 I'm delighted to welcome you to the Wild West of Computing Live, an oral history podcast performance from Cut Pathways. Apologies for starting a few minutes late. What we're learning, it's fantastic to have people here live in person. What we're learning is that you can move from one Zoom event to another in 30 seconds. Getting from one bit of campus to another takes a few minutes and we're all just remembering what that means. For more than 30 years, I have started almost every day opening either the physical and now the virtual pages of the Guardian. And once in a while, I see a story in the morning that is just perfect for the day. Today there was an article, quite seriously, you can look it up, headed podcast listeners likely to be more curious and less neurotic, study. So for those of you who have been listening to podcasts, it's great to have you here amongst friends who are more curious and less neurotic. The article went on to say, they found that people who reported ever having listened to a podcast scored more highly for openness to experience, interest-based curiosity and need for cognition, a measure reflecting an individual enjoyment of effortful cognitive endeavours. So for those of you here listening to your first podcast, you're welcome. The oral history programme in the university libraries records the real-life memories and perspectives of those who experienced the history of CMU. These interviews do not just inform listeners of the event's histories. They tell the story of how the events were experienced. The Cut Pathways podcast, which debuted in the summer of 2021, draws on the programme's growing archive of oral histories to take an honest look at higher education, exploring themes of culture, equality and access to education, as well as catalytic points of personal growth, technological innovation and creative development. Each recorded history is full of funny anecdotes, follies, triumphs, hidden connections and, occasionally, in-the-moment realisations. Tonight we have a special live version of the latest season of the Cut Pathways podcast. Over the next hour, our hosts will take you on a journey through the fascinating history of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. I'd like to thank the many participants whose stories contributed to tonight's programme, including several of my friends and colleagues who are seated waiting to see what's going to be exposed. Raish Reddy, Jim Morris, Marcella Bair, the current Dean of Computer Science are with us, as is Mary Sean Roy wheel. Great to have you here tonight. I hope you'll enjoy the exploration of what some have called the Wild West of Computing. With that, please welcome our hosts, Catherine Barbera and Dave Barnable. Thank you for that introduction, Keith, and congratulations again on receiving the Helen and Henry Posner Jr. Dean's Chair last night. Very well deserved, and we are all thrilled. Well, Dave, should we get started? Yeah, sounds great. All right. Hello, you are listening to Cut Pathways, a live podcast produced by the Oral History Programme. I'm Catherine Barbera. And I'm Dave Barnable. This live podcast dives into the university's archive of recorded oral histories to showcase the people that have made Carnegie Mellon what it is. Welcome to the Wild West of Computing. Thank you for joining us tonight. We're going to take a look at a 30-year span of time when the study of computers became a science. Our journey starts in about 1956 with the beginnings of computer science at CMU, then known as Carnegie Institute of Technology, Carnegie Tech, or CIT. And then we'll end our journey in about 1987 with the Andrew Project, a first-of-its-kind computing environment that connected the entire campus for the very first time. And before we get started, we want to introduce our guests for the evening. Special Collections curator Sam Lemley will show us some items from the Traub-McCordic Collection in the university libraries. And historian Andrew Mead McGee will provide commentary on the technologies, agencies, and funding that made everything possible. Artist and designer Maggie Lynn Negretti is here, and she will be providing live illustrations throughout the evening, charting a timeline of our conversation. And finally, our band tonight is How Things Are Made. Brian Verden, Matt Aylmore, and, of course, Dave. So Dave, I have to say, I am so excited about this event. Tonight we get to unpack this question of what is computer science. But we know what computer science is, right? There's an entire school here at Carnegie Mellon University dedicated to computer science. Yeah, but it wasn't always that way. So who here has studied or is studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon? Cheer, raise your hand. Come on. Yeah. Awesome. All right. That's awesome. So, well, some of you probably know more about the technology that we're going to talk about tonight than we do. You know, I'm an archivist and Dave is a filmmaker, but we're actually not here to talk about the tech. We're here to talk about the culture and the people who made all of this possible. And it is a fascinating journey. Computer science has completely transformed our world in so many ways. But it started with people, a relatively small community of folks fascinated with what these machines could do. Well, if computer science wasn't always around at Carnegie Mellon, how did it get started? To answer that question, let's place ourselves in the 1950s. So computers were big. They took up entire rooms and they cost a lot. You were looking at about $150,000 in 1959 for the IBM 650. That's $1.5 million today. Very few people knew how to use them and even fewer people could afford them. Remember, personal computers weren't a thing yet. And during this time, researchers were wondering, is the study of computers even a science? And how is it different from mathematics and engineering? You know, it'd be cool to hear about these early days of computer science from the folks who were there. Well, you're in luck. The oral history program preserves these kinds of recorded oral histories and for the past year or so, we've been focusing on the history of computer science. That makes a lot of sense now. So that's why I've been conducting all these interviews with computer scientists. Exactly. So tonight we'll hear from students, faculty, alumni and other folks who interacted with the university over the years about this question of what is computer science. And this is great because ordinarily in the podcast we can't show you what things look like, but tonight we can. We're going to walk you through this bit by bit. Ha, okay, bad pun. Maybe we should have put a warning on this event that it comes with dad jokes. Moving on. Now when you think about the early days of computer science at CMU, three names come to mind. Alan Perlus, Herbert Simon and Alan Newell, the big three of computer science at CMU. And you may have heard of them. Newell Simon Hall here on campus is named for Herb Simon and Alan Newell. And Maggie will be immortalizing these three figures on paper for us. And I think once it's completed we could all agree it would make a great desktop background. You may see these old videos and think this has nothing to do with you. It happened such a long time ago and computers weren't trendy yet. There was no Instagram or Twitter. But these folks were at the forefront of innovation. They were people just like us, figuring things out. They wanted to know what a computer could be used for and they were constantly exploring those possibilities. So let's hear from Jesse Quatsy. Quatsy began his career at Carnegie Institute of Technology in the 1950s as an undergraduate student. It of course had the three great men. Alan Perlus, Alan Newell and Herb Simon. Simon was Nobelist and Alan Perlus was first touring lecturer and president of the ACM and Newell had a bunch of titles and so forth. And Harry and Mark, well they believed in chaos. It's not really that but there weren't any rules. And that was one of the very great significant parts of this university and the reason why it has become so great, freedom, nothing like it. As Quatsy said, there were virtually no rules during these early years. It was the wild west of computing. Computer science was not defined so each innovation and invention expanded its definition. So many of you have studied or are studying computer science at CMU but that wouldn't necessarily have been the case then. There weren't really degrees in computer science. This was especially true for undergraduates. Someone recently asked me about computer science. There was no computer science. It was just some classes. There was no computer science degree. In fact, the first computer science degree was only in graduate school. They didn't have an undergraduate computer science degree until the 80s. That is Peg Calder. Calder studied with Alan Perlus as an undergraduate student at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Margaret Morrison Carnegie College. Margaret Morrison, which was the women's school, was one of the major colleges at CIT along with engineering and science and fine arts. Calder's perspective is fairly unique because it was less common for women to study mathematics during that time. Overall during these early years there was a general feeling of chaos but also possibilities. There was essentially no structure. To some extent I was a little ahead of some of my cohort because I had a master's degree already but also there were essentially no textbooks in those days. Very few subjects to study per se. So I think I probably had at most four or five courses here. So from a graduate student standpoint there was very little structure. We were encouraged to get into research almost immediately and we all did. That was Peter Freeman. He was a student at CIT in the 1960s and he received his PhD in computer science from CMU in 1970. It is funny to think about this culture of chaos, of freedom, of exploration and how it is all tied to these gigantic machines. These computers require so much careful planning. They had to buy or rent the computer. They had to find space for it and they had to maintain it. All these careful steps allowed them to thrive in this chaos. To understand the physicality of these machines we need to go back in time even further. So let's look at the origins of the computer. I see Sam Lemley is over here with a whole table full of items. Sam what do you have for us tonight? Thanks Dave, thanks Kate. So I'm going to be talking about the prehistory of computer science and I'm going to illustrate my talk with three objects from the university's special collections which is in the libraries and given the collection's strengths in the history of computing we're sort of spoiled for choice. We have everything from a book printed in China in 1883 on computational methods and the use of the abacus all the way to a enigma machine famously used by the Nazi military and decoded by a team of crypt analysts at Bletchley Park led by Alan Turing. But instead I'm going to sort of focus in and go 300 years farther into the past and talk specifically about the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. And each of these three things that I have on the table here illustrate kind of the range of what he was up to over the course of his career and I know in many ways this is not ideal. You probably can't see what I'll be gesturing toward on the table but I will leave them here so I invite you to come up after the event. I'll stand here with them and answer any questions you might have. So Leibniz pictured here, very impressive here is probably most well known as being the sort of independent discoverer of calculus along with Newton. Of course Newton is generally recognized as having the priority but Leibniz was the first to put calculus in print and this first book that's on the table here right here is Leibniz's Nova Methodus which is the first time that calculus as we recognize it appeared in print and the book it's a little bit deceiving given its length this is actually only a single article it's about seven pages that appears in an academic journal called the Acta Aruditorum or Acts of the Learned and as I said it was published in 1684 in Leibniz but that's just one point I like to make when I talk about Leibniz not only was he incredibly revolutionary in his ideas and his mathematics but the 17th century was revolutionary in inventing the genre of the academic article essentially and we're all familiar with that genre now but the advantage of it is that you could publish short form scholarly discoveries relatively quickly so every month the publishers of the Acta would issue 30 pages of mathematical content scientific papers and that way science could move forward much more quickly because he was sharing new discoveries so Leibniz discovered calculus, published it first and because he published it before Newton we still use his style of notation if you've ever taken a calculus class you will recognize the symbols that he's using on the page here but more relevant this evening I want to talk about another article that Leibniz published a few decades later in 1710 and this is his brevis descriptio Machini arathmeticae or a brief description of an arithmetic machine I'm showing the illustration up here on screen now but this is the first time ever that a mechanical calculator rudimentary computer appeared in print and in the description that accompanies this illustration Leibniz is very clear his objective is to design something to build something that makes arithmetic easy, fast and reliable so this is really a milestone moment in the history of computing because before this you sort of had pen and paper I'm talking about in the west, we can talk about the abacus but that's separate from this conversation but it's a really important moment in the history of computer science and next to this article which again you can come up and see after the event we have a replica of this device Leibniz's Stepped Wreckiner famously it's the first mechanical calculator to use something called the Leibniz wheel there's a certain type of gear that Leibniz invented and it was the first calculator to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division so all four arithmetic operations Leibniz's machine was an entirely groundbreaking Blaise Pascal who is a French mathematician invented his own mechanical calculator which he called the Pascaline but that was only capable of doing addition and subtraction so Leibniz has really represented a leap forward in mechanically assisted computation so again I'm going to describe this briefly but you'll have to come up and look more closely there's an input and an output so on the front panel there are these dials where you can enter the digits you'll be calculating with, there are eight of those and then on the upper panel there are 16 windows that would display the output, the result of the calculation and what that means is that at a maximum you could multiply an eight number digit by another eight number digit for a 16 digit result so it's really phenomenal that something that's made up entirely of brass is capable of that fairly high order mathematical arithmetic so that's really all I have again one point I want to make is that special collections is open for researchers so if any of this has peaked your interest or if you want to schedule time in the collection if you're a student in the audience and have a research project that would benefit from access to some of these materials do feel free to reach out and we can correspond further Thanks Sam so for the majority of the computer's history from these early calculating machines computers of the 1950s and 1960s these were rare items they weren't available to the general public and you couldn't just go out to a store and buy one and they were complicated and expensive to run and maintain you needed to learn how to use them so hey Dave, have you ever used a punch card? Well yes and no I've never used a punch card with a computer but I have punched out musical notes on this music box I'll give you a little sample it's not too awkward for me to do this of sorts so who else here has seen or used a punch card? raise your hand or cheer yeah, alright and well for those of you who don't know the punch card allowed a user to communicate instructions to the machine just like Dave used a punch card to communicate instructions to the instrument and who better to explain this idea than Raj Reddy who came to CMU as a professor in 1969 he was part of a second wave of faculty that brought new ideas and approaches for example in 1979 Reddy co-founded the robotics institute at CMU and in the 1990s he became dean of the school of computer science Reddy traces the idea of punch cards back to the 1800s to something called the Jacquard loom and so what you did was you punched everything into cards and they had a card reader read all the things and did some computations and print out some intermediate result and then you took the intermediate result and fed it back into the computer and did the next kind so you had to kind of conceptualize saying what can you do a wig and in what order you would do it and so on that was anticipated by Babbage when he designed his mechanical machine that was all based on punch cards and he got the idea of punch cards and the weaving machine people the Jacquard loom they called it mechanical loom and the interesting thing is even at that time the viewers understood the concept of art and digital art you could kind of have bits and then out of that you can create a photograph or a picture or an image of a person or anything on a woven cloth that abstraction was lost and so when people were designing computers in the 40s the only thing they thought was to use the computer's student crunch numbers only in the early 60s and 70s people said oh we can take a photograph and scan it and make an image out of it a digital picture and then we can process it and do something the concept of processing of the image was not there but the idea you could represent an image in some abstract notion and then you could use that digital card punch cards to actually then weave it over and over again so that the same carpet or the same shawl or the same whatever would come out with the same image each time and I thought that was very interesting from a history point of view historically a history of computing Gretty points out that even in the 1800s people were already combining technology and the arts so the definition of computing and the development of computers continued to advance and at a rapid rate by the 1950s and 1960s but these were expensive machines and they needed a lot of people to run and maintain them how did Carnegie Tech get the funds to pay for it that is an excellent question and I don't know but luckily we have someone with us tonight who does Andrew would you mind explaining it's fitting that we're meeting in a business school building this evening because it wasn't physicists or mathematicians that brought the computer to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the mid 1950s it was social scientists it was scholars working on questions of business and society and when the first computer arrived in 1956 an IBM 650 it was ceremoniously plunked in the basement of the GSIA, the Graduate School of Industrial Administration the purpose of running complex logistics problems brought by a series of young ambitious faculty members who wanted to harness the power of the electronic digital computer to explore complex questions beyond the capability of mere man or graduate student employee to calculate the story of computing at CMU in the 1950s and 1960s is one of exponential growth in which ambitious faculty convinced the university president John Warner and a series of deep-pocketed local businessmen to fund the acquisition of a highly expensive IBM mainframe and then to further support the growth of a computation center that would transform the institution turning CIT from an underfunded relatively unknown regional tech institute into decades later one of the leading computer-focused research institutions in the world in the 1950s Carnegie Tech trained engineers and draftsmen and technologists for the regional market of Pittsburgh the Graduate School of Industrial Administration trained mid-level managers for local corporations in Pittsburgh then home to the third largest concentration of corporate headquarters in America by the 1980s then Carnegie Mellon University could claim to be among the big three computing institutions in the country if not the world along with MIT and Stanford this transformation was made possible by an ambitious plan to grow cross-campus computing bringing in a wide array of researchers regardless of department and share in the capacity of a campus computer this was all made possible by a surprising source of funding that many on campus today who go into computers for the business connections forget computers, as we tell ourselves in America come from garages, they come from dorm rooms they come from lone inventors working late at the night burning the candle over soldering irons and code that's not where computers come from computers come from federal board rooms in the government where money is dispersed and that's how computers came and grew at Carnegie Mellon University the first grant to make this expansion possible $400,000 grant in 1962 from the Advanced Research Projects Administration set CMU on a course to create a cross-campus computation center headed by Alan Perlus collaborating with Herb Simon and Alan Newell who had previously used computers at the Rhan Corporation in their exploration of early artificial intelligence the computer quickly became a busy hub of a transforming campus as scientists, engineers, students in the arts social scientists and other curious parties would bring their stacks of cards to be calculated to use the potential power of this computer over the years as the 50s progressed into the 60s as computer education would expand the number of courses as eventually a department of computer science would be established as eventually undergraduate degrees would be issued in computer science the university would buy or acquire more and different types of computers but the money that made this possible generally came from the federal government in the form of grants from the Advanced Research Projects Administration which wanted to pay CMU to explore the potential of computing how can we replicate in artificial form natural logic how can we push the boundaries of calculation and computation into recreating human modes of creation the federal government had deep pockets in the Cold War and was willing to fund broad exploration enabling quick growth and what made it possible what transformed Carnegie Tech from a regional institute to eventually a global powerhouse in the information society is this little document plucked from the shelves of Hunt Library the 1964 grant from Carnegie Institute of Technology to establish a center for the study of information processing submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Administration by Herb Simon, Alan Newell, Alan Perlis and then the dean of faculty later provost Edward Chats in exchange for a proposal outlining the center they were given three million dollars and a mandate to explore the potential of the computer this would drive CMU on the course of the 60s and 70s down a path where federal funding through ARPA primarily dictated the rhythms of campus life and at times as much as 65% of computing on campus especially in the department of computer science was funded by federal defense dollars money was flush, times were good the questions were big and new generations of computers came CMU 650 would give away to a variety of new models often not owned by the institution generally least paying large sums but used by increasingly large numbers of students and researchers exploring complex questions that would become the foundation of fields like artificial intelligence one thing to note as we consider the movement of computing at CMU from this initial IBM 650 through a variety of computers produced by external manufacturers including an IBM system 360 very elaborate was the culture created around computing and the cross-campus collaboration the desire to test the limits of computers and among the most compelling devices produced in pursuit of this was a student generated experiment taking two superseded older mainframe computers that had been purchased by the institution Bindex G20s produced by the defense contractor Bindex and transformed by clever CMU undergraduates into the Bindex G21 Gerry Rigg device linking to Bindex G20s was shared memory on which students could tinker they could explore new programming languages they could push the limits of processing using an older machine but not that dissimilar to the attitude that allowed students at carnival time in a normal year to gather their tools and build buggies build displays and exhibits experimenting, tinkering with the tools of computing in pursuit of an ambitious goal of understanding how humans thought and how this could be replicated through artificial means and of course what underpinned all of this for the good years of the 50s and 60s was flush government money that wouldn't last forever Thanks Andrew So speaking of the Bindex G21 let's hear from Jesse Quatsy again who actually built the Bindex I was asked by Alan Perlus one of the great men in the computer history G could you make us something bigger that we can use to support research at this place and I built the G21 which is a computer facility it took us all the way up through being called Carnegie Mellon University and through founding of the computer science department et cetera et cetera and the ARPA grant that's in perpetual perpetual them right now supporting them that's my position it's a strange one the system that I built was installed through the roof of the new scape hall they put the G21 on the top floor and therefore it had the very best view on campus which tells you something I don't know what but you know the people couldn't get at the view the computer had it it was blocking so my big influence was I don't think we could have had a computer science department and the large ARPA grants without the G21 we certainly couldn't have done it on the G20 that came here and that was because we got that one because that's all the school could afford so in 1962 old famous guy John Licklider was at the Department of Defense and he thought that computers were more than just adding machines so he won some funding major bucks for what was called Centers of Excellence and that was for computing outside of counting so all the other one the first two recipients were MIT Carnegie Tech and that was the founding money for computer science departments in the two schools I'm not sure if those are the first two computer science departments in any university anywhere but could be since nobody else got the dough so the university got the money to support these machines but that doesn't mean everything went smoothly these machines had limitations and the process of using them was at times frustrating we didn't have computers except for in escape hall so you would go there and actually type the cards yourself into a punch machine and then you would assemble them and don't dare get one card out of place and submit it to the computer center to run through the computer which is a huge room and you'd wait a couple days and go back and it was clear on the other side of campus from Warwick Gardens, from the dormitory and you'd walk over there to see if your computer job was even done and if it was done, whether it ran and sometimes it was just a comma out of place and you had to resubmit the whole thing and so that's how we operated That was Peg Calder again and one of the themes that comes up in a number of the oral history interviews that we've conducted is that you can't get one card out of place Maggie is drawing the... We're writing this faster Maggie's writing this faster, she can and she's drawing the Bendex G20 with Peg's quote that you can't get one card out of place so when you made a mistake it wasn't as easy as hitting a delete key basically you had to, and you're welcome in advance to roll with the punch cards Thank you, thank you But punch cards weren't the only essential tool during this period No, they were not Back then they used a tool to do tedious calculations quickly They didn't have electronic calculators so they used something else Now Sam has a slide roll Now you might guess that slide rolls aren't normally this big they usually fit in a shirt pocket about the size of a ruler but this is a special event and we needed a special slide roll Mary Shaw, the Allen J. Perlis university professor of computer science donated this particular slide roll to the university libraries a few years ago Now hold on Dave how does this factor into our story feels like a little bit of an aside if I'm honest I mean sure, but in my humble opinion the first witness was the highlight of this show and we do have a point slide rolls are analog computers and yes you can actually still find them on ebay today maybe not seven feet long but you can still find them and they were vitally important for this generation but they would start to become obsolete in the coming years Thanks so much Sam By this time at CMU there was a lot of new energy surrounding computing The focus on doing big audacious things big hairy audacious things as the phrase goes in our field of not being satisfied of just doing something incremental but of just revolutionizing things So things seem to be going well the idea of a shared memory multiprocessor was in the works computers were getting a bit smaller the department was starting a distinguished lecture series that brought in new ideas and researchers from all over the world but then things hit a glitch First Alan Perlus left for Yale University in 1971 which was a major blow to the computer science department and then this headline was published This is a copy of a newspaper article from 1972 October The headline is 40 Staffers Lopped by CMU Economy Acts The first paragraph is plagued with the same financial problems as colleges everywhere Carnegie Mellon University has eliminated $300,000 in salaries by firing one of every ten employees in its operations division To carry out the dismissals President Syurt appointed Ronald M Rutledge who was at the time director of CMU's Computation Center appointed him as chief of operations essentially bypassing the vice president for business affairs Rutledge had previously won praise for cutting the computation center budget from 2.5 million to 1.5 million slashing the staff from 87 to 30 sharply boosting its output and effectiveness so that affected me not seriously personally I mean a lot of people lost their jobs of course Ron fired all the operators so all of us programmers had to take one or more shifts during the week to fill in for the operators to do what they did That is Elbin Varria, a former student who went on to play a big role in the computation center at CMU The center housed the computers at the university back when computers took up a lot of space and they needed a lot of staff This was a hard time for the department for the students and for the city in general That's right This was the same time that Pittsburgh's steel industry basically its economic engine was in decline I mean you've all probably heard of the old days in Pittsburgh when folks would take two shirts to work because the pollution was so bad Pittsburgh in the 1970s was not a congenial place to be I want to put this as accurately as possible The steel industry was closing Everybody didn't know that Most people thought this is just a hiccup Steel will come back to what it once was Pittsburgh will come back to what it once was and everything will be fine This is Pamela McCordic who spent time in Pittsburgh in the 1970s and during this time she researched artificial intelligence for her book Machines Who Think Hashtag shameless plug There's a whole episode with Pamela on our podcast which you can listen to if you want to hear more about her story Well that was not going to be and those people with vision here and I include the then president of Carnegie Mellon Richard Seyert, Herb Simon a handful of other people said we're going to do something different in Pittsburgh we're going to green Pittsburgh and in 1972-73 this was a radical idea very radical Meanwhile you could go through find places in Pittsburgh and find slag heaps in the middle of the road on vacant lots because nobody thought they were worth removing The warehouses which are now full of high tech they were left to rust because nobody thought it was worth tearing them down It was, as I say, not a continual place and the promise of greening seemed to me to be so far away I just didn't think I wanted to spend my life here Oh that's so Pittsburgh My house is even built on a slag heap But you know that's interesting to think about that the computer science community here at CMU had some role in greening Pittsburgh So a few years later, by the mid-1970s things were looking up new faculty and students were rebuilding the departments and new technologies meant they had the freedom to try new things Actually I was one of the first people to get on the internet and I could at night be talking to somebody in California using this teletype and they would respond back and Paul recently found a map of the internet about the time that we were there and it had 25 nodes in the whole world like you could talk to Germany or other places but that's the entire worldwide web was on only about 25 places That is Nancy Newberry who worked as a night operator in the computer science department engineering lab She was one of the lucky few to play games on the early internet And so what would you do to keep yourself up at night? Well they had these games and one of the games was something called adventure and so for a month or two everybody who was attached on the worldwide web somebody had written this word program about a little guy who was wandering through a cave picking up things and it sounds so stupid now but then it was just amazing you'd find an axe or you would find a little vial or you would see a little stream coming down and all of this was in words and all in your imagination and then everybody's trying to crack the same code at the same time and you're talking to the person in California saying both did you get the axe in the room where there were twisty little passages all different ones with twisty little passages all the same and then there was another computer program something called Eliza and somebody had created a program where this was as if you were talking to a psychiatrist and you would say type something into the teletype and it would come back and it knew how to pick out the keywords and ask you more about that As the department continued to stabilize the unique and quirky culture that computer science at CMU is now known for starts to emerge Hey Dave, I wonder if now might be a good time to talk about the cheese co-op Cheese co-op? Yes, a cheese co-op Let's hear from Clem Cole, a CMU alum and self-described old-school hacker open sorcerer and industry grey beard The whole concept is we want you to be free thinkers and to think outside the box So what are they going to do? They're going to say how do we get something we like we like cheese with beard wine and whatever How can we get something at a substantially reduced rate so we can shepherd our monies you know whatever and that's where it came out of and you got to understand Pittsburgh had the strip district The whole Pomani brothers in those days Pomani brothers opened at midnight and it ran from midnight to 10 in the morning and it was in the strip district and it was there to feed the people that worked the strip district Well of course computer scientists were up at night we want something to eat not that many places are open so we discovered Pomani's it all came out of that learning if they went down to the strip district they could buy wholesale cheese they could buy certain things that are a lot cheaper and if you've got enough people to buy into that then you could buy a whole wheel of cherries and cut it in 10 pieces and instead of paying the retail rate the big burn it would be a tenth the price of what it would cost and guess what we could get better stuff we could get more more interesting things and that's all how that happened I actually just finished an interview with computer scientist Joe Newcomer and Newcomer mentioned that the cheese co-op had software on I believe a PDP10 computer that allowed them to organize estimated cheese prices and weights of cheese so you would pay for a certain amount of cheese but when the cheese wheels were actually picked up the size might be a little different so the amount of cheese you received could vary and it doesn't stop with cheese there was also a coke machine the coke machine that Maggie is currently sketching the very same machine that is quite famous because it was hooked up to the internet starting the internet of things that's the one and it's good Maggie is sketching it out because we actually don't have any confirmed pictures of it in the university archives so if you happen to have a picture or other documentation of it let us know okay so let's hear from Clem Cool again Coca-Cola absolutely tastes better than glass bottles there's no doubt about it but it was expensive well somebody managed to get a late 60s old fashioned coke machine that distributed glass bottles and then what they did is they were able to get wholesale 10 oz glass coques that fit in the machine you had a choice it was Coca-Cola, Coke Coke, Coke, Coca-Cola or Coca-Cola was 25 cents for a 10 oz coke which was just a miraculous price going over to Scebo or whatever probably would have been 50 to 60, 2 to 3 times that so of course you got people that know a little bit about electronics and you got a lot of computer power and sooner or later somebody says well you know how do you tell when the last time that thing's been filled and so pretty soon thermal couples end up in each of the columns of the coke machine and before long a program shows up coke stat so you could find out what the temperature of any one column was how many bottles were inside of it and it was it became a cult and of course there's been lots and lots of things written about it and it's a very famous piece of the internet by the original CMU coke machine and it was literally just a bunch of people trying to save money so by this time the computer science department had momentum in a culture that was definitely uniquely their own they were figuring out how to work together too and they developed something called the reasonable person principle which was as you know Dave still around today so let's hear from Sherry Nichols a student in computer science in the 1980s it was friendly, it was informal very accepting I mean you know you didn't call the professors doctor so and so you called them by their first name there was an assumption that if you were here you were good you didn't have to prove yourself explicitly operated by something called the reasonable person principle which is you assume you're a reasonable person until you prove otherwise Kate I'm actually kind of curious what they meant by reasonable well let's hear from Dan Swarick a long time professor in computer science at CMU who tells us a bit more Alan Perlis who was the department chair in computer science at the time I was hired in June in 71 had left for Yale by that fall and but he's credited bringing what was called the reasonable person principle to CMU and the idea that I'll tell you my interpretation but most people have slightly different variations on it but I think it's one of the reasons that CMU is so nimble and able to react very quickly the idea is the way I paraphrase it is if people have the same information they're likely to make the same decision so I can trust them because they're looking out for the general good of everybody as opposed to just themselves and so we can make decisions without having to worry about not being backed up if we're sort of doing what's reasonable and then we don't have to go through layers of bureaucracy to get things done now by the 1980s so much was happening and the definition of computer science was still expanding new departments and institutes were popping up and the number of faculty and staff related to computer science also increased by 1980 there were 64 computer science faculty and visiting professors at the university that's up from just 15 in 1966 so let's hear from Manuel of Aloso a professor emeritus and alum of the school of computer science it was really an amazing place to be you have to understand that in those days all exciting things you turned left there were exciting things you turned right there were exciting things it was not dull the place it was extremely alive it was everything chess wearable computers operating systems word processors wifi architectures it was everywhere there was like excitement and everywhere there was almost everything something new every day so you were always like surrounded by discoveries, by novelty as Manuel says everywhere you looked it was exciting and dynamic but this kind of makes it hard to get a handle on what was going on during that time there was so much of it and it was changing so rapidly Andrew can you provide us a little more context for this transition from the 1970s into the 1980s computing would undergo a dramatic transformation in the 1970s and 1980s on the small campus bound by Flagstaff Hill in Forms Avenue but from a period of disarray and faculty defect in the late 1960s and 1970s the department of computer science would rebuild a core of star faculty who would vowed to remain in Pittsburgh and explore the possibilities of research questions that pushed the boundaries of artificial intelligence logic and the capabilities of software code with the arrival of new faculty and increased prominence of those star researchers who remained the scope of computing at CMU would grow beyond the chalkboards of the computer science department new related institutes and centers would pop up around campus showing the ways in which computing continued to permeate the fabric of what CMU was increasingly CMU was a place defined by its relationship to the computer you go to CMU to do things connected to computing if you're a computer scientist if you're an electrical engineer if you're a data scientist but also if you're a dance choreographer or a neuroscientist or a behavioral psychologist or an English literature scholar interested in digital humanities the spirit of the computer permeated the sense of the campus creating this reputation of a computer you and among these institutions that in the 70s and the 80s would help further CMU's national reputation and push it into new and more expansive areas of computing we have the robotics institute founded in 1979 manifesting in physical form of rolling, whirring, automatons the cutting edge investigations into artificial intelligence into the boundaries of computing 1984 CMU would become host to the software engineering institute a sort of jet propulsion laboratory for code a federally funded research center that anchored a new era of collaborative project based research that distinguished CMU in this period from the earlier largest of the government open exploration world government money is tighter in the 1970s and the 1980s in the wake of belt tightening of the federal government in the wake of rapidly changing views of the defense industry post Vietnam in the wake of decisions by DARPA the successor to DARPA to pivot funding to specific projects rather than open-ended exploration Carnegie Mellon and its researchers would embrace more applied methodologies more partnerships based on the patronage of private corporations other institutions and specific project driven research in partnership with the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and our cross bridge neighbor the University of Pittsburgh CMU would establish in 1986 the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center the department of computer science becoming so prominent would lead to it seeking new status within the larger institution free-floating for a couple of years and then a self-sanding school divorced from the Mellon College of Science now its own entity in many ways the public face of the university by the close of 1980s CMU's reputation as computer U would be based in part on the expectation that its students would encounter the computer in nearly every aspect of daily life nowhere was this more prominent than in a project driven external partnership funded program that would brand CMU as an innovator in 1980s computing the Andrew project named after university namesake benefactors Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon would see a distributed network of personal computers spread around campus in labs, in classrooms, in faculty offices in dorm rooms linking students to a wired network anywhere they were on campus the university wanted to experiment with what interlinking a campus might do for research and student life it also wanted to make a little bit of money on the side by licensing this model to other institutions and becoming a pioneer in the first truly wired campus its corporate partner in this endeavor IBM and for many years the Andrew system still remaining in the email addresses assigned to CMU affiliates would define the ambitions the scope and the ability of the campus to pivot as the broader digital world changed because the 1970s and 1980s saw a decentralization of computing they saw computers growing cheaper, faster the move from mainframes to many computers to micro computers to personal computers and as computers spread become more accessible as students encounter them at home on kitchen tables in their dorm rooms in addition to the labs as computers move from the world of punch cards to the world of visual graphical interfaces computers are more accessible and CMU comes a place where people train for what now seems to be an avidled digital future but also come with the optimistic goal of helping shape that future this is the place where in the 1980s the Wild West closes a little bit but now it's the place with those who have desire to shape the future can direct the technology in very ambitious and optimistic ways well thanks so much Andrew so let's look at some numbers which were published in the Tartan student newspaper in 1986 in 1981 CMU had 131 computers then in 1986 the university had 4,510 computers that's a 3,400% increase in just 5 years now think back to 1960 when the school was in the lower single digits for computers owned this influx of computers can in part be attributed to a drop in price in 1986 an IBM XT sold for $3,070 which is $7,300 if you ingest for inflation that's dramatically lower than the million-dollar computers of the 1960s all in all computers were more widely available there was also this growing interest in using computers to help people connect so let's hear from James Morris a professor emeritus in computer science at CMU in like January of 1983 I read a book called Dream Machines or something and it was a book about hypertext it was a book by a guy named Ted somebody or other the book and question is Computer Lib Dream Machines which you can see here it's by Ted Nelson and it's actually quite funny three weeks before I did the interview with Morris a friend lent me this book and it's actually two books in one with two different covers and it's a really wild book I highly recommend it the whole notion by computers all in a social revolutionary mood at the time I mean technologists were saying technology is going to set us free from whatever horrible mess we thought we were in at the time especially people like Engelbart were total idealists about making computers support human collaboration and the world will get better because we have this computer communication tools and so it was quite sort of idealistic in the 1980s Morris and his colleagues had this idea to enhance communication across campus and over the next decade as Andrew mentioned earlier they developed a computing environment called the Andrew project which as he said was named for Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon you may not have heard about the Andrew project before but you may have seen remnants of it so if you look at your Andrew IDs that's why all of our email addresses have the domain Andrew.cmu.edu if you know differently please let us know we love learning about this history anyway I said well the Andrew project is going to be something like that and I actually wrote a little essay about computer communication in the world of the future it was called communication through time and space and we were going to build this system which was going to enhance the community and communication within the community it wasn't just about computing a bunch of stuff or proving that computers are smarter than people or all the other fantasies that computer people have it was going to be transformative to the community I thought. Now the Andrew project lasted quite a while seven years or so there were a lot of decisions made in that time but one of the most important realizations that came from the project was the idea that the network was the key concept not necessarily the hardware oh there was all this crisis about what kind of workstation it was a continuing crisis and I went to Alan Newell and said I was going crazy with this competition among the different kinds of workstations and this and that but Newell said the thing that matters is the network he said forget about the device make sure that you build the infrastructure the network and the file system or whatever is on top of the network that's the most important thing the device doesn't matter which was totally right because if you look at it now our devices are wristwatches and phones and everything the devices change all the time the network was the most important thing remember this is the same Alan Newell who was one of the big three of the original computer science department and it's fascinating to see what these folks predicted things like the idea of these networks communication tools and file sharing were they right about everything? not necessarily but they predicted a lot of what was to follow okay back to Jim it was original model for a giant file system long before the internet had that idea so we had sort of a campus wide computer network which was a huge community of people using a computer having a lot of fun with it sort of long before anybody else in it it was a big deal so Carnegie Mellon developed a reputation of being the place that had the most wonderful computer system so by the 1980s the wild west of computing was ending and in 1988 the university founded the school of computer science it was no longer a single department in a 1967 article in science magazine Alan Perlus, Herb Simon, Alan Newell had asked the question is there such a thing as computer science and if there is what is it? we found that computer science continually reinvents its definition what is new today is commonplace tomorrow and these are people taking one step after another and then looking back over 30 or 40 years it all adds up to an impressive legacy to quote Perlus, Simon and Newell there are computers ergo computer science is the study of computers thank you for listening to Cut Pathways and also thank you to the Weible Foundation for sponsoring the Aurohistory Program along with our other generous donors if you want to find out more about these topics listen to season 2 of our podcast and also keep a look out for the activities of the robotics project the university archives and the university libraries and if you're interested in seeing any of the materials we showed today contact the university archives thanks again to everybody watching at home and everyone here in the Simmons Auditorium we hope you weren't too motherboard and we'll see P.U. next time thank you for that wait wait wait before we go I want to thank everyone who made this event possible a big thank you to our band tonight how things are made and their terrific music artist Maggie and her amazing illustrations I mean look at those she brought the Coke machine to life again our guests Sam Lemley and Andrew Mead McGee for helping us to tell this incredible story my co-host Dave for his incredible multitasking tonight I also want to thank our wonderful events team and our colleagues who volunteered their time to help us out this evening and of course thank you to all of the Aurohistory participants for sharing their remarkable stories with us so that we can share them with all of you thank you for listening to Cut Pathways have a great night everyone