[SIGCIS-Members] Op-Ed on Obamacare

[Ian S. King]

FYI: the other well-known programmer on the Bonneville project was Paul
Allen, Microsoft's co-founder.  Bob Barnett, who was Paul and Bill's
manager at BPA (and is now the business manager of the Living Computer
Museum), remembers the "raft of code" produced by Allen.

Does anyone know if John Norton is still with us?  -- Ian


On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP at si.edu> wrote:

> Thanks to everyone for their kind words about the op-ed piece. Some of you
> mentioned that a word "problems" was somehow dropped from the quote form
> the 1968 NATO conference report. Sorry.
>
> Too bad the Times & Washington Post cannot be persuaded to think again
> about their headlines and op-ed pieces on Obamacare (I sent it to the Post
> but they turned it down). Maybe one of us could send a note to the Times?
> If not to the op-ed page, then to John Markoff or Steve Lohr? I really like
> Andrew's last note.
>
> I did not have the space to mention it, but the person NASA sent to Draper
> Labs to look at the Apollo software was John Norton. He later worked on a
> TRW contract, programming a complex networking of PDP-10 computers for the
> Bonneville Power Administration. Among the young programmers that he
> mentored was Bill Gates, who I think was still in high school at the time.
> Gates later cited Norton as a big influence on his career. At Draper Labs,
> John's comments on the Apollo code were known as "Nortran." I remember him
> showing me a voluminous print-out of such comments, and he made sure that I
> understood that "we did all this on an electric typewriter, there were no
> word processors back then!"  To everyone's credit, the MIT programmers came
> around & produced code that fit in to the AGC, and that had very few
> "anomalies."
>
> Paul E. Ceruzzi
>
>
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-- 
Ian S. King, MSCS ('06, Washington)
Ph.D. Student
The Information School
University of Washington

"Be yourself, everyone else is already taken."  - Oscar Wilde
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