Monday  2006-10-09   Software

Ralph Griswold 1934-05-19 -- 2006-10-06

Ralph Griswold passed away a few days ago. He was one of the early pioneers of computer science, invented SNOBOL language at the Bell Labs and Icon at University of Arizona, where he started its computer science department. Icon was and is an elegant language that supports goal-directed evaluation, high-level constructs and powerful string handling capability. As Larry Wall once put it "Icon is a cat language, and Perl is a dog language."

Friday  2006-08-25   Software

Schoonschip

Probably very few people know of software named Schoonschip. It is a computer algebra system for high energy physics -- it can handle tens of thousands of terms in equations, sum over indices in those terms, carry out integrations, etc. It is possibly the first software ever that helped its author (Martinus J.G. Veltman) win the Nobel Prize.

Monday  2005-12-26   Software

browser 15 years later

One of the most important milestones in 2005: cross platform local persistence for browser. Fifteen years too late? No matter, this event will be remembered fifteen years from now.

Saturday  2005-06-25   

Jack Kilby 1923-11-08 -- 2005-06-20

Jack Kilby, a co-inventor of IC, passed away recently. He had received many awards including Nobel prize in physics in 2000.

Wednesday  2005-03-02   Software

Jef Raskin 1943-03-09 -- 2005-02-26

Jef Raskin passed away the other day. Raskin was one of the pioneers of GUI, UI design and other efforts for improving personal computers, the most famous of them being Apple Macintosh.

Tuesday  2005-02-01   Development

Disconnected

Just like "dark matter" in the universe, most software professionals are invisible, silent and ancient. Jeff Schneider has been listening to these people: "Jeff, it was only a few years ago that we quit writing programs in Assembler and started writing them in COBOL."

Thursday  2004-10-21   Software

Ken Iverson 1920-12-17 -- 2004-10-19

Kenneth Iverson passed away. Iverson invented APL, later J, and won Turing Award.