[SIGCIS-Members] Fran Allen lecture on STRETCH / HARVEST just released

James Cortada jcortada at umn.edu
Sat Aug 15 18:02:53 PDT 2020


Fitto. And thanks so much about mentioning Ann Hardy!!!!  Jim

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 6:57 PM Eileen Buckholtz <thequeensofcode at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Dag, you have made my day releasing this Fran Allen lecture on Harvest.
> For the last 2 years I have been working on the Queens of Code Project to
> tell the stories of NSA's Computing Women from the 60s, 70s, and 80s.  And
> I wanted to include the contractors like Fran Allen and Ann Hardy who
> worked on Harvest and other agency systems as well as our own NSA women.
> So thank you!
>
> Eileen Buckholtz
> Queens of Code Project
>
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 6:42 PM Dag Spicer <dspicer at computerhistory.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> Here is a great lecture from the Computer History Museum archives — just
>> released — with Fran Allen discussing the Stretch/Harvest compiler at the
>> Museum, November 8, 2000, on the occasion of her being made a CHM Fellow.
>> She won the ACM Turing Award in 2006.
>>
>> Enjoy!
>>
>> https://youtu.be/BD035veZd-E
>>
>> Synopsis:
>> In response to government requests, IBM Research designed a system for a
>> very large data processing application, known as the HARVEST system, based
>> on the Stretch supercomputer (IBM 7030), which was delivered to the
>> National Security Agency in the early 1960s. The combined Stretch-HARVEST
>> Project created a milieu for developing new technologies, new hardware
>> architectures, and new software to meet the challenges of both systems. One
>> of the guiding principles of the project was to make programming easier by
>> the use of a compiler to generate code automatically from statements in the
>> user's language.
>>
>> Frances "Fran" Allen was a member of the ALPHA language design team which
>> created a very high level language featuring, among other things, the
>> ability to create new alphabets beyond the system defined alphabets (e.g.
>> English, decimal, integer, binary) and treat complex, heterogeneous data in
>> high-level statements. In addition to an overview of Stretch-HARVEST, the
>> talk will describe some of the lesser known aspects of the project the
>> people and institutions involved, the political climate, and the shared
>> knowledge, views, and value systems which were part of this interesting
>> project at an interesting time in the history of computing.
>>
>> Catalog number: 102621818
>> Lot number: X4835.2009
>>
>> Dag
>>
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-- 
James W. Cortada
Senior Research Fellow
Charles Babbage Institute
University of Minnesota
jcortada at umn.edu
608-274-6382
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