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Oral History of Ed Fredkin (2006) [pdf]

17 pointsby wallfloweralmost 2 years ago

1 comment

gwernalmost 2 years ago
A decent oral history (the Computer History Museum did a lot of them, a pity they seem to have died with Paul Allen). Doesn&#x27;t seem to have been followed up as the ending promises, so it winds up omitting almost all of his academic &amp; physics-related life, which is a pity. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;doc&#x2F;cs&#x2F;2016-hagar.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;doc&#x2F;cs&#x2F;2016-hagar.pdf</a> for more.<p>Highlights: he blew stuff up as a kid; discovering social engineering as a kid of the look-like-you-belong-and-they&#x27;ll-just-let-you-in sort; flew Piper Cubs so high saliva boiled and ran zero-g experiments for fun, using a floating eraser head to check he had true zero-g; Air Force radar pranks and the general idiocy of the military; getting into computing through SAGE; inventing drum memory and helping with time-sharing OSes; hyperoptimizing his tools like an assembler which could run in &#x27;1 pass&#x27; while using near-zero memory because you finished the program by running it through the card punch <i>backwards</i>; and taking credit for killing IBM&#x27;s Future Systems <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_Future_Systems_project" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IBM_Future_Systems_project</a> <i>and</i> Russia&#x27;s Rayvka.