Backus and his influence in Canada

The American computer scientist John Backus died recently, and obituaries followed in major newspapers, on the radio and television, and online. Such an honour is rare for computer scientists, but there is little doubt that his contributions to modern computing were significant and deserving of such recognition.

As an employee of IBM, Backus was responsible between 1954 and 1957 for the development of FORTRAN, a high level programming language for the IBM 704. FORTRAN was one of the worlds' first programming languages. Though it was not the first, it was the first widely popular language, and one of the first to be made available on different computers (not long after the IBM 704 version was completed IBM began writing a dialect for the IBM 650 known as FORTRANSIT and other computer manufacturers soon began developing their own implementations). Among computer scientists and linguists, Backus was also famous for his contributions in the late 1950s to the Backus-Naur form (BNF), now a near-universal technique used to describe a language grammar, though fewer obits mentioned this.

There are two Canadian connections to Backus that I feel compelled to mention. Although there were other computer languages to choose from by the mid 1960s -- COBOL, ALGOL, LISP -- most universities had little choice but to teach FORTRAN, given its astounding popularity. In 1965 the University of Waterloo produced WATFOR, a student-oriented compiler intended for the IBM 7040 mainframe. The standard IBM FORTRAN compilers were considered too slow and inconvenient for use in a student environment so over the summer of 1965 Waterloo hired four undergraduates to implement a quicker version that also provided useful diagnostics to beginner programmers (see Shantz, P. W., German, R. A., Mitchell, J. G., Shirley, R. S., and Zarnke, C. R. 1967. WATFOR—The University of Waterloo FORTRAN IV compiler. Commun. ACM 10, 1 (Jan. 1967), 41-44.). Though not original -- it was based on other student-oriented FORTRAN compilers which existed for the IBM 1620 -- Waterloo was the first to create one for the 7040, and more importantly, the only organization to tackle a student-oriented FORTRAN compiler for the IBM System/360, which it completed in 1968. Both these and many other versions to come were made widely available and eventually millions of students world-wide learned to program with a WATFOR compiler. Obviously, Backus' influence was indirect, but WATFOR was one of the great Canadian accomplishments in early days of computer science.

The second connection is rather more direct, and far less well-known. Prior to his work on FORTRAN, Backus supervised the creation of an automatic coding system, or autocode (and similar to an assembler in today's parlance) for the IBM 701 known as Speedcoding (see Backus, John, "The IBM 701 Speedcoding System", Journal of the ACM (JACM), Volume 1, Issue 1 (January 1954), pp. 4-6,). The Speedcoding system simplified programming for the IBM 701 considerably and after Backus described it in a talk in the fall of 1953 at a conference at MIT, programmers from the University of Toronto borrowed the concepts to craft an autocode for Ferut, their Ferranti Mark I. Known as TRANSCODE, it was a godsend to beginner programmers, reducing the time it took to learn basic programming skills from months down to hours. It was so simple that amateurs could read the TRANSCODE manual and submit their own programs via mail. It was crucial in making Ferut available to the entire country at a time when there were less than half a dozen computers in Canada (see Hume, J. N. and Worsley, B. H. 1955. Transcode, A System of Automatic Coding for FERUT. J. ACM 2, 4 (Oct. 1955), 243-252. Alternatively, read my dissertation!)

So a toast to John Backus, one of the fathers of modern computing.

The Order of Canada gets some hot Java

James Gosling has been named to the Order of Canada for his work on Java. The Canadian computer scientist studied at the University of Calgary before completing his Ph.D. at Carnegie-Mellon in 1983. He was the primary architect of the programming language Java and wrote the first Java compiler. There are many critics of Java, but there is little question it had a dramatic impact on the networked world.

Travel back in time

As noted in the Globe and Mail Travel section Wednesday, the Personal Computer Museum in Brantford is going to be open this Saturday, 10am to 4pm (and again March 17). While the collection doesn't seem to have many Canadian artifacts, that's no reason to stay away!

It would be worth mentioning that there are many collectors in Canada with similar small museums, though many are not open for unscheduled public visits. There is the York University Computer Museum, aka YUCOM (a research collection which does emphasize Canadian microcomputers and mentioned on this blog before) or Dave Dunfield's remarkable and extensive collection. The Canadian Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa has a large collection of Canadian microcomputers as well.

It would likely surprise many people, but the world's first personal microcomputer, the MCM/70, was invented in Canada around 1972, several years before Apple or the Altair. Research at YUCOM was crucial to bringing this story back to light.

(The) Internet on CBC

This YouTube clip of a CBC report (circa early 1990s?) is certainly part of history (Flash required). As introduced by Peter Mansbridge, "There is a revolution taking place in rec rooms, offices, and classrooms around the world." Bill Cameron proceeds to explain the computer network "Internet", in a time before YouTube, before the dot-com collapse, before the web even caught hold. He explore chat rooms, emoticons, and written computer communication across cultures and continents.



For the first half of the report Mansbridge and Cameron call it simply "Internet" without the definite article, and the overall effect is humorous to our 21st century ears (to be fair, Cameron does include "the" towards the end). It is a charming little piece, especially in the awe shown for what would soon be everyday technology.

History, the sheldoncomics.com way

While not about Canadian technology per se, the famous Antikythera Mechanism was highlighted yesterday in a Sheldon comic. It can't be very often that the famous and mysterious Greek computing device shows up in the funny pages, so it deserves to be highlighted. If only history were as simple as the punchline suggests...

And I did attend a recent talk about the Antikythera computer not that long ago here in Toronto, so there is a slim Canadian connection.

Computing for the masses not the classes

While it is too late to attend World of Commodore 2006 (Dec 1-3), maybe it is not too early to start planning for next year. The WOC is hosted each year by the Toronto Pet User's Group, the oldest computer user group in Canada. TPUG was founded in 1979 and is still going, though membership has declined from a peak exceeding 20,000 in the early 1980s.

For those still in the dark, Commodore was a personal microcomputer manufacturer in the 1970s and 1980s responsible for the highly successful Commodore PET, VIC-20, C64, and Amiga computers. Thanks to colour graphics and more memory than any other computer in the same price range, Commodore shipped over 20 million C64s after it was introduced in 1982, making it perhaps the most popular computer of all time. For a history of Commodore longer than two sentences, try http://www.commodore.ca, but a recent book on the subject should be enlightening. On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall promises to explore how a company founded to repair typewriters in Toronto in the 1950s rose so quickly to the top of microcomputing in the early 1980s only to fall even more dramatically a few years later. I have yet to read his book, but it's on my Christmas list.

Jim Butterfield, one of TPUG's founders and a phenomenal advocate of personal computing in the 1970s and 1980s, gave a nice historical talk on early microcomputing in Canada at the York University Computer Museum a few years ago. YUCoM has a substantial collection of Commodore computers, including a VIC-20 that was manufactured in Canada, and several SuperPETs, produced in collaboration with the University of Waterloo.

Canadian computing pioneer interviewed

At the Canadian IT Manger, a 28 minute interview with Professor Emeritus Calvin "Kelly" Gotlieb was posted today. Gotlieb has been involved with modern computing at the University of Toronto since 1948, when he was hired to help build an electromechanical relay computer for the new Computation Centre. While that project fell through within a few months, he had already begun to supervise both a mathematical team of human computers in the Centre and an engineering group determined to build the first electronic computer in Canada. For the rest of his storied career he has continued to lead Canadians in the application of digital computers, all of which is discussed in the interview, available as an mp3. Link

Paper beats Rock, Paper also beats Computer

Statistics Canada released a study recently entitled Our lifes in digital times, with one standout result:

The arrival of the personal computer gave much talk to the "paperless office". However, between 1983 and 2003, consumption of paper for printing and writing alone more than doubled... Similarly, volumes of postal mail have been rising, although the composition of mail has changed, and couriers and local messengers are proliferating. This is the case even as Internet usage and e-mail are high in Canada. Link

That we are no closer to the paperless office today is no surprise. Thomas Landauer and other computer critics warned us about this in the 1990s, and I recently spent time flipping through magazine advertisements from the mid 1980s which rated a personal computer's storage capacity in terms of typewritten pages, a delicious irony to say the least.

Bletchley Park in the news and the Canadian connection

A recent news item notes that at Bletchley Park a replica has been built of a Bombe, a codebreaking machine used to crack the WWII German Enigma code. Bletchley Park was home to British codebreaking during the war, and is now a museum with artifacts and exhibits dedicated to the massive wartime effort which took place there.

The bombe was an electromechanical device used by the British to crack the codes generated by the German military's Enigma machines. Though the design of the bombe is often attributed solely to Alan Turing , in fact it was based on earlier work conducted by Polish mathematicians, who contributed a great deal to the cracking of Enigma.

Aside from Turing, thousands of people were employed at Bletchley Park during war; many were recruited for their intellectual ingenuity or even their ability to solve crosswords rapidly. One recruit was William Thomas Tutte, who provides a Canadian connection to the story. Tutte was born in England in 1917, and attended Cambridge University in 1935 to study chemistry, though he held an interest in mathematics. In 1941, as he was beginning graduate research in chemistry he was invited to join the codebreaking work at Bletchley Park.One of Tutte's greatest achievements was to decipher a German military code produced by a Lorenz SZ 40/42 cipher machine -- not the more famous Engima. Remarkably, Tutte managed to deduce the entire structure of the Lorenze machine and a deciphering strategy armed only with intercepted messages. It took too long to decipher messages by hand, so a top secret electronic machine known as Colossus was built at Bletchley Park in 1943. Like the Bombe, a Colossus rebuild project has also been undertaken.

Following the war, Tutte completed his doctorate at Cambridge, but in mathematics, not chemistry. In 1948 H.S.M. Coxeter invited Tutte to join the mathematics faculty at the University of Toronto, where he stayed until 1962. That year he moved some 100km west to the University of Waterloo, where he eventually launched a Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the Faculty of Mathematics, conducting research and teaching in the mathematical field of graph theory. Tutte is widely acknowledged to have contributed more to graph theory than most anyone else, and in 2001 was awared the honour Officer of the Order of Canada for "his seminal work in the area of graph theory" and his work deciphering the Lorenz codes, "one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II." Tutte died 2 May 2002.

• http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Tutte.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.T._Tutte