Re: E-mail, timesharing, and social computing: the beginnings

["N.N. Thayer" <nnthayer@hotmail.com>]

Also, don't miss the footnotes - they're full of shiny gems like:

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Marvin Minsky, one of the early members of Project MAC and director of
its AI group, provides an account of an early meeting about time-
sharing at IBM. IBM was committed to batch processing. It was part of
their business model. "In fact, we went to visit IBM about using a
computer with multiple terminals. And the research director at IBM
thought that was a really bad idea. We explained the idea, which is
that each time somebody presses a key on a terminal it would interrupt
the program that the computer was running and jump over to switch over
to the program that was not running for this particular person. And if
you had 10 people typing on these terminals at five or 10 characters a
second that would mean the poor computer was being interrupted 100
times per second to switch programs. And this research director said,
'Well why would you want to do that?' We would say, 'Well it takes six
months to develop a program because you run a batch and then it
doesn't work. And you get the results back and you see it stopped at
instruction 94. And you figure out why. And then you punch a new deck
of cards and put it in and the next day you try again. Whereas with
time-sharing you could correct it - you could change this instruction
right now and try it again. And so in one day you could do 50 of these
instead of 100 days.' And he said, 'Well that's terrible. Why don't
people just think more carefully and write the program so they're not
full of bugs?'"

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That reminds me of how Steve Ballmer recounts in "Triumph of the
Nerds" that IBM wanted to pay Microsoft according to how many KLOCs
(thousand lines of code) they did for a given product. "And we kept
trying to convince them: if a developer's got a good idea, and he can
get something done in 4 KLOCs, instead of 20 KLOCs, should we make
LESS money?"