Author Archives: Austin Sharp

11/9 Class Summary: Guest Lecture by Jon Brewster

09 Wednesday Nov 2011

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Today, Jon Brewster from Hewlett-Packard gave a guest lecture, entitled “Will Compile For Food (life in corporate America)”. He has worked at HP since 1977, and graduated from OSU in 1980.

When he was at OSU in about 1976, there was a large analog computer or two in Dearborn Hall. These computers actually added and divided voltage amounts, rather than using voltages to represent bits. This made the computer very fast (compared to contemporary digital computers) for physical simulations, such as a flight simulator.

Jon explained which projects HP’s Corvallis location worked on. Originally they mainly built calculators. These were very useful in their day, programmable, modular (memory modules could be added), and they were based on reverse polish notation (which looks like  4 3 + instead of 4 + 3). He even wrote a universal Turing machine on one of these.

In 1984, HP released its first personal computer, which included many other firsts for the company: first mouse, inkjet printer, 3.25″ disk, window system, flat panel, and unix system from HP. Since there were no standards, all of the drivers and operating system were built from the ground up at HP. They had to cross-compile C code to get it working on the processor, which involved a complicated bootstrapping process of using compilers on themselves.

Between 1987 and 1993, HP led a consortium that standardized X windows system, so that it was easier for application makers to write for any machine. This consortium beat Sun Microsystems’ very nice window system, because the standardization was helpful to developers and cost customers nothing.

Jon also dropped a crucial knowledge bomb around this point: “If you don’t answer email from your 6-year-old daughter, it’s not okay.”

In the mid-1990s, Jon went to Hawaii to work at an observatory, replacing very old equipment (computer that used Fortran and 16-bit manual input) with a more modern Unix/C/X windows system. He has become quite a bit of an astronomy hobbyist and operates his own automated mini-observatory in Monmouth, controlled entirely by Javascript.

Since about 1998, HP Corvallis has focused on eServices. Jon is extremely excited about eServices, particularly using Agile development processes (in this case, Scrum) to deliver software in small increments and adjust easily to changing requirements. This is likely an ideal situation for agile, but despite Jon’s disdain for waterfall development, some projects need a larger perspective, even if eServices do not. EServices also have the upsides of making it easy to push updates, keep code in-house, test, and gather data from customers and users.

Finally, Jon began to talk about the cloud. He explained that the cloud doesn’t simply designate an application that stores no information locally; rather it is a different processor/data storage paradigm, that distributes both processing power and data over many servers, rather than having many servers that crunch numbers pulling from one main database. This avoids the database bottleneck, and makes it easier to expand capacity without overbuying, and so works well for websites like Facebook and Google. Jon called this ‘map reduction’: computing in parallel across a ‘blizzard’ of machines, and then reducing to the answer needed.

Unfortunately, we did not have time to see whether Jon’s ancient HP PC worked, but his enthusiasm in relaying the developments of the last 30 years in computing was much appreciated.

Assignment 2: Southern Victory

15 Saturday Oct 2011

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      The historical event I have selected is the recovery of Lee’s Special Order 191 by a Union soldier during the American Civil War. The order detailed Lee’s intentions and how he was splitting his forces while invading Maryland and Pennsylvania. The order was intended to be destroyed (it was found wrapped around several cigars), but instead was found and relayed to George McClellan, commander of the Union Army of the Potomac. McClellan had previously been outmaneuvered and outfought by Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia multiple times. However, with this order he was able to predict Lee’s movements, and forestalled the invasion of the North at the Battle of Antietam. Many historians believe that McClellen, a notoriously over-cautious and slow-moving general, could have taken greater advantage of the order. Antietam was a very bloody battle, with heavy casualties on both sides. Lee’s army did retreat, but McClellan, fearing a trap, refused to pursue, despite the insistence of President Lincoln. Hindsight shows that if he had pressed his advantage, the Army of Northern Virginia was not in good shape, and could have been destroyed or severely damaged. A few days later, Lincoln removed McClellan from command for failing to take full advantage of his intelligence.
However, the Battle of Antietam did allow Lincoln to make the Emancipation Proclamation. This was crucial, because the President’s advisors had convinced him to delay the announcement until after a Union victory, so as to not seem like a move of desperation. The result of the Emancipation Proclamation was that France and Britain could not convincingly recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate nation, due to slavery now being a central issue of the war.
Harry Turtledove, the foremost contemporary alternate history author, used Special Order 191 as the point of divergence for his epic alternate history series Southern Victory, where the pertinent copy of Special Order 191 is in fact destroyed. I would propose a similar change as part of a ripple effect from Babbage’s Difference Engines becoming widespread and well-used.
Had Difference Engines been finished, used, and proved helpful enough for common use, the technology of the period leading up to 1860 could have been wildly affected. Babbage would have continued to be prominent, and it seems reasonable to assume that this other ideas, inventions and interests would have become more important among the scientists and engineers of his day. In addition to that, if the Difference Engine succeeded, it’s likely that other mechnical computation devices would have been invented in a similar sense to the electro-mechanical devices that began to flourish after Hollerith’s initial success in the 1890s.
One field that would have been the key beneficiary of these advances would have been cryptography. By World War I, military cryptography was commonplace; however, Special Order 191 was not encrypted, which allowed the Union army to quickly realize its importance, forward it up the chain of command, and understand it. Had cryptography spread to the Confederacy’s armed forces, it would have at the very least taken the Union some time to decrypt the order, were it even realized as important at all by the corporal who found it.
In actual history, McClellan’s deficiencies as a commander were such that even with fantastic military intelligence, he was only able to fight Lee to a standstill, barely enough of a success to allow the Emancipation Proclamation to go out. Without Special Order 191 in hand, it seems more than likely that Lee would have once again humiliated Union armed forces, this time on their own soil, and possibly given the Confederacy enough of an advantage to win the war. Had the CSA’s advantage after Lee’s Maryland campaign been seen as sufficient, Britain and France would likely have recognized the South and broken the blockade to restore the flow of cotton exports and to hurt the USA.
Such a vast change in the power balance on the American continent would have had vast consequences. Certainly, Britain and France would have been enemies of the United States, rather than eventual allies, due to their effective alliance with the CSA. Furthermore, assuming German unification proceeded as in actual history, the USA and Germany could well have applied the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, and found common ground in the later 1800s, maybe even in World War I. Had the United States never entered World War I against the Central Powers, but rather been tied down by a war at home (or at least the prospect of being counterbalanced by the Confederate States), the entire 20th century would look completely different. Everything from German backlash to the Treaty of Versailles and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire to the October Revolution in Russia could have had vastly different outcomes, with a German-Union alliance, and an independent Confederate States of America.
The farther one moves forward from Special Order 191, the greater the implications become. With simple knowledge of encryption, and perhaps even something as simple as a substitution or rotation cipher, the importance of Special Order 191 or at least its meaning would have never been realized (or at least not soon enough). That paper, wrapped around cigars, is one of the hinges upon which history has turned, and with the technological advances that could have been perpetrated by the Difference Engine, history could have turned in a very different direction.

Class Summary 10/3: Babbage

04 Tuesday Oct 2011

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Class began with Dr. Wagstaff telling us a bit more about herself. She grew up in a small town near Moab, Utah. Her undergraduate degree was in computer science at University of Utah; she followed that up with a graduate degree in computer science with a minor in Mars from Cornell University, and then worked in algorithm development for space programs at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab and finally JPL.

Dr. Wagstaff then directed us to the two following puzzles:
2, 6, 12, 20, 30, ?? = 42 = x^2+x
-3, 0, 15, 48, 105, ?? = 192 = x^3-4x

The easiest method to solve these puzzles was the one employed by Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2: the first puzzle had a constant difference of differences (2) between each number, and the second puzzle had a constant difference of difference of differences (6). Each of these corresponded to a polynomial equation of the kind that the Difference Engine could solve. A crucial point was that in Babbage’s day, it was essential to have accurate tables of polynomials, logarithms and trigonometric functions for all kinds of calculations theoretical and practical, navigation, et cetera. This was the reason for Babbage including printing on paper and printing of plaster molds in his machine – so that the tables would never need to be copied by a human, and thus would remain reliable.

Another effect of Babbage’s desire for reliability was his demand for high quality machined parts. We discussed his disagreements with his engineer, Joseph Clement, and how most of the British government’s grant money likely ended up in the engineer’s pockets. Also mentioned was Babbage’s inability to be diplomatic, as related even in his autobiography – his funding dried up as he could not convince government officials such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the important of his machines. A side note to this was that a Swedish engineer, Per Georg Schultz, created a derivative Difference Engine for several governments – Sweden, England and eventually the United States. His engine was delivered over-budget but on time.

Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 was not fully completed until recently. We saw a video that detailed the course of his endeavors, from the first difference engine, and the analytical engine, to the complete and improved plans for the second difference engine. Most interestingly, this video featured many shots of the replica Difference Engine No. 2 in action.

Babbage’s Analytical Engine, however, has never been fully realized. The same video showed the ‘mill’ of the Analytical Engine, which Babbage’s son eventually completed. The mill was to be the area in which computations were done, as opposed to the ‘store’ of memory.

photo credit: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z5/illo/nw/story_graphics/11mar/science-museum/science-museum-babbage.jpg

The Analytical Engine also incorporated three kinds of punched cards – operations, numbers, and variables (which were essentially addresses). This engine has never been completed, but a group at http://plan28.org/ is taking the first steps towards building it.

Class ended with a question to ponder: was Charles Babbage a success or a failure?