The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. Since its inception in 1966, the Turing Award has honored the computer scientists and engineers who created the systems and underlying theoretical foundations that have propelled the information technology industry.
The video clips presented here were edited down from longer interviews with award recipients conducted by ACM (or provided to ACM by other organizations) to accompany the biographical profiles at amturing.acm.org/. Each clip describes a key contribution of an awardee or an important moment in their life or career. Clip descriptions includes a links to corresponding biographical profiles, where you can learn the context for the events they describe and access the full interviews.
I have both a 28C and a 28S calculator and despite their age, they are far superior to anything I've seen since. The only negative is the poor screen, which is sometimes difficult to read. Once you get used to PRN it's so easy and reliable - no more guesswork as to whether to enter √2 or 2√ like on other calculators.
I've had an HP-55, HP-67, and HP-41c. I've got an emulator for the 48/49 series as well as the Prime on my phone now. The one thing I miss is the tactile feeling of the solid click of the HP keyboards. It's probably because I started working with computers very early on that RPN appealed to me so much. I've always been able to think in better in those terms than relying on how the calculator is programmed to interpret algebraic notation. It's great hearing the thoughts of the people involved in creating and programming of these calculators.
_yawn_ I'm sure the guy (as well as many others in computer science) had their hay day back in the day and deserve respect for it, but everyone's trying to be guru legend nowadays. It's so tiring. Current day social media markets egging it on.
But we can use zero knowldge to have a decision of the correctness of a proof, a correct proof is a proof that we can use her same parameters to have an other decision for similar problems. we assume that the axiom system are correct.
Recalling the days I walked into my University bookshop and excitedly handed over my money to pick up a HP 33c then a couple of years later to pick up a HP 15c, were some of the most etched memories in my life!
The 41-CV was what the rich kids flourished when I started university - only two in my year had them. Over 40 years later, still nothing can touch those HP calculators: I use my 48GX every day, and run Droid48 on my phone and Emu48 on all my computers.
This gives me goosebumps! One of the greatest discoeries with very large scale adoption. One had decency to value the other collegue so he added him. The other one had the decency to question it. 🥲
C/C++ really is something that should be left behind - regardless of whether modern languages are marketed more or liked more. The reason is that they are still stuck in the 1970s - they don't abstract more than a Macro Assembler would. C/C++ language are low-level languages, very close to the hardware. The problem is, they are used for low-level things, but also for things that we abstracted from in the 1970s. Largely, the American software industry is to blame for this grandfather regression and the corporate pushes for languages that are never finished, playing some silly game of dominance, rather than trying to make a great language. In the rest of the world, a software engineer has a greater chance of picking the right tool for the job, and leave a codebase that doesn't fail, crash, or won't even compile a few months later without incessant, frail, updates.
RIP hero. <3 Great story on the need for very small implementations. During the 1970s timeshares and later microcomputers changed the needs of computer languages. They had to fit in only 4 or 8K RAM, and before 1975 even BASIC was split into two parts, a translator bytecode that would then free the memory used by the translator and available to the BASIC program. It's nice to know, and sort of expected, that Pascal was there to compete. I've had a life-long love for the Pascal language family, which started with Turbo Pascal and Compis Pascal (Compis was a national college computer in Sweden). I've since had two consecutive careers writing serious applications in Delphi (industry and backend data processing), and now enjoy FreePascal from time to time. I betcha my old applications are still running, and haven't crashed once. That's a testament to the design of these languages.
Rutishauser kannte ich Mitte der 60er Jahren weitaus besser als Nklaus W. : Nun ist NW von uns gegangen - in Pascal und Modula schrieb ich MathLogic Quine, BuralliForte sowie Hao Wang Programme . Antworten
Got my first HP calculator in 1975, an HP25 (Second year electrical engineering) and still use it today, although modified the battery to NiMH. Then got an HP15C and a HP19B financial calculator, still all working. Great machines.
What a wonderful story. CPA with a math degree here. Thanks for the complex numbers and matrices. I've got a few HPs. The 48G is my daily driver; it still has great buttons. My phone has Free42 on it (I'll probably get a Swiss Micros unit with buttons at some point). Every year I program up the latest payroll source deductions formulae on my calculators.
I bought an HP-34C in September 1979 at the start of my senior year of college, specifically because of the SOLVE and INTEGRATE functions…and because I couldn't afford the HP-41C, which released at the same time. I found both functions to be very helpful in finishing my civil engineering degree. I remember solving an iteration problem on a final exam that semester by recording a program in the HP-34C, writing the re-arranged equation and program steps on my test paper along with my initial guesses and a brief explanation of the SOLVE function, then reporting the result. By hand, this problem would have taken perhaps 20 minutes, but my method took only about 2 minutes. My professor loved my approach, and because he used an HP-45 he understood my program. I also appreciated the extra chapter in the manual. As a not-yet-professional, I needed the extra guidance. THANK YOU, Professor Kahan.
