Tuesday 12/03/2024
And so we roll into this blog’s seventh year of (almost) daily production. Between 8 and 10am I wrote a short piece for the writers group. The cue was “I only met them once but…” about someone who had an effect on your life. The only famous person who had such an effect, I realized, was Ken Iverson. (Who? Sorry, you hafta be a computer nerd.)
Then practiced guitar from 10 (I never start earlier for fear of bothering my neighbor Carolyn who can sometimes just barely hear me) until 10:40. Then the writers meeting. A couple people had encounters with genuine stars. Joan had spent an hour chatting with Jay Leno. Mary Ann had heard Dylan Thomas read his own poetry.
At 1:30 I met with Alice and John and we practiced our number. We agreed we are good enough, we’ll keep practicing individually but should be fine for the show which is next week.
That’s about it. Here’s the Iverson piece.
Kenneth Iverson was a mathematician and computer scientist who had a large impact on the computer industry at the very beginning of that industry, the late 1950s into the 1970s. His signature contribution was a notation for describing operations on data, which developed into the APL language (named from the initials of his first book, A Programming Language). When he failed to get tenure at Harvard—he later said, because he had “only published the one little book”—he took a job with IBM Research in 1960. There his notation was used first to document the architecture of the model 7090 mainframe, and then, more famously, to document the design of the IBM 360 series just then being designed by him, Fred Brooks, and others.
I knew nothing of this history when in 1970, at the urging of my friend Scott, I asked IBM for a transfer from servicing customer problems in San Francisco, to a new software development shop in Palo Alto. I doubt I had even heard of APL. An early APL time-sharing system had been developed by Iverson and others at IBM’s Philadelphia Scientific Center and had leaked out to a few universities, but not to any of my customers in San Francisco.
While I had written a couple of small programs, I knew nothing at all about the process of software development, and I set to work learning my new job under the generous and tolerant assistance of several experienced programmers (one of whom I would go on to marry). Our first task was to take that experimental APL implementation by the Philadelphia people and “productize” it — test it, document it, and package it for sale to IBM customers. Then we set to work making a completely new implementation of APL that would run as part of a different time-sharing operating system.
In the course of all this, 1970-1975, our organization was favored with only one visit from Ken Iverson. He stopped by and chatted with management, and then a couple dozen of us programmers were assembled in a conference room where he gave us a talk. In this same period Iverson was much involved with efforts to use APL as a teaching tool in high schools, and he and others were writing math textbooks using APL notation. His talk to us was a higher-level version of that, simultaneously clarifying the basics of algebra and calculus while justifying and explaining the advantages of APL notation.
I don’t remember the specifics of what he taught, but I remember being massively impressed by both the depth and the clarity of his presentation. It was an awesome display of sheer intellectual power.
So Ken Iverson is a person who, although I only was in his presence the one time, changed my life by his work and his example.
Codgerville 