Website for lectures for the 2002 CERN Summer Student programme.
This site contains background information for lectures on Computing at CERN, given July 22, 23 and 25
2002.
The lecture material itself, including videos, is also available below.
 | Rough outline of the 2002 lectures:
| ||||||||||||||||||
| Tony Cass' lectures
on Computing at CERN:
|
| The Old Computer Centre - the "White Coat" era |
| The CERN Cray - the mainframe era |
| The Shift Era - farms of RISC workstations |
| The PC Era - farms of Intel "white box" PCs |
| History of Computing at CERN: CERN Computer Newsletter (CNL) special
editions:
| ||
| Website on the History of Computing by former editor of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing | ||
| The annual CERN School of Computing Website | ||
| The Creation of the Unix Operating System | ||
| The Unixica pages on Unix people and culture | ||
| The Free Software Foundation | ||
| The History of the Internet (many links) | ||
| The History of Xerox Parc | ||
| The History of the IBM PC | ||
| The History of Microsoft | ||
| The History of Sun Microsystems | ||
| Steve White's History of Computing pages | ||
| IT Timeline (one of many - try Google!) | ||
| Time's 1982 "Man of the Year" - The Computer! | ||
| Augmented Reality | ||
| Nothing to do with computing, but an interesting article on the definitions of Fahrenheit and other temperature scales. |
| Alan Turing: The Enigma |
| The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary |
| Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: official Website |
Famous and not-so-famous quotes.
| "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. " [Thomas J. Watson Sr., Chairman of IBM, 1943] |
| "The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected." [Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd Ed., June 12, 1972] |
| "If I had to do it over again? Hmm... I guess I'd spell 'creat' with an 'e'. [Ken Thompson (on the Unix operating system)] |
| "Computers are useless - they can only give you answers." [Pablo Picasso] |
| "If you were plowing a field, what would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" [Seymour Cray (on massively parallel architectures)] |
| "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." [Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977] |
| "There will never be a faster [VAX] computer than the VAX 11/780 [Digital Employee, 1985] |
| "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't
even know existed can render your own computer unusable." [Leslie
Lamport] |
Many famous people are not mentioned in the list below: this is not to undervalue their contribution to computing but rather to focus on those mentioned in the lectures themselves and the relevance of their contributions to Computing at CERN.
| Herman Hollerith - applied use of punched cards to US census, founder of the Tabulating Machine Company, forerunner of the Computer Tabulating Recording Company (CTR), which changed its name in 1924 to IBM. |
| Grace Hopper - developer of the first compiler, first to use term "debug" (to physically remove a moth from a computer) |
| Alan Turing - founder of modern Computer Science |
| John Backus - inventor of Fortran |
| Doug Engelbart - inventor of the mouse |
| Ken Thompson, Dennis M. Ritchie, Brian W. Kernighan - all inseparable from Unix |
| E.F. Codd - inventor of the Relational Model |
| Various Internet Pioneers |
| Robert Metcalfe - inventor of the Ethernet |
| Bjarne Stroustrup - inventor of the C++ programming language |
| James Gosling - original designer of the Java programming language |
| Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of the World Wide Web & Marc Andreesson, author of MOSAIC |
| Linus Torvalds - inventor of Linux |
Last change June 10, 2004 13:23, Jamie Shiers
