The Shoulders We Stand On
summary
A rapid lineage of concrete inventions and surprising outcomes: Babbage designs the Difference Engine (never completed) and the Analytical Engine (programmable by punch cards); Lovelace frames symbol manipulation; Turing builds the Turing machine and helps crack Enigma; Engelbart debuts a working mouse, video conferencing and collaborative editing in the “Mother of All Demos”; Sutherland ships Sketchpad (first CAD/object ideas); McCarthy ships Lisp macros; Dijkstra gives shortest-path and structured-programming rules; Hopper ships the first compiler; Hamilton’s Apollo software prevents mission failure; TCP/IP, WWW, Unix, C, Linux, JPEG DCT and ZIP all become practical building blocks.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 2:09Defining the dependency graph
- 2:36Theoretical pioneers
- 15:55Building the foundations
- 29:00Pioneers of practice
- 35:21Open source and infrastructure
- 37:49Building global infrastructure
- 48:49Conclusion and reflections
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