Strategic Computing

What Hacker News says

1. hydandataMar 2020
   In no particular order:

   Sunburst and Luminary: an Apollo Memoir https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html

   The Brain Makers https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Makers-HP-Newquist/dp/067230412...

   Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Computing-Machine-Intellige...

   The Soul of a New Machine https://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine/dp/B01FCTJCR0

   Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-An...

   Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/B00AQU7...

   Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn... Not a dedicated history book, but Hamming talks a lot about personal experiences and observations

   UNIX: A History and a Memoir https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan-e...

   Masters of Doom https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult... linking to audiobook because it is read by Wil Wheaton :)

   Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wires-Adventures-Worlds-Wanted/...

   It might be just me, but I really enjoy reading biographies of people important to the science, for example here is one for John Tukey https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.2003...

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2. nickpsecurityAug 2016
   It's important to look at this in context of history. A lot of what came about today started under the Strategic Computing Initiative (link below). It was a massive investment over a period of time that threw money at every smart person or neat idea you could think of hoping for scientific equivalent of moonshots. We got a bunch of them, too, so it worked imho. Thinking Machines explored the novel concept of massively parallel CPU's with languages & work distribution modified for them. Supercomputers of time had fewer, less-radical cores. Projects like Thinking Machines led to Massively-Parallel Processing architectures that combined hundreds to thousands of more-typical CPU's, custom interconnects, and special tools for programming. My favorite of those were Distributed, Shared-Memory (DSM) machines. Later, Beowulf clusters were invested to use commodity CPU's, boards, and networking to bring cost down. High-performance interconnects improved and got cheaper simultaneously. These trends led to commodity clusters from startups and semi-custom clusters from IBM (esp SP2), Cray, SGI, etc.

   The reason for doing something so different & risky like Thinking Machines Corp is to try to create those ripple effects. Well, build and dominate a market is number 1 but government funders trying to get ahead wanted ripples as a backup. They got it, too. Also, the machine could pull off amazing stuff [1] with its architecture. Similar one's using 8-bitters piled into a chip were used for neural networks. One could probably re-created benefits of Thinking Machines same way for the problems that suited it.

   [1] http://kk.org/mt-files/outofcontrol/ch15-d.html

   https://monoskop.org/images/d/d4/Roland_Alex_Shiman_Philip_S...

   Note: The book is well-worth skimming through given how it documents how modern computing practices formed. I had never heard of SCI. I thought the stuff was unrelated but turns out it was all connected. Documents lots of attempts, justifications, policy effects, etc. Gold mine.

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3. lispmMar 2012
   Lisp Machines started at Xerox and MIT. The MIT project was started in the mid 70s. Much of the funding for Lisp at MIT came from DARPA (aka ARPA) in the context of enabling technology for modern software for the military. The MIT AI Lab projects in general were largely funded by DARPA. For some information about the later funding see this book: Strategic Computing, DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...

   When the research created the first usable prototypes of hardware (the Lisp Machines and other stuff) and software (expert systems, ...) DARPA wanted to commercialize it to create a market which then could serve their needs. So licenses of the Lisp Machine design were sold to LMI, Symbolics and later TI. DARPA financed also the users. Many machines were funded to be bought by university projects. Much of the early Lisp Machines were sold to the SDI project (strategic defense initiative, a pet child of Ronald Reagan in the cold war, the space deployed missile defense system).

   Stallman's role in that scenario is relatively tiny. He worked on software and when some of the stuff he was using was about to be commercialized (in the above context), he protested against it. DARPA's mission was not to develop free Lisp software, but to develop battle management systems, logistics software, diagnosis software for complex military equipment, assistents/trainers for fighter pilots, missile guidance software, ...

   Stallman fought for free software, but he was working in a government funded lab, where the funders (DARPA) had a very different mission. The 'hacker spirit' at the lab was more of an accident, attracting creative people to develop the next generation of software and hardware. For the military and other government agencies, with commercial spin offs.

   As mentioned the SDI initiative was using this technology. But there were several others. One of the biggest wins was DART, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replanning...

   Stallman developed a lot of GNU software, but the goal of a new Lisp environment was given up early. For the initial goals see the GNU manifesto: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html

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