Semiconductor chips get tinier and cheaper, and every week seems to bring another innovation in handheld devices. The newest gizmos: telephones, Internet appliances, music players and personal organizers all wrapped up in one.
By Jeffrey Kutler
December 2001
Institutional Investor Magazine
But hardware is old news. These days the real action is in software, where Microsoft Corp. is trumping many of its rivals with its Pocket PC wireless applications, the controversial Passport electronic identification system and the new Windows XP operating system. Microsoft is even making hardware headlines with its Xbox for video games.
In Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts - The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution, Steve Lohr declares that “the modern economy is built on software.” His book is about the builders.
The author explores cultural tensions that flared as early as the 1940s between by-the-book hardware developers, who grew up in the business by learning how to reconfigure machine components for each new calculation, and Young Turk software writers, who developed more flexible methods using abbreviated commands and codes. It was a “yin-yang relationship . . . so different yet so interdependent,” Lohr writes on the way to explaining how software came to rule supreme as a discipline and a business.
Focusing on those Young Turks and their successors, Lohr, a New York Times reporter who has distinguished himself in his coverage of Microsoft’s antitrust case, treats Microsoft and its founder and chairman, Bill Gates, as minor players. Rivals like Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems also play second fiddle to the likes of Douglas Engelbart, creator of the mouse and the windows-type user interface, and James Gosling, architect of the Java language. In Lohr’s narrative, corporate venues in Washington State and Silicon Valley are eclipsed by R&D hubs like Stanford Research Institute and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
The author looks at computing from the bottom up - just like the code-writing that is its subject matter. It’s arcane stuff, to say the least, but Lohr makes it accessible. He takes just one page, for example, to show what a Fortran program looks like and how it gets translated into machine-processable binary numbers.
Although Gates, a 1970s-era personal computing pioneer before he became a captain of industry, may deserve more than the ten or so pages Lohr gives him, the book aims to pay homage to less celebrated visionaries. Among them: John Backus, a misfit mathematics major at Columbia University who wandered into IBM Corp.'s New York City headquarters in 1950 and, simply because he expressed interest in a calculating machine on display, was ushered in to see an executive named Robert Seeber. Backus was hired on the spot and dubbed a programmer. He later helped create the Fortran language.
A rare woman in this crowd, Grace Hopper, a former navy admiral and Sperry Rand Corp. executive, may or may not deserve credit as the principal author of the Cobol language in 1959. Software folks, a combative bunch, are still arguing over that, and Lohr lets them vent.
The fact is that Cobol was created by committee; Hopper had worked on a predecessor called FlowMatic. As reported by Lohr, she told Daniel McCracken, author of definitive Fortran and Cobol textbooks, that she would accept the epitaph “grandmother of Cobol.” Hopper died in 1992, well before long-surviving Cobol code preoccupied Y2K debuggers.
Such are the revelations of Go To. (Lohr takes his title from a basic programming command.) A combustible mix of egos and eccentricities somehow invented an industry that in many ways defines our daily lives. Lohr shines an admiring spotlight on people and tales little known outside the computer science community. The book will probably be enlightening, too, to younger geeks who will do well to skip past Lohr’s few elementary digressions into technical matters to get to the human side of their code-saturated heritage.
Occasionally, Lohr strains in trying to popularize stories of intellectual intensity. The emphasis on personality suggested by the subtitle’s reference to bridge and chess players is oversold and distracting. Indeed, just about every principal character in this book is portrayed as a maniacally driven mathematics or engineering genius.
But Lohr does succeed in evoking the atmosphere of sheer joy that pervaded the software business in its infancy. As Backus recalls of his early days in the industry, “You were inventing all the time.”
Jeffrey Kutler is an Assistant Managing Editor at Institutional Investor.
