Friday, July 04, 2008 - Posts

• Alan Turing

  Jeff Attwood has a post on possibily the greatest man in the computing age, Alan Turing. As Jeff states during WW2 Alan helped break the enigma code and went on to become one of the fore-fathers of AI. There are several books on Alans life that are well worth reading with the Andrew Hodges book one of the best. Alan is one of personal heros, some of Alans greatest work in computing occured in the very place I was born and grew up in. After the war Alan conducted research into computing and maths at the University of Manchester. He worked on one of the first computers ever built the Manchester Mark 1 as well as conducting a great deal of his AI and machine learning research there. The memorial you see above was built in his honor and rightly so, with out him I can't imagine what kind of world may have become. Read More... Posted Friday, July 04, 2008 7:56 PM from Andrew Stopford's Weblog | 0 Comments Filed under: General Software Development

• Software Development Meme

  Julie Lerman tagged me to answer a few questions that have been circulating. The Short Version How old were you when you first started programming? 18. How did you get started in programming? College course (1971). What was your first language? FORTRAN IV. What was the first real program you wrote? Probably health insurance claims statistics (c. 1976). What languages have you used since you started programming? PL/I, APL, 8080 assembly, Z-80 assembly, MBASIC, CBASIC, 8086 assembly, Turbo Pascal, C, C++, C#, VB .Net. What was your first professional programming gig? Getting paid strictly for programming apart from writing has been rare for me until very recently, but in 1988 (I believe) I was paid to write a graphical roulette-wheel for a Fall Comdex (Las Vegas) presentation of the OS/2 Presentation Manager. If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming? Absolutely. Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven. Read More... Posted Friday, July 04, 2008 11:42 AM from Charles Petzold | 0 Comments Filed under: Programming