-based sage notebook at a talk I gave at digipen (a video-game programming college near Microsoft). If I remember correctly, there were no accounts -- all users shared everything. There were named worksheets, but I think you could only add new cells (not delete existing stuff). It was all persistent though. I used to teach every summer in this program (SIMUW): http://www.math.washington.edu/~simuw/thisyear/index.html A year after the first sage notebook stuff, mentioned above, mostly me and Bobby Moretti spend a huge amount of time during about *2 weeks* right before 2007 SIMUW writing a new version of the Sage notebook that was much more powerful, in that it had user accounts, making documents public, etc. We had to finish the entire thing in about 2 weeks, since I wanted to use it for SIMUW, and those dates were fixed. Instead of worrying about UI design, we mostly just copied Google docs, so in 2007 Sagenb looked almost exactly the same as Google docs. (I don't think Google docs had synchronized editing back then -- only one at a time, just like sagenb even today.) Actually, sagenb *today* in 2015 looks much the same as Google docs looked in 2007, but nothing like Google docs today, since just as we were releasing sagenb, Google docs's UI got completely redone. Google also had something called "Google notebook" for a little while -- they release it after sage notebook, but it coincidentally looked very similar. It didn't compute anything -- it was like Sage notebook without any computational ability. Of course Google killed it. There was also Google wave, which was again similar, and again got killed. I think in 2008, Alex Clemesha wrote something called Knoboo, which is here: https://github.com/knoboo/knoboo It hasn't been touched in 6 years. He would have continued working on massively improving the sage notebook, but I couldn't afford to pay him. [Repeatedly realizing and actually acknowledging the number of massive lost opportunities for lack of money during the last 10 years really hurts.] So he tried some new experimental open source stuff on his own, but then stopped as he had a fulltime job. Mike Hansen, Robert Bradshaw, Jason Grout and I at some point rewrote some of the notebook backend in FLASK/Twisted so that it would scale up a little more since a lot of people wanted to use it. The site sagenb.org got a lot of traffic, but would routinely die due to overuse, and was massively limited by lack of scalability (not lack of demand). It also regularly got abused in every imaginable way by assholes, causing no end of grief (and having all of the sage.math resources banned from the internet multiple times at UW). For a while Tim Dummol -- a 16 year old high school student in the Philippines (!) -- became the main developer on the sage notebook, polishing many little things, fixing every bug he could find, etc., etc. Then he graduated high school, went to college somewhere, and we never heard from him again. In 2012 maybe (?) some student from I think Brown University started using sagenb, but described the UI as "making him want to gouge his eyes out" (exact quote). I think we mustered up $5K of NSF money to fund his work on improving the frontend. He seemed to not understand the backend at all, only the frontend, and also deleted much functionality that was documented, but I guess he hadn't read the docs. Anyways, this never got merged and I don't know what happened to it. I think this was the last nontrivial work on sage notebook. I hope that is helpful... It's all from memory so don't take the dates seriously. I'm sorry for anybody I omitted. -- WilliamYours, Thanks t. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
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