 Thank you ladies and gentlemen and welcome to at the heart of the work a celebration of the electronic digital computer at Carnegie Mellon University an Unveiling of the plaque to commemorate the location of CMU's first electronic digital computer and a celebration of the legacy at the computer on campus My name is Andrew Mead McGee I hold an appointment as a visiting assistant professor in the history department and I am in the university libraries the clear Postdoctoral fellow in the history of science and computing I'm part of an initiative based in Hunt Library to promote the study of the history of science Technology and computing at CMU to bring together groups across campus already doing work in these areas and to promote new research initiatives exhibitions public events and Collections around topics of science technology and computing history today We have an exciting series of speakers leading up to an unveiling of the plaque I wanted you to go over just a few logistics points first We will have a remarks by the dean of the libraries Keith Webster in the university president for our Jahanian then professors James Morris and Lenore Bloom will speak then we'll have a reception which you can wander around Look at the exhibits in the case. There is a program that Lays out what items and photographs are on display. We have photographs drawn from the university archives and collection items Taken from the Pozner collection the Traum accorded collection and several other holdings of the Carnegie Mellon University libraries on the inside cover of your program you'll find a solicitation to submit us your memories of Computing at CMU whether you're an alum Student faculty member staff or just a member of the community tell us your memories of how you've used computers We're soliciting this information as we're starting an oral history initiative and Trying to learn where the community would be interested in following some of these narratives of the history of computing the event today is sponsored Both by the university libraries and by a new organization on campus host at CMU Which stands for histories of science and technology across campus initiative based in Hunt Library But drawing on faculty and staff from across campus who are interested in promoting History of science and technology more broadly history of computing and institutional histories Within Carnegie Mellon University. We have some wonderful items on display today We have photographs from across the range of CMU's history. We have a robot on loan from the robotics Institute We have some of Herb Simon's logic toys, and we have some wonderful Early computing pieces loaned to us by two good friends of the program Mary Shaw and Catherine Kapitas from the School of Computer Science And now I'd like to introduce our sponsor for today the man who is hosting the event and who has made possible the new initiative In the history of science technology computing the Dean of the libraries Keith Webster Thank you Andrew. Good afternoon everyone. It's wonderful to see you on campus today I will give apologies in advance if we're still going at 315 I will be making a sharp exit some of you know that there is this Bizarre festival during Carnival which involves Deans being drenched in water And it's my turn to be drenched at 330 and I'm not going to wear this when I'm getting soaked So I will be making a sharp exit I noticed in the Notes that I was given for this event that Farnham has been asked to say a couple of words about his first computer And that prompted me to think about my first experience with computing which was in the mid to late 70s when my high school in the northeast of Scotland every year would receive delivery of a computer from Aberdeen University It would come for a week that would come in a large truck. They would take two days to unbox it Install it in a classroom, which had been emptied for the purpose We would have one day of putting in our punch cards and then two days to dismantle the machine And I thought it was just so exciting that we could spend weeks in advance writing code Didn't call it code on those days on paper and then Transcribe it into punch cards and then you drop them and wish you'd really pursued the random number option Rather than the structure of cards And then you'd get the print out a week later telling you that two plus plus three equals five It was just so fantastic, but it changed the course of my career When I was a computer science student in the mid 80s I was given a copy of a book called the fifth generation Coincidentally written by Ed Feigenbaum and Pamela McCardock that changed the course of my career by Really making me think about the interaction between Computer science and library science which happened to be big at my university and really focused on whether artificial intelligence could change How we interact with content? It only took 35 years, but last week Springer published the first Comprehensive book written by a machine learning algorithm. They had digested Thousands of scholarly articles in a branch of chemistry and written a literature review running to several hundred pages Completely without human intervention. That's what I hoped I would do when I read the fifth generation But the interesting segue there is the relationship with Pamela McCardock who I met two or three years ago Many of you know Pamela. She and her late husband Joe Traub were influential figures on this campus in the 1970s part of that interaction with Pamela led to the gift of the travel McCardock collection of Predigital computers which in turn brought Andrew who just welcomed you to our campus as a postdoc fellow to work with that collection Separately Pamela has been working on an autobiographical history of artificial intelligence It will be published later this year But you have in your hands today or you might be sitting on it a copy of the first three chapters of the book Which are not terribly salacious, but they are they are very entertaining reminiscences of her relationships with Simon and Newell and ready and you will have great fun reading this Computation occurred frequently on the campus of this institution before the first computer arrived in 1956 but it was plotted out by slide rules and mechanical tabulators on The 28th of August 1956 we entered the digital age Thanks to a partnership between the then GSIA now the tepper school of business and the departments of electrical engineering Psychology and mathematics and that sort of collaboration speaks very much to the culture of this institution then and now the collaboration across disciplines and I'm not going to steal Jim Morris's thunder and say more about the history of that What I will say in case he doesn't is that that first computer the 650 from IBM was valued by the company at the time at $250,000 and with annual operating costs of $53,000 in today's terms a purchase price of $2.3 million you can get a lot of scholarly journals for that and $490,000 in annual running costs I do believe that we in libraries and we as a university community have a responsibility both to preserve and to celebrate the history of this remarkable institution and to the History of the disciplines for which we are renowned around the world I'm so grateful for the support of donors like Pamela who make our work in this area possible I'd be happy to talk to any of you who would be interested in helping us Curate the history of computing at CMU. I'm also incredibly appreciative of the strong support and endorsement for our work of our president Farnam Jehanian who I now invite to address you well, good afternoon. It's so good to be with you this afternoon and Before I start I just want to remind you this is such a special weekend on our campus as we celebrate the spring carnival which of course is one of the longest Traditions we've had on this at this institution. This is a hundred and fifth anniversary of our carnival. I should say Here I saw some data that I want to share with you We have 2,500 alumni and parents who pre-registered for this event, which is twice the number that we had last year The mayhem that you see outside Includes About a hundred events across various venues on campus We have reunions of 1st, 5th, 10th, 25th, and 50th Alumni reunion anybody in the 50th here today. Oh Gosh, all right. Well Do I hear 60? No, this could become an auction Welcome back. Can you introduce yourself? I Fabulous welcome back welcome back happy to have you back on campus And I should also tell you that we have nine buggy races two of them are autonomous. So You would expect that at CMU and of course that makes our general counsel really nervous Once again, it's so good to be with you. Thank you Keith for hosting this Historic celebration. I want to begin by acknowledging Dean Keith Webster for his outstanding leadership of our University Library Thank you Keith for everything that you do. I Also want to welcome extend a warm welcome to all of you. It's such a pleasure to see so many of our alum Colleagues, of course faculty staff and students and parents. I want to acknowledge Our university trustees were with us today and Malloy and Mary Ann Olishkir with us today. Thank you for joining us also We have a number of of course the speakers and a number of my colleagues from computer science who've played such a Significant role in shaping this institution including of course Jim Morris, Lenore Bulom, and I saw Mary Schar earlier today and there she is. Mary is right here Well, thank you all for joining us. I'm also joined by a number of my colleagues from the university leadership Our provost Jim Garrett was here. He just got wet outside not because of The rain he was the first one who participated in doused the Dean Which is a special Olympics? Fundraising that our police department does and as Keith mentioned he's going to be there after 315 We'll try to finish by 330 so we can come and contribute to this so that also Our solves and I know Amy Burkard and a number of my other colleagues are here today I also want to acknowledge the student groups that are showcasing some really cool demos of our early computing technology Professor Daniel Cordoso The act I think is here at from the school of architecture and the students from his computational design laboratory Who are demoing a pioneering piece of software used in urban design also students computer club And officially recognized student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery ACM chapter are also here to demo vintage computer Reconstructions that have previously been exhibited at international computing Festivals, please join me a round of applause for our fabulous students It might surprise some of you that IBM 650 predates me Although not by many years But I do have some fond memories I was asked to try to remember my first use of computers and the one that probably left the biggest impression on me was my nerdiest memory of computing was Using essentially an IBM machine Programming in PL one running jobs on the IBM 370 mainframe using JCL scripting language Some of you in the room know what I'm talking about Jim Morris certainly does to instruct the operating system how to run a batch job and As Keith was mentioning in the early days at least when I learned to program We use punch punch cards and we often would submit our punch cards and Then we would come back about two hours later three hours later and get the output and find out that it was a missing semi Colon and then I tell our students are so spoiled. They have no idea Which I think made all of us a much better Programmers and developers because you had to be so so careful about What you did I did want to share one side story with you one time I was taking my second computer science course and I remember it was a second data structures class And I had like I don't remember maybe a 2,000 punch cards that I had typed in Program ready to be submitted. I submitted it five hours later. I get the output back and It just didn't seem like anything that I submitted it just seemed like A different language as he turns out that all sorts of errors and so on I went to the To the to the window and asked the guy who was submitting it to the card readers and I said Is this my set of cards that I submitted he said, oh, yeah, it is we dropped it And then we put it all back together and submitted it. So You know, it was a time when Things happen much more slowly I can tell you but there is a certain level of nostalgia Just thinking about these early machines again as a computer scientist I don't need to tell you that computers have been central to Many of our careers in this room. I'm enormously proud of course to serve as a steward of this great institution That helped pioneer our artificial intelligence established the nation's first robotic Institute Founded the first college in the world devoted solely to computer science Not to mention this first undergraduate AI program that we launched last year our model of course is still a model that other Universities follow and the paradigm shifting advancement developed here have had an Immeasurable impact on society over the past 50 years. We've been at the forefront of innovations in an increasingly Information-driven society But celebrating the computers campus's first computer is also a celebration of all that Computation has made possible not just in computer science This is actually a great campus to highlight that but also across the university In all areas of science and engineering in the arts and the humanities in business economics Social science and so much more Although she couldn't be here as you heard from Keith Pamela McCorda I wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude to her she and her late husband computer science department head Joseph Traub Collected a remarkable history of our work in machine learning AI and computer science that are now exhibited to here at CMU We're grateful to them for their contribution Also want to acknowledge take a moment to acknowledge the team in the university libraries including Andrew McGee from whom You just heard as well as the history of science and technology committee at Carnegie Mellon We just known as host at CMU I think this is just such a terrific thing and it's so uniquely CMU to have a group of essentially Colleagues and students and postdocs who across campus come together to look it's an interdisciplinary committee Of course to uncover classify and celebrate CMU's accomplishments I look forward to of course uncovering more threads of this history in the coming years But I'm primarily here to introduce our keynote speaker I'm delighted to introduce Jim Morris who is an emeritus professor of computer science Has worn many many hats at CMU too many to enumerate He had been a department head a founding director of HCI and of course from 1999 To 2004 he served as our dean of the School of Computer Science Jim's service to computer science and to Carnegie Mellon Extends back to the 1980s when he first was first director of the information Technology Center ITC a Joint venture with IBM that actually conceived and led to university's original Andrew project aside from that He set foot on campus I had I found out in fact a few months ago as a native Pits burger attending spring carnival Are you gonna say this later or no, but I should say it that 65 years ago plus He would later enroll as an undergraduate and become a member of the varsity football team and serve as president of Delta Opsalon fraternity. Yes, folks. Jim Morris was a frat boy at some time in the past Jim spent his career shaping our strength in computer science together with trailblazers like nul Simon Perlis Hoverman rogd ready and so many more today Jim is of course is our keynote speaker and his presentation will discuss the legacy of these leaders That's established for generations of CMU Researchers to come please join me in extending a warm welcome to Jim Morris Jim. What is yours? Thank you So the real beginning of the change at Carnegie Mellon wasn't in my mind in the 650 But in 1949 when Herb Simon came here came here to GSIA. That was the real starting point for this remarkable transformation But I came in 1959 in the So I think in the fall of 1960 I was having a beer at the fraternity house and one of the brothers came in and said Taking a class from this crazy professor who said whatever grade you would like if you're in that rat race Just write the grade on the blue book in your exam, and I'll give you that grade in the course I said that sounds like a fascinating course. What is it? Well, of course was computer programming and the professor was Alan Perlis So I enrolled in this class Hoping to get my a whatever and came arrived in a huge room Porter Hall 100 200 excited geeks ready to learn about programming and the front of the room was Perlis And he was an extraordinary its first time I'd seen an extraordinary looking fellow We had he had no hair not even eyebrows at that point, but he was the most enthusiastic Dynamic person I had seen in many many years And he was talking about programming and and for the first of many occasions. I didn't understand what he was talking about Anyway, he would get he would talk about whatever was perplexing or amusing him that day I just very very ad hoc sort of lectures, but he was telling us that programming was really an exciting thing to do He excited he assigned whimsical problems. He said design a program or write a program that designs motel layouts Because apparently he stayed in a motel recently and he began to think about that So that's the sort of guy he was He was the head of the he was the head of the math department He was the head of the computer center as the head of the computer center He did everything he could to get everybody programming until that time Computers were really sort of sequestered in research labs But Alan who had been a student at Tech said I want everybody on this campus who is interested to learn how to program He was So Anyway, he was quite active in computing. He was an international gadfly. He was on an international committee to design programming languages He was the first editor of the academic journal of computing. He was the first winner of the touring award Which is the Nobel Prize of computing? I said if this doofus is a big cheese that can't be that much competition I said this looks this like it looks like a good career choice for me So I got out of physics or I had to worry about Einstein and Newton and all I had to do is compete with Perlis So that that sort of sealed my fate and it worked out quite well for me But then as time went on in the 60s a lot of money started to come from the Defense Department for computing and Carnegie Mellon started his computer science department and Perlis was the first Director or head of the department And and I think he also kept all these other jobs too. So you might wonder how he did it Well, he did it by not really managing anything in a traditional sense. He wouldn't hold any meetings He wouldn't do formal activities no committees. He would just decide what to do as the decisions came along But he did make great decisions He hired people from all over the world who were enthusiastic in computing regardless of credentials because there really aren't Any congressions in computer science, which wasn't even called that at the time So the people from all over the world that he'd met in his travels he Let's see what at the beginning of a PhD program some students were complaining about the curriculum and he said Okay, go and design a curriculum and come back and tell me what you think and we'll talk about it So they went away for two weeks or months whenever it was came back with a curriculum. He said this looks good Let's do it. And so if that's how in fact a bunch of graduate students beginning graduate students The Carnegie Mellon designed a computer science curriculum, which has been copied all over the country because those students went on to teach at other places Alan Perlis invented or promulgated the reasonable person principle which basically goes like this We can't have rules that explain everything to do and if we had rules all you computer nerds would figure out How do you get around them? So all I want you to do is make a reasonable Decision in any situation or we think something's reasonable do it and we'll deal with the consequences later And this reasonable person principle is still being talked about And computer science and around the world today What else about Perlis he Oh he he wrote many papers about programming languages and so forth, but his he's most well known He's best known for a huge number of epigrams that say things about computing which amuse computer people One man software in software everything is possible, but nothing is easy one man's constant and another man's variable Fools ignore complexity pragmatists suffer it some can avoid it geniuses remove it There are two ways to write air-free programs only the third one works I Look Alan I found in general situations has tried to always say the least expected thing So let's see So later on by this by this point I was now teaching at Berkeley, but I was traveling in in Europe And I went to a computer conference in Bavaria being held by NATO this computer conference was Became a sort of an annual affair in the summer It was run by a German guy who happened to be in the Wehrmacht in World War two the German army So many some people said I'm not going to this thing run by a former Nazi soldier and you would have think that Perlis who was Descended from Jews in Squirrel Hill would be one of these but Alan true to form Plunge right in with great enthusiasm. He went to this thing multiple times He brought his his wife and his daughter and my wife and I spent many happy hours Drinking beer and cabitzing with him after the in the evenings at this summer school the summer school also featured a sporadic debate between Perlis and a guy named Dykstra who was a Dutch computer scientist And they would give alternate lectures and they were talking about computer things But somehow they were also having a debate between each other Which they probably thought was about computers and computer science, but it's really about their philosophy of life Alan was a liberal open very hopeful person who believed in the perfect ability of humans and for a perfect ability of man Actually, I think he said that one day at this conference Dykstra on their hand was a very pessimistic guy and and sort of nasty and he believed that most things that were going on Especially in computer science were wrong The irony behind this is the way they look Perlis could have passed for an extra terrestrial and and and and Dykstra was sort of a fuzzy guy So but Alan was the most human person I've ever met. So it was an interesting contrast Let's see Many years later a couple or maybe five years later I was working at Xerox Park, which was sort of inventing a new compare computer paradigm And I had a call way conversation with my friends one day Well, I was just talking about what I thought of Perlis's contributions and here's an approximation of what I said Whereas most people in computer science at the time were practicing an academic discipline They already knew and using computers to leverage it Perlis knew that this new thing called software not hardware was the most important thing And he believed the most important thing to do was to get everybody to learn how to write software And he specialized in programming languages was something that did that So one day he said to an assembled group of experts You're talking like mountaineers arguing about how fast you can climb Mount Everest and what we have to do is transport Thousands or maybe millions of people to hundreds of mountaintops around the world So that's the kind of let's go for it sort of guy that he was By this by this time Alan was beginning to fail in health He had an autoimmune disease which none of us really understand He was it mostly confined to a wheelchair, but he was still as vibrant as ever And but he was now he'd left see him you and started the computer science department at Yale But it came back for the 10th anniversary and gave us all a pep talk about how have fun in computing And then sometime he after that he died and at the 25th anniversary We had a big celebration of the 25th anniversary of the computer science department And we honored Alan by creating a chair and computer science in his name So for the next 20 years by this time I was on the faculty at CMU for the next 20 years as Farnam said I've had it innumerable administrative jobs something that no self-respecting professor really ought to be doing and I just like thinking about this recently. Oh, I was doing this because I wanted to be like Perlis This guy who I thought was a doofus in 1960 I was trying to be like him. Now, of course, I couldn't be like him But I'm glad I did that to honor his contributions and and the way he had lured me into this great career Okay, Alan Nule Pamela McCordic has a great phrase in in her early book about him about artificial intelligence She said Alan was a big man with a pear-shaped face Which was always radiating the obvious enthusiasm and excitement He had about his work and that was Alan. That is so perfect that I just had to quote it directly I took a graduate seminar from Alan. I think late in my undergraduate career he He came in the room and started talking about a biology paper even though he wasn't a biologist and He said I don't really understand this but these are the equations that explain why your heart beats faster when you run and he was sort of working His way through it to sort of show us the way you tried to understand something I realized at the time and and certainly learned later that he had tremendous courage about diving in to any intellectual Issue regardless of whether he knew anything about it He was it was certainly a polymath and so he was willing to go to argue with anybody in any department on this campus So after his talk he had looked at a graduate student He said I'd like you to give a paper next week Are you willing to do that graduate student was a guy named David Parnas who some of you might know and Graduate students said well if you twist my arm so Alan walked over Started twisting his arm then finally partner said okay. I'll do it. So he was a spontaneous jokester He was he started his career at the Rand Corporation where he worked on the sage system which was an early warning system That the US military was using And he met many computer scientists there and and other Computer types and he met at one named Oliver Selfridge from whom he learned a new programming paradigm that self is called Pandemonium I won't bother explaining that but Newell said that changed my life I decided a new way in which I should pursue program to do entirely different arrange my programs entirely differently And that's when he became an artificial intelligence expert even though it wasn't called that at the time He said it changed my life that day I went back and reprogrammed my whole system according to these principles and he never looked back He also met Herbert Simon who was consulting for a round at the time And it was love at first sight intellectual love at first sight They formed a partnership that went on for 40 years to basically begin many fields including artificial intelligence The first thing they did which is recorded on one of these charts here They created something called the logic theorist which proved theorems and propositional logic now propositional logic is Let me here's something that is like propositional logic Suppose three missionaries and three cannibals are on the shore and they want to get to an island two miles away And there's a boat that holds two people at a time and the problem is that you can never allow the cannibals to I'll be more cannibals than missionaries on either shore because then the cannibals will kill them and eat them So you have to figure out how to go back and forth with these boats to move people around so that's true So that's the kind of intellectual problem proving something their propositional logic is anyway, they interviewed or they had many people sit down and solve these problems because a guy named Bertrand Russell famous British philosopher had written a bit book proving all these theorems in this logic So it was regarded as a real intellectual feat so they had people try to solve these problems which many of them did and they talked aloud while they were doing them and they recorded their voices and Then they put all that together and they developed an algorithm which they thought was good for doing propositional logic Now computer time was precious at the time So nul and Simon got their wives and children to simulate a computer by passing cards between each other and doing all these Mechanical steps, and they managed to prove some theorems from propositional logic that was in this book by Russell They went went ahead that that worked Simon announced that they had created a thinking machine in 1956 winter of 1956 they went on and programmed the thing and then More or less did all the theorems in this large book by by Russell So that and that was the first concrete Demonstration of a computer program which you could claim to be intelligent um Let me see The other thing about that program that was interesting is nul Simon and nul were cognitive Psychologists first and foremost they were interested in describing how humans think and they said to the cognitive Psychology community look you don't have to be writing Differential equations or writing prose paragraph to describe how people think you can make a precise theory Represented as a computer program and then you can test that theory by running the computer Programming and seeing if it does the same things that the humans were doing so they really began to disrupt and energize the field of cognitive Psychology along with beginning artificial intelligence all with one project So Do do do do So Alan Alan was the power behind the throne in the computer science department He was never the department head and he always let the department head make the decisions But I think he met with department heads Weekly if not more often and was constantly giving them advice and guiding them And I think every student and everybody in the computer science department depended upon Alan's good sense and example So he's did that for 30 or 40 years the Let's see he also was also he was consulting at Xerox Park where I was working and the entire Computer community at that time was getting excited about the kind of system was being built at Xerox Park Which was personal computers linked together with a network namely the system that all of us use today But before that it was all these mainframes like the 650 Anyway, Newell and the computer science department went to the president of university and said we want to build that kind of system for our campus be and we want to be the first and we want to Try this new paradigm and show how it works on a college campus Sorry, it went around and just raised money and he got that went to IBM and raised a kind of amazing $10 million a year project to build such a system More or less by coincidence. I came to see him you in a sabbatical that year in the fall of 82 and While I was here Sire to announce this computer for every student project and everyone's very excited about it and Alan Newell and a few people were trying to convince me that I should be here to direct that project I was reluctant Because well, I said I had a conversation with Alan. I said well it would be sort of a taboo to Leave Xerox and go to work for a project funded by IBM and Give them all that great knowledge that I'd acquired and Alan said Jim. Here's here's the thing When you break a taboo, it's it's really enjoyable So so that sold me and I've been oh, I you saw the chart I've been here ever since So in this in this project we had a big problem about what kind of computer to use Should it be a Macintosh? Should it be an IBM PC? Arguments were flaring and it was I was in quite a quandary about which direction to go in and I went to Alan to ask Him for advice and he said he said look Jim the only thing that matters actually is the network infrastructure Concentrate on that and that's what we did and it turns out that that's the only part of the Android system That still isn't used today And as you've noticed the network infrastructure is like the permanent feature of our lives and the device We use whether it's a laptop or a phone or everything is changing all the time So that was just another example of the kind of way sort of person He was he would focus on your problem not his problem He would dive in solve your problem and then like my childhoods He wrote the Lone Ranger would ride out of town and go and back to his research But he was a very important person So he Well He he promoted he was the one who put through the very difficult political problem of Creating the school of computer science, which if you know the academic world You can imagine it was a big deal took him a couple of years He also said at the time that he wanted us to begin an effort in human computer interaction Which was going to be an alliance between the computer science department and the psychology department Everybody was enthusiastic about it, but but actually nobody did anything about it In fact, I went off and started a company doing the same sort of things that he was describing The interaction between human computers and the interface Then so two or three years later or two years later I think in 92 suddenly Alan came down with prostate cancer, which was a devastating blow to many of us I Was talking to him on the phone that summer and I said, you know, I sort of broke out what which was a purely professional Relationship I said Alan. I'm I'm I'm sorry that this is happening and that one said well, you're not as sorry as I am Is most that's when that was Alan So anyway, so when he after he died I In the Perlis had actually died a few years before that once somebody remarked and everybody had the feeling the giants of computer science who have guided CMU have left us and I thought I am many people I think were wondering what was going to happen next so I Stopped working on my startup company and came back and became a department head at CMU and tried to do the best I could to get things You're at least tell people things are going to be okay. The first thing I did Was I wrote down what I called Alan Nules precepts and these were the things that I learned from him Because I'd never actually seen him write it all down So do what you love love what you do. We've already said he was so enthusiastic about his search for the How computers could think that he just loved doing that said help others to do what they love and that's a unique feature Many people who begin to after you get your PhD you begin to believe that the thing you're doing is the only thing that matters and Nobody should work on anything else, but that was not that was not nul. He said I'll help you do your thing As much as you want me to it was great. He said don't worry about how smart you are Just get the work done and do the accomplishments. He really just cared about what the end result was not how clever you were Be intellectually tough. I said that already it's fine to take out time from research But you should make it pay off in some way you should make it tangible When a technical agreement arises stop arguing and devise an experiment to settle it He they sponsored many people including Jeff Hinton the recent winner of the Turing Award to pursue approaches to artificial intelligence Which they did not believe in? Newland Simon said they invited Jeff Hinton and many other people to to solve the problems That's also about the research agenda They invite people to solve the problems they were working on in different ways because they wanted the answer to emerge They didn't insist upon being the ones who had the right answer There's really an extraordinary tradition for them to start for the CS department So the second thing I did was start this HCI effort Within the school of computer science, which it became the HCI Institute, which was an apartment That's that department's not 25 years old has become the model for HCI departments across the country Okay Herb Simon In my senior year, I had a conversation with Herb Simon which ended with him saying young man You have Charles River fever the Charles River flows past Harvard and MIT And I just told Simon I that I was going to go to MIT I wasn't going to become a graduate student in his new psychology department Now Simon had a kind of a resentment about Harvard and MIT in such places for what he called their automatic presumption of greatness He just he just didn't well he came to Carnegie Mellon The GSIA with a lot of other brilliant people who and they remade business education They started the field of analytic business and they show how you could do business using mathematics and computers When other universities richer universities got wind of this they began hiring away these guys Some of which went on to win Nobel Prizes the Dick Leone and Jim March Very big-time people they they all see him you got raided which often happens, but Simon never left Now in later years you ask Simon why he'd never left Because he certainly was offered jobs all over the place. He said well when I was in the University of Chicago There was a football player there who became an all-american Even though the football team didn't win a single game that year He said I want to be able to Have everybody know that when I accomplish things it wasn't because I was leaning on my institution that it was something that I did And my fame will be that much greater and he said I want to win the academic game that way Now he was very serious He looked upon the academic game so to speak as as a real competition And he had lots of good advice about it He's one of his best lectures was called how to be creative or it really might have been called how to make people think you're creative It said he said First of all he said you choose a problem for which you have a secret weapon He said you should work on important problems and if you're working on important problems There are lots of other smart people working on these problems So if you want to win to be the first one to solve that problem, you better have some technique or technology Which will Be that they don't have that you can use to beat them So Simon for example was an excellent mathematician, but he applied it all to social science where there was very little mathematics going on the second thing he said which was Coherent with Carnegie Mellon's motto. He said you had to work hard said you have to work for ten years to become world-class at anything He said you know you did and he's pointed out that Bobby Fisher Before he was 14 years old had played more games of chess than anybody ever had including all the grand master That ever existed so it was all about the practice. He's sort of like the guy in the joke You're driving through Manhattan and you ask how do I get the Carnegie Mellon and the guy on the corner says practice That was that was Simon's attitude and it's certainly a Carnegie Mellon attitude Now the other thing he did to become famous was he got into fights and feuds everywhere if you ever suggested in any venue in writing or speaking that there was something that a People could do that a computer couldn't do Simon would be after you with hammer-and-tongues. It was it was really quite terrible He's just wouldn't stand for it and this of course as we've learned recently with cable news and such getting into fights You can you can give a wonderful description of the way the world is and if nobody disagrees with you Everybody will forget it the next day. You've got a fight about things So he actually he fought with the neo neo economists in GSIA These are the guys who try to use mathematics and use the assumption that people can optimize their choices Simon said that's nonsense. The humans can't optimize their choices. They don't have enough intelligence or enough time They just make decisions and with given the time allowed and do it. So he invented I think he invented the term He said you just have to solve problems as they go along and that's certainly That's become common knowledge. In fact Daniel Kahneman who won a Nobel Prize five years ago It's basically he and his colleague Tversky did a lot of just proving how irrational and how quick how the way people make decisions Which is far from optimal Let me see The so he So he continued this combat in us he and nule took their results from the logic theorist to a conference of all the AI people in the country in 1957 right after they had written this computer program and they were all impressed by it but nevertheless Simon got it basically got into a fight with the other gurus of artificial intelligence about how significant it was and he more or less said Look you guys have lots of ideas about how intelligence might work and lots of bright things and you're all very smart people But Alan and I were the only ones that have ever have produced a concrete example of an intelligent program So go back to your labs and do something for a change. So that that was the Herb's attitude So he had some foibles he he said that He said he claimed that he never read newspapers or magazines because his friends at CMU would tell him if anything Everything happened that was important because they were watching television and reading magazines He didn't need to bother. He said well, maybe at the end of the year I'll go and get the encyclopedia world book of 1972 and read it to see whether anything interesting has happened But other than that I don't I don't waste my time doing that sort of thing He at the eulogy for Alan Newell or at the memorial service for Alan Newell and Herb got up to give his eulogy He said well Alan and I believe in doing good science So what I think I'm going to do today is describe the latest theory which Alan and I were working on when he died And then he went on to this 20-minute thing was when what was supposed to be a eulogy. I've actually seen that happen Again at eulogies John and Reynolds Who a colleague who died several years ago? Somebody else got up and gave a 20-minute lecture about about actually his own work not even John We were once at a Raj Reddy's house we were once at a large faculty gathering of husbands and wives and One of the faculty wife of the faculty member made an off-hand comment about the political situation with Herb Which Herb didn't think was correct. So down from the his end of the table He delivered a three-minute lecture proving to everybody at the table why what she said was completely wrong Well, you know the poor woman wanted to climb under the table But but Herb just well Herb was all business the business of of science if you will Let's see So he's had a huge impact a journalist wrote a book about Carnegie Mellon at the time or in the 80s that said Said I think there should be a statue of Herb Simon in front of the Carnegie Music Hall Along with the statues of Shakespeare Michelangelo Galileo and Bach In the middle of the 1980s. I thought this was a little bit over the top But now I'm beginning to think he might be that person or he might he might if this Artificial intelligence thing continues to be the huge thing that we think it is I mean artificial intelligence has gone from being science fiction to being a joke to being sort of successful To being a threat to all mankind So if this is the century of artificial intelligence Simon is likely to be regarded as his father So there's some irony in this because especially with AI threatening the existence of humankind Simon and Newell were Social scientists what you think would be want to improve the human condition They wanted to prove that a computer could do anything that a person would do They never thought about this question of this really a good idea They never had what I would call an Oppenheimer moment in fact saying oh, I don't know whether this will be good for my friends Actually Pamela McCordic asked Newell for one in one of her books Why don't you write an article to explain to people what you're doing and to you know layman and and Newell said Oh, if we did that they would be scared stiff Simon Simon I wish Simon were here to explain to us what we should do next But he's not but he did he did write a paragraph about What he thought the situation was and it's and this has been quoted in many places in many books The definition of man's uniqueness has always formed the kernel of his Cosmological and ethical systems with Copernicus and Gallico and Galileo He ceased to be the species located at the center of universe Attended by Sun and stars with Darwin he sees to cease to be the species created by God With Freud he ceased to be the species whose behavior was governable by rational mind as we begin to produce Mechanisms that think and learn he has ceased to be the species capable of complex intelligent manipulation of his environment I Am confident that man will as he has in the past find new ways of describing his place in the universe a way will Satisfy his needs for dignity and purpose, but it would be as a way as different from the present one as the Copernican and the pole make So he said Not my problem You guys figure it out and that's something we need to do One final comment about you. So that's Herb Simon one final comment about that is important These three people work together as a team for many years I'll go back to the very beginning here Yeah They coincided for a long period of time. They never had any serious disputes. They had disagreements They were very different people But they always managed to work out their disagreements And you know that in a great university The faculty well if you're if you're in the faculty at MIT You've proved you're the one of the smartest people in the world now The only question is is are you the smartest person in the world you start fighting with the other smart people? Well, these guys were Carnegie Mellon. They weren't worried about that They were worried about accomplishing something so they sort of set the spirit for a computer science and many other people and they created This great field of computer science for both Carnegie Mellon and the world. Thank you Thank you, Jim. My final act before I go to be doused I thought the rain might call it off, but I'm going to get wet anyway is to Introduce professor Lenore Bloom who is going to offer some reflections Little while back we were sitting at a meeting in one of the Pozner boardrooms and Lenore said Kind of remember where that 650 was located in the building next door to where we are seated today And I just thought it would be fantastic to have some reflections from Lenore So I'm going to invite her to say a few words I'm going to go and get wet come and see me once we're finished and Andrew meet McGee will wrap up proceedings in a few months Lenore. Thank you Well, thanks Jim for that wonderful History of Carnegie Mellon why we're so excited to be in the computer science school of computer science and Also, thank you Jim for bringing me back to Carnegie Mellon So I'm going to also talk about this I'm a contemporary of Jim's actually and we were in the same class So I didn't know it then and I'm going to talk about the same Period of time early on but perhaps from a slightly different perspective and a couple of months ago I wrote a little short story that was published in the Pittsburgh Quarterly online and I had titled it first Alan Perlis and me And Andrew had suggested girl on the move. So they picked up girl on the move, but actually it was out so Well, you can say which which title you prefer So and so it is from a girl's perspective of computing here at Carnegie Tech So I arrived at Carnegie Institute of Technology Carnegie Tech in the fall of 1950s, I'm only going to read a few excerpts from this article So I won't go on the whole thing, but okay I arrived at the at Carnegie Institute of Technology Carnegie Tech in the fall of 1959 as a 16 year old first-year student in architecture department in the College of Fine Arts I Had chosen architecture because I loved art and math ever since I was a kid and Architecture seemed to be the perfect combination I love the ambience of the architecture community at Tech We all had drafting board space on long wooden tables in the huge bright room on the top floor of the fine arts building The first few lines of tables were for first-year students the next few for second and so forth Like most fine art students we worked on projects throughout the night thus getting to know our classmates well The upper division students would drop by our first-year drafting tables with encouragement and helpful advice Another advantage of having to work through the night was that I did not have to the restrictive dorm sign-in hours at the time 8 p.m. I believe that women outside of fine arts had Presumably to more easily manage us all fine arts women were housed separately in the old Mellon mansion on The top of the hill on Forbes Avenue near with a Cohen University Center stands today I don't know if you remember that Jim where we were Many of the architecture students came from families in the construction or architecture businesses They had worked summer jobs in the field and were passionate They had been inspired by Anne Rand's the Fountainhead one classmate had even spent a summer at Taliesin West Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home in school in the Arizona desert. They were passionate But for me except for a wonderful world history course that included weekly lectures on the arts with a focus on Asian arts The technical courses were not what I was looking for the math and engineering were useful, but formal aic I wanted to know why not just how So mid-second year I decided to switch either to art or to math I thought math I thought I would be able to do the art on my own Which was a bit naive, but I certainly couldn't do math on my own So switching to math seemed to me the right decision But not to everyone as always soon find out Math at Carnegie Tech was in the College of Engineering and Science Switching between colleges was not easy particularly not from fine arts to engineering even today That would be difficult Carnegie Mellon University today as Carnegie Tech then generally accepts entering students into specific majors and I was a fine arts girl During my sophomore year I spoke to deans and knocked on many doors I was told time after time. It was impossible to switch majors. Maybe I should think of seeing it seeking a counselor Okay, but that did not stop me one day I knocked on a math professor's door and as usual I said I wanted to take math courses and become a math major To my surprise. He immediately responded great I'm teaching an experimental math course using the computer and IBM 650 in the basement of GSIA That's the Graduate School of Industrial Administration Administration you can take my class the computer will grade all your makeup homework So I came in the middle of class the math professor was Alan Perlis and that's how I became a math major at Carnegie Tech Perlis's course, and this is a little bit what Jim said Perlis's course was not exactly the former mathematics I was looking for but it was quirky Forward-looking and definitely experimental. He was lively enthusiastic Iconoclastic teacher Prentsing around the classroom and sneakers a striking figure with bald head and lashless Persing eyes and you saw his picture the arch typical Hollywood computer genius He would give us problems to solve that were all over the place sometimes from a numerical analysis Sometimes vaguely stated again iterating but reiterating what Jim said He occasionally gave us problems that had no known solution at the time Although what we were not told that for example the firing squad problem The firing squad problem is now standard and all auditometer theory courses and for historical and cultural reasons I often assign it for homework when I teach automata theory to undergrads computer science students at Carnegie Mellon Although the solution is now readily available on the web We had to solve our problems by writing programs in Perlis's programming language tasks In which instructions had to be written on paper line by line Each line that had to be coded into a computer punch card and you heard that from Farnam and Jim in the bed and The resulting stack of cards had to be taken down to the computer room in the basement of GSIA God forbid as happened to Farnam if you trip going down the stairs and that didn't happen to you but Your colleagues there if you were lucky next morning You would get reams and reams of paper showing how your program ran on the computer and the solution If you were not lucky well Then you had to figure out if there were a bug in your program or in punching of the carts, right? And I see lots of nodding here the acronym tasks Which stood for tech assembly system was pure Perlis in Congress the House and American Activities Committee Huac set up to ferret out communist in the early 50s was still active and Tass was the name of the official Soviet news agency Perlis's view of the universal relevance of computing across disciplines was prescient Even startling at the time his experimental course led to formal programming course He instituted at Carnegie Tech the following year and I want to say many years later I'm somebody sent me an article that I was based on a conference in 63 64 at MIT of Perlis talking about this course and what he said that we took and he said you know Engineers really need to do programming the first year But liberal arts students we can wait to their self in more year But that was fun it was and this in his experimental class They became aware of another arch type the guy who spends day and night in the computer room writing and punching out computer programs These early hackers or computer geeks like Bill Gates and Paul Allen were a more benign character than the computer hackers of today Because Perlis except me into his class. I was able to enroll in other math classes I love the challenge of the course on modern math Which I called the brick wall course if you made it through you were on your way This is professor more and I think Jim was also in that class But I was shocked by the new ambience. No one seemed to talk to one another. I had lost the camaraderie I had experienced in architecture. I was on my own I'm skipping a whole bot bunch here now I'm not exactly sure when I was officially declared a math major, but in the June of 1961 I received a letter from the assistant dean of the College of Engineering Dear Miss Epstein, that was my maiden name your final grades for the spring 1961 semester again indicate excellent scholastic Performance is there for a great pleasure for me to close 6061 academic year with this letter congratulating you your parents and your high school teachers on this very fine record So I was in The letter was sent on June 27th 1961 airmail to our address in Caracas, Venezuela with a four cent stamp I actually had that letter Apparently the US post office returned it for an additional four cents and it was mailed the next day So I was there. So basically that's my story. There's a lot more and then I'm happy to share this with you it's online and Maybe just a little addendum Here see if I can find it I So this is the article that I mentioned before Perlis experiment experimental course led to the formal programming course the Institute at Carnegie Tech the following year in the computer in the In the university chapter five of computers and the world of the future MIT Press 1964 Perlis describes what he viewed as essential components of this course He also prevents his view prescient at the time about the ubiquity of programming And that's what I think was really Really prescient and really part of Carnegie Mellon that this is going to be a universal tool Which as a I is going to be just knowing having computer literacy is really a critical part of our Our world today and in fact, that's what he actually says like physics and chemistry are important and literature is important And in a liberal arts course certainly by the sophomore year, everybody should be taking programming. So thank you Thank you to professors Morris and bloom from taking us to the local from the local to the universal and now going in reverse From the present to the past we hope to unveil with the help of President Jehanian and Professors Bloom and Morris a plaque to be installed next door in the basement of Posner Hall at the site of CMU's first electronic digital computer Yes, the three of you to come up and this is the first hopefully a growing series of plaques sponsored by the university Libraries promoting the institutional history of CMU Oh And in case you're wondering it reads the first computer on this site on August 28th 1956 the Carnegie Institute of Technology install its first electronic digital computer and IBM 650 mainframe sponsored by the Graduate School of Industrial Administration University Computation Center became the interdisciplinary hub for emerging campus interest in computers and information technologies. The computer remade Carnegie Mellon and in return Carnegie Mellon continues to remake the computer H Thank you for coming. Please enjoy the recession