John Wilder Tukey: Contribution to Computer Science
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While reading the fanastic book, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Developer Best Practices) by Charles Petzold[^] I stumbled upon this:
Charles Petzold said:
Sometime around 1948, the American mathematician John Wilder Tukey (born 1915) realized that the words binary digit were likely to assume a much greater importance in the years ahead as computers be came more prevalent. He decided to coin a new, shorter word to replace the unwieldy five syllables of binary digit . He considered bigit and binit but settled instead on the short, simple, elegant, and perfectly lovely word bit .
Verified by wikipedia. John Tukey - Wikipedia[^]
wikipedia:
While working with John von Neumann on early computer designs, Tukey introduced the word "bit" as a contraction of "binary digit".[8] The term "bit" was first used in an article by Claude Shannon in 1948.
Have any of you read Code? It's really fantastic.
raddevus wrote:
Have any of you read Code?
I have. It's one of the things that got me modeling relays, gates, adders, etc. in C#. :-D
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You verify a book with Wikipedia? When I was in school we verified Wikipedia with books! :sigh:
Best, Sander arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript SQL Server for C# Developers Succinctly Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
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While reading the fanastic book, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Developer Best Practices) by Charles Petzold[^] I stumbled upon this:
Charles Petzold said:
Sometime around 1948, the American mathematician John Wilder Tukey (born 1915) realized that the words binary digit were likely to assume a much greater importance in the years ahead as computers be came more prevalent. He decided to coin a new, shorter word to replace the unwieldy five syllables of binary digit . He considered bigit and binit but settled instead on the short, simple, elegant, and perfectly lovely word bit .
Verified by wikipedia. John Tukey - Wikipedia[^]
wikipedia:
While working with John von Neumann on early computer designs, Tukey introduced the word "bit" as a contraction of "binary digit".[8] The term "bit" was first used in an article by Claude Shannon in 1948.
Have any of you read Code? It's really fantastic.
Interesting. When I saw the title of your post I thought you may be referring to one of his other achievements. In the 70's I wrote a Basic program for a PDP-11[^] taken directly from this paper: An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series on JSTOR[^]
Peter Wasser "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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Interesting. When I saw the title of your post I thought you may be referring to one of his other achievements. In the 70's I wrote a Basic program for a PDP-11[^] taken directly from this paper: An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series on JSTOR[^]
Peter Wasser "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
That's really cool. Must've been a serious challenge. We're so lucky today to have so much access to compute time and be able to REPL through code and try things over and over. Seems like it would've been so hard to do things back then. Plus no Internet to look up answers & code on StackOverflow. :laugh:
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raddevus wrote:
Have any of you read Code?
I have. It's one of the things that got me modeling relays, gates, adders, etc. in C#. :-D
I really love the way Petzold builds up the "story of computing". I think it opens a lot of understanding about why many things are the way they are in computing. It is also interesting that way down there at the bottom the computer is still the same thing it always was: just a bit machine.
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That's really cool. Must've been a serious challenge. We're so lucky today to have so much access to compute time and be able to REPL through code and try things over and over. Seems like it would've been so hard to do things back then. Plus no Internet to look up answers & code on StackOverflow. :laugh:
raddevus wrote:
like it would've been so hard to do things back then
It wasn't hard it was fun. No CodeProject or StackOverflow. The main resource was piles of manuals which usually contained the information one needed and other PDP-11 users of which most campuses had a few.
Peter Wasser "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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Once a book is wrong; it stays wrong.
I know, and a book author is not such a different person than a Wikipedia author so books will have mistakes too. Study suggested that Wikipedia is only slightly less accurate than the Britannica encyclopedia. Wikipedia has a lot more info though. It's just that these arrogant academics feel threatened by Wikipedia so it's forbidden to use even though that makes no sense :sigh: We still used it, of course, and then used the Wikipedia sources as though we consulted them instead of Wikipedia. And even though they hate to admit it, the teachers used Wikipedia in their research too, in exactly the way we used it.
Best, Sander arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript SQL Server for C# Developers Succinctly Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly
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While reading the fanastic book, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Developer Best Practices) by Charles Petzold[^] I stumbled upon this:
Charles Petzold said:
Sometime around 1948, the American mathematician John Wilder Tukey (born 1915) realized that the words binary digit were likely to assume a much greater importance in the years ahead as computers be came more prevalent. He decided to coin a new, shorter word to replace the unwieldy five syllables of binary digit . He considered bigit and binit but settled instead on the short, simple, elegant, and perfectly lovely word bit .
Verified by wikipedia. John Tukey - Wikipedia[^]
wikipedia:
While working with John von Neumann on early computer designs, Tukey introduced the word "bit" as a contraction of "binary digit".[8] The term "bit" was first used in an article by Claude Shannon in 1948.
Have any of you read Code? It's really fantastic.
I've given out 2 copies to friends that were thinking about getting into IT. It's a great starting point for those that don't go to school for CS.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli
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I've given out 2 copies to friends that were thinking about getting into IT. It's a great starting point for those that don't go to school for CS.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli
Nathan Minier wrote:
It's a great starting point for those that don't go to school for CS.
I agree. The build-up of the story of computing is really fantastic. I actually read the section on relays years ago and my head exploded because it made so much sense. :)
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raddevus wrote:
like it would've been so hard to do things back then
It wasn't hard it was fun. No CodeProject or StackOverflow. The main resource was piles of manuals which usually contained the information one needed and other PDP-11 users of which most campuses had a few.
Peter Wasser "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
