Lecture 4

Question 1

What did people want to achieve?

Answer 1

Selling machines
Academic discipline
Thinking machines

Question 2

Why was real-time computing needed?

Answer 2

With the appearance of cards, banks wanted real-time computing to know at any point whether there was money in an account available for a transaction

Question 3

Modern bank that wanted real-time computing example

Answer 3

Barclays
Running batch jobs by 1961
Installed the cashier
Needed a central computer node that would store, manage, and distribute information about bank accounts

Question 4

Burroughs

Answer 4

Involved in SAGE and knew how to make real-time computers
Created the B5500 and the TC500
Tried to compete with IBM in the business automation sector

Question 5

Barclays and Burroughs

Answer 5

Entered a partnership
Burroughs invited bankers to the secret Colorado Springs military base to show them the B7500 computers

Question 6

Problems with B5500 and B6500

Answer 6

Vibrations from nearby trains caused problems with the machines’ hardware

Question 7

What is the UPC?

Answer 7

Universal Product Code is a standardised barcode symbology widely used for the tracking of retail items

Question 8

UPC in the US

Answer 8

adopted in 1973
a necessity for larger companies
proved growing trust in the machines

Question 9

UPC in Europe

Answer 9

decided not to join the UPC
created the Article Number Code instead, known as the International Product Code
had 2 more digits than the American version
a political choice which brought the European countries closer together
stand against dominance of American tech

Question 10

Agendas within the academic world

Answer 10

Cybernetics (Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon)
Logic (Turing, Church)
Sharing information (CERN, astronomics)
Ordering, sorting, processing (administration business, economics, business analytics)
Calculations

Question 11

How has programming changed?

Answer 11

Programs used to be things that you prepared, or assembled. Now, we have programming languages and compilers, etc.

Question 12

Autocoding (examples of languages)

Answer 12

FORTRAN (1957)
COBOL (1959)
ALGOL 60 (1960s in Europe)

Question 13

ALGOL 60

Answer 13

not successful in the business application world
used as an academic language as it was elegant, universal, and satisfied a sense of clarity and order
not flexible and difficult to learn

Question 14

What was the problem ALGOL was trying to solve?

Answer 14

Programs only worked on the machine they were made for. The idea was to make programming easier and be able to make existing programs run on new machines.

Question 15

ACM and ALGOL

Answer 15

The ACM decided that ALGOL would be the standard for publication of scientific algorithms (but not other algorithms). This let ALGOL into the American market but also kept it from getting really big.

Question 16

Software changes

Answer 16

Before, programs were code. A company testing code was considered a software project. But with the unbundling decision of IBM, the meaning of the term changed.

Question 17

Software crisis in the US

Answer 17

Code was rarely fool-proof

Question 18

CS in academics in Europe

Answer 18

In the academic world, there were problems with getting CS in universities. The CS field was just a part of the mathematics and engineering fields.
Also, could not teach pupils to code as there were no machines for them to learn on.

Question 19

Rise of software engineering

Answer 19

appeared as a way of solving a crisis
convinced governments to fund universities’ CS fields
software engineering meant structured programming and project management

Question 20

What happened with regards to programming in 1968?

Answer 20

people from various fields came together in 1968 with the intent of proclaiming a crisis (GAMM, Universities, IFIP, ACM)