[ih] Historical Tracing from Concept to Reality over 5 decades?

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

hopefully "the evolution of technical ideas from concept to widespread use"
can include a "notion" of yours truly recalls Bob Kahn spoke about at a
conference presentation sometime in the 70's (or perhaps early 80's) on the
ARPANET:

Bob Kahn said something along the lines that email on the ARPANET was
something that was not planned but kinda "evolved" by "accident" -- i.e.
was not something that was a part of the conception/technical idea in the
inception/purpose of the creation/need for the ARPANET.

the creation of ARPANET kinda, thus, became/was an agar laden petri dish
that "grew" a "culture" of/for which things -- such as email -- evolved in
the result of which was email sprouting into widespread use...

geoff

On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 8:51 AM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> For a while now, I've been curious about how ideas progress from
> brainstorm to
> reality, and the recent mention of Licklider's vision reminded me.  So a
> question for the historians out there -- has anyone traced an
> Internet-related
> idea from concept decades ago to reality today?
>
> There's a specific idea that I have in mind.  Back in the early 70s,
> Licklider
> ("Lick") was my thesis advisor and later boss of the group where I worked
> at
> MIT.  Lick had a vision of "verbs" and "nouns", roughly meaning
> subroutines and
> data structures, that could be used to put together "sentences,
> paragraphs, and
> documents", meaning computer subroutine libraries and programs.  These
> "documents" would interact with each other across the "intergalactic
> computer
> network".
>
> Having been brainwashed by Lick, I'm admittedly biased, but that sure
> sounds
> pretty close to what we have today, 50 years later.
>
> Back in the 70s, part of Lick's vision was also that you could write
> libraries
> of subroutines to create a dictionary of "verbs" and standardized data
> structures , or "nouns", and through some magic (APIs) plug them
> together into
> sentences, aka programs, to do useful work.
>
> Our group spent a lot of time, as part of an ARPA effort called "Automatic
> Programming", to build such a system, called "CALICO" (which stood for
> something
> but I can't remember what). The "dictionary" of pieces was well-documented
> (eeerr, uuhm, sorta kinda - we weren't big on documentation) and in a
> searchable
> database for use by subsequent programmers.
>
> But the technology of the era dictated using PDP-10 assembly language,
> text-only
> terminals, and the now appallingly slow ARPANET.   None of this was
> especially
> portable and has long since disappeared.
>
> Fast forward to 2020.  I recently stumbled across a technology called
> NodeRed,
> somehow associated with IBM, which provides a "palette" of components
> which do
> interesting things -- i.e., the "verbs" and "nouns" in Lick's
> terminology.  The
> programming environment is a blank screen, onto which you drag the
> pieces you
> need, and then "wire" them together to create functional programming.   You
> create your program by literally drawing a picture.  The Internet
> provides the
> necessary communications substrate on which all these actors perform.
> People
> can readily create new "verbs" and submit them to the library.
>
> IMHO, Lick would have loved this.
>
> I've been using NodeRed to create some simple home automation programs,
> e.g.,
> stuff like turning on lights when motion sensors trigger.   Or send me
> email
> when something unusual is detected.  Or almost anything else you can
> think of.
> It really is very simple to use.  I can see the parallels between Lick's
> 70s
> vision and today's actual implementations.   Instead of a PDP-10 and
> ARPANET,
> today I just use a Raspberry Pi and Wifi.
>
> So, my curiosity is how the world got from point A to point B.  There
> were lots
> of people who encountered Lick over the years, e.g., at MIT, ARPA,
> etc.   There
> were lots of students who passed through Lick's group on their way to
> careers.
> Did Lick's vision travel with some of them and influence the appearance of
> NodeRed 50 years later?   Or was it some totally different evolution from
> someone's else's similar vision?
>
> Do Internet Historians perform these kinds of "genealogy" traces of the
> evolution of technical ideas from concept to widespread use?   How did
> something
> like NodeRed come from vision to reality?
>
> /Jack Haverty (MIT LCS 1969-1977)
>
>
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True