I think many of these claims as "MIT's contribution to transform Computer Science" is unjustified. Particularly, wasn't Bob Kahn already out of MIT when Vint Cerf and him created TCP/IP? What was MIT's role here? Just that they paid salary to Bob Kahn in the distant past?<p>On the other hand, when I think of MIT, the most important contribution to Computer Science that comes to my mind is Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch's proof to Brewer's Conjecture, famously called CAP theorem. This proof is so profound, so important to Computer Science and the way we build large-scale computer systems today. And d'uh, it has been left out.<p>This looks like pure marketing to me. And in some sense misleading.
The World Wide Web was INVENTED at CERN in Europe, I thought.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web</a><p>After that Tim Berners-Lee went to the MIT and founded the W3C.
Most of this work is publicly funded. They whole VC industry is built on it. It should return more of its profits to the public, just as it would to early-stage investors.
my favorite is the GUI. While many credit XEROX with the GUI, most of the ideas came out of the quite amazing Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland. As an MIT student, this list makes awesome reading!<p>Here is the relevant snippet:<p>Nearly 50 years before the iPad, an MIT PhD student had already come up with the idea of directly interfacing with a computer screen. Ivan Sutherland’s “Sketchpad” allowed users to draw geometric shapes with a touch-pen, pioneering the practice of “computer-assisted drafting” that has proven vital for architects, planners, and now even toddlers.
"50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science"<p>This is really misleading and makes MIT look bad. It's just spin.<p>MIT has done plenty of great work; there is no need to try to take credit for things that they really can't lay claim to.<p>Many examples elsewhere in the comments, but I'll throw in that Ethernet was not invented at MIT. I know the main title now says "MIT-related", but the article is not so modest.
#24 caught my attention with the poem/song about the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE_AbM8ZykI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE_AbM8ZykI</a><p>Somewhere in between music school and programming for a living, I had the superficially nonsensical epiphany that algorithms and data structures were essentially music... just another language for expressing ideas about combinations and time. It's interesting to see this other perspective... an algorithm expressed as a song for the purpose of clearly communicating how it works.<p>The interview with Radia Perlman is a good read too:
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-perlman-dont-call-me-the-mother-of-the-internet/284146/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-...</a>
The title should be "50 ways that MIT has transformed computer industry".
Not too much are about "computer science".
To say that MIT has transformed computer industry, it should include include someone like Leslie Lamport.
Dan may not be happy - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin</a>
Is there a school that's done more for computer science than MIT? I can think of a few contenders - and obviously this is largely subjective - but when I think computer science in the U.S. I think MIT, Stanford and Cal-Poly in that order.
It's interesting that they include the FSF, Internet Archive, Creative Commons, and Open Courseware among their "computer science" contributions. These are more political than scientific, although some of them did end up contributing massively to the development of computer science.<p>Now let's talk about some ways in which MIT <i>hindered</i> the development of computer science, including political hindrances.<p>1. Complicity in the persecution of Aaron Swartz (2011)<p>2. Anyone else?