This is quite a long interview and I found it all fascinating history. Here are a few early quotes: [...] [...] I linked to the transcript but alternately you could watch the video:...
This is quite a long interview and I found it all fascinating history. Here are a few early quotes:
We went to Boston in the summer of 1961. I didn’t have a job lined up. I
decided I would just go and then I would look around to see what I could find. I
got to Boston probably in August and sent out résumés to various places. I
wasn’t able to get an interesting job as a mathematician but I was offered a job
as a programmer at the Mitre Corporation, and so I took that. That was my first
intimation that there was such a thing as computers. And at that time, since
there were no computer science programs and nobody coming out of college
who knew anything, or they were very rare, they would take anybody they
thought might have an aptitude for programming.
[...]
[...] I went to work at Harvard on the language translation
project.
That was a good move as it turned out. The project used a huge program that
was written in assembler - it was probably for the IBM 7094. I think in both
places it was a 7094. That gave me an opportunity to really understand how the
machine worked, and since I was maintaining a very large program, it taught me
a lot about program structure. It was a pretty good program as these programs
go, and fairly well modularized, although I knew nothing about modularity in
those days. But it was non-reentrant code, so when you would call a procedure,
they might modify an instruction in the procedure they were calling so that when
it got to the end it would go back to the caller without having to have a stack
where you branch through something. Of course that was a very error-prone
way of doing things.
[...]
I went [to Stanford] without any financial support. I didn’t even know there was
financial support. I wasn’t really worried about it anyway because I’d been
saving all my money so I had a lot of savings. But my recollection is that on the
day I arrived I met John McCarthy. I walked up the steps with him, and I asked
him whether he could support me and he said yes. It’s highly unlikely that this
is what actually happened, so I always think this is an example of how memory
is not all that reliable. I think, in retrospect, they probably expected me to be in
AI because I had been doing this work on the language translation project even
though I knew nothing about AI at the time.
This is quite a long interview and I found it all fascinating history. Here are a few early quotes:
[...]
[...]
I linked to the transcript but alternately you could watch the video:
https://amturing.acm.org/interviews/liskov_1108679.cfm