Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

On Fri, Nov 30, 2018 at 3:28 PM Grant Taylor via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: Most people know that Newton's motivation for developing calculus was explaining the motions of the planets, but not many know that he served as the Warden, and then Master, of the Royal Mint, as well as being fascinated with optics and vision (to the point where he inserted a needle into one of his eyes!) and a closet alchemist. His competitor, Leibniz, was motivated to develop calculus by a strong desire to win more billiards bets from his fellow wealthy buddies in Hanover, the financial capital of Germany at the time, while developing the mathematics of the physics governing the collisions of billiard balls. Babbage was motivated to develop calculating and computing machines to eliminate the worldwide average of seven errors per page in astronomical, navigational, and mathematical tables of the 1820s. Shannon and Hamming (with whom I worked - the latter, not the former!) were motivated to represent Boolean logic in digital circuits and improve long-distance communications by formalizing how to predictably ferret more signal out of noise. Turing was motivated to test his computing theories to break the Nazi Enigma ciphers (character-oriented, vs. word-oriented codes) and moved far beyond the mathematical underpinnings of his theories into the engineering of Colossus and the bombes. Hollerith was motivated by the requirement to complete the decennial census tabulations within 10 years (the 1890 census was going to take 13 years to tabulate using traditional manual methods within the available budget). Mauchly and Eckert were motivated to automate calculations for ballistics tables for WW-II weapons systems that were being fielded faster than tables could be produced manually. Hopper developed the first compiler and the first programming language to use English words, Flow-Matic, that led, in turn, to COBOL being created to meet financial software needs. John Backus and the other developers of FORTRAN were likewise motivated by scientific and engineering calculation requirements. Kernigan, Ritchie, and Thompson were motivated by a desire to perform an immense prank, in the form of Unix and A/B/BCPL/C, on an unsuspecting and all-too-serious professional computing world ( http://www.stokely.com/lighter.side/unix.prank.html). Gates and Allen were motivated by all of the money lying around on desks, in their drawers, and in the drawers worn by the people sitting at said desks, to foist PC/MS-DOS and Windows on the less serious computing public. Kildall was motivated by the challenges of developing multi-pass compilation on systems with minimal microcomputer hardware resources. Meanwhile, the rest of the computing field was motivated to pursue the next shinier pieces of higher-performance hardware, developing ever-more-bloated programming languages, OSes, services, and applications that continue to slow down even the latest-and-greatest systems. Berners-Lee was motivated to help scientists and engineers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN - the Conseil Europ?en pour la Recherche Nucl?aire) organize and share their work without having to become expert software developers in their own right. Yang, Filo, Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, et al, were motivated by whatever money could be scrounged from sofas used by couch-surfing, homeless Millenials (redundant syntax fully intended), and from local news outlets' advertising accounts. Selling everyone's, but their own, personally-identifiable information, probably including that of their own mothers, has been a welcome additional cornucopia of revenue to them. Computer science and engineering degrees weren't even offered yet when I attended the heavily science and engineering oriented naval institution where I earned my BS in engineering (70% of degrees awarded were in STEM fields). The closest you could get were math and electrical engineering degrees, taking the very few electives offered in CS and CE disciplines. Granted, the computer I primarily had access to was a secondhand GE-265 with drum storage (we each got a whopping 32 KBs for all of our software development ... yeah, that's with a K). There was also a PDP-8 in a rack on wheels movable between the various engineering labs - we had to plug it into a wall outlet for power, and a phone line for its modem to connect to our accounts on the GE-265. My senior year, we received an Evans and Sutherland Picture System 1 hardware-accelerated, 3-D vector wireframe workstation, mind-melded to a dedicated PDP-11/70 via a three-foot cube on its Mass Bus, containing 1 MB of dual-ported static RAM ... that alone cost a million smackers (a buck a byte!). I had to wait until I earned my MSCS 10 years later (taking care of my WW-II D-Day in Normandy/Bastogne/Bulge/etc., 101st Airborne Division paratrooper, POW, and vet Dad, and cancer-stricken Mom during that entire period) to "officially" be considered a computer scientist and software engineer (by HR weenies). That was despite being a full-time practitioner of both that entire decade, developing systems with a majority of components involving data, information, and knowledge processing. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I've routinely had to show even some younger CS PhDs what discrete transistors look like (going all the way back to Bell Labs' 1947 dual gold point-contact germanium prototype) and how they work when presenting artifacts during tours at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. It's also been handy in jobs to be able to accurately describe the real-world effects of bone-headed decisions based purely on academic theoretical beliefs. In short, Necessity and Invention are Mothers ...