注：机翻，未校。
A Science Is Born: The “yeasty times” when computer research grew at Harvard
by Harry R. Lewis
September-October 2020
Illustration by Mark Steele
Thirty veterans of Harvard’s Aiken Computation Lab reunited on January 19*,* 2020, some 50 years after each of us had a role in creating today’s networked, information-rich, artificially intelligent world. Rip van Winkles who had never fallen asleep, we gathered to make sense of what had evolved from our experience as undergraduates and Ph.D. candidates during the decade 1966-1975. One thing was clear: we hadn’t understood how the work we were doing would change the world.
2020 年 1 月 19 日，哈佛大学 Aiken 计算实验室的 30 名退伍军人重聚，大约50年前，我们每个人都在创造当今网络化、信息丰富、人工智能的世界方面发挥了作用。Rip van Winkles 从未睡着，我们聚集在一起，以了解我们在 1966 年至 1975 年的十年间作为本科生和博士生的经历发生了什么变化。有一点很清楚：我们不明白我们所做的工作将如何改变世界。
Harvard didn’t even call what we were doing computer science; our degrees are mostly in applied mathematics, mathematics, or physics. The University remained blind to the future of computing for a long time. I joined the faculty in 1974, right after completing my graduate work. Four years later, as a still-junior faculty member, I tried to get my colleagues in DEAP (the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, now SEAS, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) to create an undergraduate computer-science degree. A senior mechanical engineer of forbidding mien snorted surely not: Harvard had never offered a degree in automotive science, why would we create one in computer science? I waited until I had tenure before trying again (and succeeding) in 1982.
哈佛甚至没有把我们所做的称为计算机科学;我们的学位主要是应用数学、数学或物理学。长期以来，该大学对计算机的未来视而不见。我于 1974 年在完成研究生工作后加入该学院。四年后，作为一名仍然很年轻的教职员工，我试图让我在 DEAP（工程与应用物理学部，现为 SEAS，工程与应用科学学院）的同事创建一个本科计算机科学学位。一个令人生畏的高级机械工程师肯定不会：哈佛从来没有提供过汽车科学学位，我们为什么要设立计算机科学学位呢？我一直等到我有终身教职后，才在 1982 年再次尝试（并成功）。
But there we were, in our teens and twenties in the Aiken lab, laying some of the foundation stones on which the field has been erected.
但是，我们就在那里，十几岁和二十几岁的时候，在 Aiken 实验室里，为建立这个领域的一些奠基石奠定了基础。
No information infrastructure has been more consequential than the internet—arguably the most important information technology since Gutenberg made movable type practical. And Harvard fingerprints are on the internet’s embryo. As with so many critical advances, the circumstances were somewhat accidental.
没有哪个信息基础设施比互联网更重要了 — 可以说是自古腾堡使活字印刷成为现实以来最重要的信息技术。哈佛的指纹就在互联网的胚胎中。与许多关键进展一样，情况在某种程度上是偶然的。
Notwithstanding the pioneering work of professor of applied mathematics Howard Aiken in the 1930s on the Mark I, his massive electromechanical calculator, by 1960 Harvard was not a place to study circuitry or computer design. The action in hardware had moved, first to Penn and then to bigger engineering schools and industrial organizations. (For more on Aiken, see the review, “Computing’s Cranky Pioneer,” May-June 1999, page 25.)
尽管应用数学教授霍华德·艾肯 （Howard Aiken） 在 1930 年代对他的大型机电计算器 Mark I 进行了开创性的工作，但到 1960 年，哈佛已经不是研究电路或计算机设计的地方了。硬件领域的行动已经转移到宾夕法尼亚大学，然后是更大的工程学院和工业组织。
So when Ben Barker studied hardware design as a Harvard sophomore, his instructor was a part-time adjunct faculty member named Severo Ornstein. Ornstein was an engineer at the Cambridge firm of Bolt Beranek and Newman (which had been co-founded by Leo Beranek, Ph.D. ’40). BBN won a contract from ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense) to design the first Interface Message Processor. The IMP (which Ted Kennedy once hilariously mischaracterized as an Interfaith Message Processor) was the electronic switching device that would glue heterogeneous host computers together to form the ARPAnet. Ornstein became the hardware engineering lead and brought his Harvard students (and College radio station WHRB engineers) Barker and Marty Thrope onto the team (see the photo below).
因此，当 Ben Barker 在哈佛大学二年级学习硬件设计时，他的导师是一位名叫 Severo Ornstein 的兼职教员。Ornstein 是剑桥 Bolt Beranek 和 Newman 公司（由 Leo Beranek 博士 '40 共同创立）的工程师。BBN 赢得了 ARPA（国防部高级研究计划局）的合同，设计了第一个接口消息处理器。IMP（泰德·肯尼迪 （Ted Kennedy） 曾滑稽地将其误认为是跨信仰消息处理器）是一种电子交换设备，它将异构主机粘合在一起以形成 ARPAnet。Ornstein 成为硬件工程负责人，并将他的哈佛学生（和大学广播电台 WHRB 工程师）Barker 和 Marty Thrope 带入团队（见下图）。
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The Interface Message Processor team at BBN in 1969 (from left to right): Jim Geisman, Dave Walden, and Will Crowther crouch in the center; surrounding them are Truett Thach, Bill Bartel, Frank Heart, Ben Barker, Marty Thrope, Severo Ornstein, and Bob Kahn. (One key member of the team, Bernie Cosell, missed the photograph.)Photograph coutesy of Frank Heart
The IMP project was interesting work, but no one thought they were changing the world. Ornstein remembers that when the Request for Proposals for designing the IMP and building the first part of the ARPAnet first arrived on the project manager’s desk, “He handed it to me and said, ‘Take this home and read it and let me know what you think.’ I did so, and next morning I put it back on his desk, saying, `Looks like a straightforward engineering job; we could certainly do it, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want such a thing.’” High up the chain of command there was a vision—in 1963, while he was head of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, former Harvard research fellow J.C.R. Licklider had grandly touted the idea of an “Intergalactic Computer Network.” But the most obvious actual utility of the first IMPs was to enable a printer attached to one computer to print a document from another.
IMP 项目是一项有趣的工作，但没有人认为它们正在改变世界。Ornstein 记得，当设计 IMP 和构建 ARPAnet 第一部分的征求建议书第一次送到项目经理的办公桌上时，“他把它递给我说，'把这个带回家读一读，让我知道你的想法。我照做了，第二天早上我把它放回他的桌子上，说，'看起来是一份简单的工程工作;我们当然可以做到，但我无法想象为什么有人会想要这样的事情。在指挥链的上层有一个愿景——1963 年，当他担任 ARPA 信息处理技术办公室的负责人时，前哈佛研究员 J.C.R. Licklider 大肆吹捧“星际计算机网络”的想法。但第一批 IMP 最明显的实际用途是使连接到一台计算机的打印机能够从另一台计算机打印文档。
While working for BBN during his Harvard graduate studies, Barker installed the first IMP at UCLA in September 1969. Thrope, employed full time at BBN after finishing his undergraduate degree, installed the second IMP a month later at SRI (originally the Stanford Research Institute, in Menlo Park). On October 6 Barker sent the first message to Thrope across the network, which at that point consisted of nothing but those two IMPs. From two nodes the internet has grown to tens of billions of computers.
1969 年 9 月，Barker 在哈佛研究生学习期间为 BBN 工作，在加州大学洛杉矶分校安装了第一个 IMP。Thrope 在完成本科学位后在 BBN 全职工作，一个月后在 SRI（原斯坦福研究所，位于门洛帕克）安装了第二个 IMP。10 月 6 日，Barker 通过网络向 Thrope 发送了第一条消息，当时该网络只由这两个 IMP 组成。互联网已经从两个节点发展到数百亿台计算机。
Barker does not remember what his message said. The fact that it arrived was miracle enough.
巴克不记得他的信息说了什么。它到来的事实已经足够奇迹了。
“Those were yeasty times,” one of our group said. Big things grew quickly out of next to nothing and shape-shifted in reaction to their environment. John McQuillan ’70, Ph.D. ’74, wrote an important dissertation laying out the way the ARPAnet could, without any central control, figure out which parts of itself were broken and route data so neither sender nor recipient would notice the failures in between. Some at ARPA viewed the internet’s capacity to survive failures as a central feature, because that promised to harden the network against nuclear attack. Others looked at the network and had other ideas.
“那是酵母时代，”我们小组的一位成员说。大东西很快就从无到有地生长出来，并根据环境发生了变形。John McQuillan '70， Ph.D. '74 写了一篇重要的论文，阐述了 ARPAnet 如何在没有任何中央控制的情况下，找出自身的哪些部分被破坏并路由数据，这样发送者和接收者都不会注意到两者之间的故障。ARPA 的一些人将互联网在故障中生存的能力视为一个核心特征，因为这有望加强网络对核攻击的防御能力。其他人查看了网络并提出了其他想法。
Bob Metcalfe started graduate school at Harvard in 1969 after earning undergraduate degrees in engineering and business at MIT. When Harvard got its ARPAnet node in 1971, Metcalfe wanted to manage it. Harvard rebuffed him: that was a job for a professional, not a grad student. So Metcalfe talked his way into managing MIT’s node instead, and thereafter was seen only rarely around Harvard. Then one day in 1972 shocked whispers raced through Aiken: Metcalfe had failed his Ph.D. defense. Nobody ever fails their Ph.D. defense; it’s a symbolic and celebratory occasion, with champagne chilling outside the examination room. But somehow Metcalfe had fallen so far out of touch with his faculty committee that they walked into that room with different expectations. Metcalfe had already accepted a job at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he moved while changing dissertation advisers. Almost simultaneously with successfully defending his revised thesis, he and a co-author at PARC published the design of the Ethernet, the networking protocol that provided connectivity to computers scattered around a building at a fraction of the cost of the IMPs that connected large systems located hundreds of miles apart. Metcalfe left Xerox in 1979 and founded 3Com to commercialize Ethernet, which became ubiquitous. (Now a professor in both the engineering and business schools at the University of Texas, he is a writer, mentor, and visionary on technology.)
鲍勃·梅特卡夫 （Bob Metcalfe） 在麻省理工学院获得工程和商业本科学位后，于 1969 年开始在哈佛大学攻读研究生。当哈佛大学在 1971 年获得 ARPAnet 节点时，Metcalfe 希望对其进行管理。哈佛拒绝了他：那是专业人士的工作，不是研究生的工作。因此，Metcalfe 通过自己的方式来管理 MIT 的节点，此后在哈佛大学很少出现。然后，1972 年的一天，令人震惊的耳语传遍了艾肯：梅特卡夫的博士答辩失败了。没有人在他们的博士答辩中失败;这是一个具有象征意义和庆祝性的场合，考场外的香槟令人放松。但不知何故，梅特卡夫与他的教师委员会脱节了，以至于他们带着不同的期望走进了那个房间。梅特卡夫已经接受了施乐公司帕洛阿尔托研究中心 （PARC） 的一份工作，他在更换论文顾问时搬到了那里。几乎在成功答辩他修改后的论文的同时，他和 PARC 的一位合著者发表了以太网的设计，这种网络协议为分散在建筑物周围的计算机提供连接，而成本仅为连接相距数百英里的大型系统的 IMP 的一小部分。Metcalfe 于 1979 年离开 Xerox，创立了 3Com，将无处不在的以太网商业化。（他现在是德克萨斯大学工程学院和商学院的教授，是一位作家、导师和技术方面的远见卓识者。
Our reunion group members are mostly third-generation computer scientists. Aiken was Harvard’s first generation; Claude Shannon was MIT’s. These men were already legends—we never saw them during our years at Harvard. (First-generation pioneer Grace Hopper did give a memorable talk at Harvard in the early 1970s, fuming because the cabin crew on her flight had mistaken her Navy admiral’s uniform for that of a retired stewardess.)
我们的 REUNION GROUP 成员大多是第三代计算机科学家。艾肯是哈佛的第一代人;Claude Shannon 是麻省理工学院的。这些人已经是传奇人物了——我们在哈佛的那些年里从未见过他们。（第一代先驱格蕾丝·霍珀 （Grace Hopper） 确实在 1970 年代初在哈佛大学发表了一次令人难忘的演讲，她很生气，因为她航班上的机组人员将她的海军上将制服误认为是一位退休空姐的制服。
The second generation of computer scientists included Anthony Oettinger, who was Aiken’s student, and Ivan Sutherland, who was Shannon’s. Sutherland spent three remarkable years on the Harvard faculty from 1965 to 1968 and, among other more important things, advised my undergraduate thesis.
第二代计算机科学家包括 Aiken 的学生 Anthony Oettinger 和 Shannon 的学生 Ivan Sutherland。从 1965 年到 1968 年，萨瑟兰在哈佛大学任教度过了非凡的三年，除其他更重要的事情外，他还为我的本科论文提供了咨询。
The language of generations makes the succession sound too tidy. In the 1970s Oettinger shifted his interests toward matters of national security. Except for Sutherland, the only tenured computer scientist during our years was Tom Cheatham, who had no doctorate. He learned about computing in the army, having made the most of his assignment to keep the books at an officers’ club. Our small group inherited some intellectual traditions but also a sense that there wasn’t that much to know about the field, so anyone could contribute to it. Some walked in the footsteps of their advisers, while others came into computing from left field and brought some of that sod with them.
世代的语言使继承听起来太整洁了。在 1970 年代，厄廷格将他的兴趣转向国家安全问题。除了 Sutherland，我们这些年唯一的终身计算机科学家是 Tom Cheatham，他没有博士学位。他在军队中学习了计算机，充分利用了他的任务，将书籍保存在军官俱乐部。我们这个小团体继承了一些知识传统，但也继承了一种感觉，即对这个领域没有太多了解，所以任何人都可以为它做出贡献。有些人追随了他们的顾问的脚步，而另一些人则从左翼进入计算机领域，并带来了一些草皮。
Cheatham had the most students, in part because he had the most money to support them, but also because his tastes were catholic and his turf was unfenced. He advised 36 Ph.D. theses, including that of Ben Wegbreit, who joined Cheatham on the faculty. Cheatham’s group worked on programming languages and the systems that made them usable. It was a hot research area because software development projects were becoming enormously expensive and might nonetheless fail spectacularly. In that environment there were established rows to hoe, if you were the row-hoeing type, but almost anything that might help could be a good thesis topic.
Cheatham 的学生最多，部分原因是他有最多的钱来支持他们，但也因为他的口味是天主教的，而且他的地盘没有围栏。他指导了 36 篇博士论文，其中包括加入 Cheatham 的 Ben Wegbreit 的博士论文。Cheatham 的小组致力于编程语言和使它们可用的系统。这是一个热门的研究领域，因为软件开发项目变得非常昂贵，而且可能会以惊人的失败告终。在那种环境中，如果你是划船的类型，就有既定的行可以锄草，但几乎任何可能有帮助的东西都可以成为一个好的论文题目。
Cheatham set the tone for the Harvard style: bring in good people and give them a lot of responsibility and a lot of freedom—a method that one of our group reported using successfully later as a hiring strategy. Cheatham’s students had a profound influence on language design. In 1977-78, when the Department of Defense launched a competition for the design of the DoD standard language Ada, three of the four competing designs were headed by Harvard students of our era: Ben Brosgol, Ph.D. ’73; Jay Spitzen ’70, Ph.D. ’74, J.D. ’88; and John Goodenough ’61, Ph.D. ’70 (who also was on the faculty for a time).
Cheatham 为哈佛风格定下了基调：引进优秀人才，赋予他们很多责任和很多自由——我们小组的一位成员报告说，这种方法后来成功地用作招聘策略。Cheatham 的学生对语言设计产生了深远的影响。1977-78 年，当国防部发起国防部标准语言 Ada 的设计竞赛时，四个参赛设计中的三个由我们这个时代的哈佛学生领导：Ben Brosgol，博士 '73;Jay Spitzen '70， Ph.D. '74， J.D. '88;和 John Goodenough '61， Ph.D. '70（他也曾在该教职期间任职）。
Cheatham’s students built tools: new languages, compilers, verifiers, anything to improve the ease and quality of programming. That orientation, combined with the very primitive computing facilities available to us, oriented the non-theorists among us toward tool-building and proofs-of-concept. None of us had the ambition to build payroll systems or avionics software; we just wanted to make software that would help other people make systems like that. And nobody launched a company straight out of school—“start-up” was something you did to your car. So most of our group who did not go into academia went to companies that made software tools. It took several years before some realized that they could make a good living by building products for people who were not themselves computer geeks. Rob Shostak, having established a strong theoretical reputation during his years at SRI, launched the Paradox database system in 1985—for a while a personal computer database system very widely used in offices, including Harvard’s.
Cheatham 的学生构建了工具：新语言、编译器、验证器，以及任何可以提高编程易用性和质量的工具。这种取向，再加上我们可用的非常原始的计算设施，使我们中间的非理论家转向工具构建和概念验证。我们都没有建立工资单系统或航空电子软件的雄心;我们只是想制作能够帮助其他人制作类似系统的软件。而且没有人直接从学校毕业就创办了一家公司——“创业”是你对你的汽车做的事情。因此，我们小组中大多数没有进入学术界的人都去了生产软件工具的公司。几年后，一些人才意识到，他们可以通过为本身不是计算机极客的人构建产品来过上好日子。Rob Shostak 在 SRI 工作期间建立了强大的理论声誉，他于 1985 年推出了 Paradox 数据库系统——有一段时间，这是一个在办公室（包括哈佛大学）广泛使用的个人计算机数据库系统。
Bill Bossert, Arnold professor of science emeritus and former master of Lowell House, is not a computer scientist and supervised none of our Ph.D. theses. He is a mathematical biologist who uses computers. But in the words of Pat Selinger, who took his course as a junior at Radcliffe, he was “heart and soul committed to inspiring people to use and appreciate the capability of computers.”
比尔·博塞特 （BILL BOSSERT） 是阿诺德 （Arnold） 的名誉教授，也是洛厄尔之家 （Lowell House） 的前任院长，他不是计算机科学家，也没有指导过我们的博士论文。他是一位使用计算机的数学生物学家。但用 Pat Selinger 的话来说，他在 Radcliffe 大三时参加了他的课程，他“全心全意地致力于激励人们使用和欣赏计算机的能力”。
In 1968 Bossert had the idea to teach a computer course for everyone as part of Harvard’s General Education program. It was called Nat Sci 110. The point of the course was to teach students what computers could do, not to make them skilled or employable programmers. He hired one of our group, Mark Tuttle, as head teaching fellow (TF)—not because Tuttle knew much about computer programming (he didn’t), but because he had been an undergrad at Dartmouth, which was already evangelizing computing for everyone. In its first year Nat Sci 110 drew 350 students—more than twice what had been anticipated, and too many for the lecture hall. Bossert responded not by capping enrollment, but by repeating the lecture each class day, giving it once at the scheduled hour of 11 a.m. and then again at the overflow hour of 1 p.m. Some students wanted to come to both lectures—which Bossert said was OK as long as they laughed at his jokes both times.
1968 年，Bossert 萌生了为每个人教授计算机课程的想法，作为哈佛通识教育计划的一部分。它被称为 Nat Sci 110。这门课程的重点是教学生计算机能做什么，而不是让他们成为熟练或可就业的程序员。他聘请了我们小组的一位 Mark Tuttle 作为首席教学研究员 （TF），不是因为 Tuttle 对计算机编程了解很多（他不了解），而是因为他曾经是达特茅斯大学的本科生，达特茅斯已经在向所有人宣传计算机。在第一年，Nat Sci 110 吸引了 350 名学生——是预期的两倍多，对于演讲厅来说太多了。博塞特的回应不是限制入学人数，而是在每个上课日重复讲座，在预定的上午 11 点时间讲一次，然后在下午 1 点的溢出时间再讲一次。一些学生想来听这两堂课——博塞特说，只要他们两次都笑他的笑话就可以了。
Over tea at his house, President Pusey asked, “Why do we need computers? Why are they so expensive? Why is the faculty complaining?” And so on.
普西校长在他家喝茶时问道：“我们为什么需要电脑？为什么它们这么贵？为什么教职员工要抱怨？等等。
Tuttle recalls being invited, as TF in this phenomenal new course, to tea at President Pusey’s house. “I’m introduced to the president,” Tuttle recalls, “who started peppering me with questions—`Why do we need computers? Why are they so expensive? Why is the faculty complaining?’ and so on. He listened intently but got quite emotional and ignored the others in the receiving line. I answered as best I could, but I am not sure how much got through. Later I learned that Oettinger and others were putting pressure on him.”
塔特尔回忆说，他被邀请作为这个非凡的新课程的 TF 去普西校长家喝茶。“我被介绍给总统，”塔特尔回忆道，“他开始向我提出各种问题——'我们为什么需要计算机？为什么它们这么贵？为什么教职员工要抱怨？'等等。他专心听着，但变得非常情绪化，无视了接收队伍中的其他人。我尽可能地回答了，但我不确定有多少人通过了。后来我才知道，厄廷格和其他人正在向他施压。
The course was a success, even though it was taught in FORTRAN, a poor instructional language, and used rented time on a commercial timesharing system. The following year Tim Standish joined the faculty, and Bossert leapt at the opportunity to use the highly flexible language Standish had designed, called PPL, for Nat Sci 110. Getting the language up and running over the summer fell largely to undergraduate Ed Taft ’73, who went on to a long career at Adobe Systems.
该课程取得了成功，尽管它是用 FORTRAN（一种糟糕的教学语言）授课的，并且将租用的时间用于商业分时系统。次年，Tim Standish 加入了教职员工，Bossert 抓住了这个机会，使用 Standish 为 Nat Sci 110 设计的高度灵活的语言，称为 PPL。在暑假期间启动和运行这门语言主要落在本科生 Ed Taft '73 的肩上，他继续在 Adobe Systems 工作了很长时间。
Nat Sci 110 changed lives, Selinger’s for one. Bored in her introductory logic course by the eminent but mumbling Pierce professor of philosophy Willard V.O. Quine, Selinger looked for a course that met in closer proximity to her 10 a.m. physics lecture so she would not always be arriving late, relegated to the back row. Thus she stumbled into Bossert’s passion for making computing interesting and fun. A few years later she finished her Ph.D. on programming languages and systems under the direction of Chuck Prenner, Ph.D. ’72, a student of Cheatham’s who had moved on from being his TF to assistant professor. Then Bill Joyner, another member of our group who had gone to work at IBM Research, aggressively recruited her. At IBM Selinger made fundamental contributions to database query optimization—the technology that makes it possible to find needles in haystacks without going through every stalk. In 1994 she was awarded IBM’s highest scientific honor, IBM Fellow. All because Nat Sci 110 was taught in a lecture hall near the physics building. Geography is destiny.
Nat Sci 110 改变了生活，Selinger 就是其中之一。塞林格在著名但喃喃自语的皮尔斯哲学教授威拉德·奎因（Willard V.O. Quine）的逻辑入门课程中感到无聊，她寻找一门离她上午10点的物理课更近的课程，这样她就不会总是迟到，被降级到后排。因此，她偶然发现了 Bossert 对让计算变得有趣和有趣的热情。几年后，她在 Chuck Prenner， Ph.D. '72 的指导下完成了编程语言和系统的博士学位，Chuck Prenner 是 Cheatham 的学生，后来从他的 TF 转为助理教授。然后，我们小组的另一位成员 Bill Joyner（曾在 IBM Research 工作）积极招募了她。在 IBM，Selinger 对数据库查询优化做出了重大贡献，这项技术使大海捞针成为可能，而无需遍历每个茎。1994 年，她被授予 IBM 的最高科学荣誉 IBM Fellow。这一切都是因为 Nat Sci 110 是在物理大楼附近的一个演讲厅教授的。地理就是命运。
A few years later Prenner took the course over, and then I inherited it from him. I gave a shopping-season lecture in a Santa suit and drew 500 students my second year on the faculty. But in the late 1970s the Gen Ed program was disbanded and Nat Sci 110 with it; computing wasn’t a “Core Curriculum” subject. Instead, Harvard instituted a joyless and trivializing programming requirement. Students hated “the computer test,” which had the opposite effect from what Nat Sci 110 had done—and Lady Lovelace had also done more than a century earlier: show people that computers could be useful for lots of things.
几年后，普伦纳接手了这门课程，然后我从他那里继承了这门课程。我穿着圣诞老人套装在购物季发表了演讲，并在第二年就吸引了 500 名学生。但在 1970 年代后期，Gen Ed 计划被解散，Nat Sci 110 也随之解散;计算机不是一门“核心课程”科目。相反，哈佛制定了一个毫无乐趣且琐碎的编程要求。学生们讨厌“计算机测试”，它的效果与 Nat Sci 110 所做的相反——洛夫莱斯夫人在一个多世纪前也做过：向人们展示计算机可以做很多事情。
Yet ghosts of Nat Sci 110 live on. Eric Roberts ’73, Ph.D. ’80, was a Nat Sci 110 TF under Bossert, Prenner, and me while he was an undergrad and grad student. He took his amazing pedagogical skills to Wellesley and then to Stanford, where he shaped the undergraduate computer-science program. Mark Tuttle took his experience to Berkeley, where starting in 1973 he taught a course on “The Art and Science of Computing” to audiences of hundreds. Now Bossert’s pedagogical grandchildren are teaching the fun of computing everywhere. Even at Harvard: Henry Leitner, who was my Nat Sci 110 TF when he was in graduate school, delights students every year with his Computer Science 1, and the dramatic flourishes in David Malan’s hugely popular Computer Science 50 can also be traced back to Nat Sci 110.
然而，Nat Sci 110 的幽灵仍然存在。Eric Roberts '73，博士 '80，在本科生和研究生期间，是 Bossert、Prenner 和我的 Nat Sci 110 TF。他将自己惊人的教学技能带到了韦尔斯利大学，然后去了斯坦福大学，在那里他塑造了本科计算机科学课程。Mark Tuttle 将他的经验带到了伯克利，从 1973 年开始，他在那里为数百名听众教授了一门关于“计算的艺术与科学”的课程。现在，Bossert 的教学孙辈们正在到处传授计算的乐趣。即使在哈佛大学：Henry Leitner，他在研究生院时是我的 Nat Sci 110 TF，每年他的计算机科学 1 都让学生感到高兴，David Malan 广受欢迎的计算机科学 50 中的戏剧性繁荣也可以追溯到 Nat Sci 110。
When some have suggested calling our field “computer sciences,” I have protested that the totality of what is known amounts to at most one science. In the 1960s the field was too small to have well-defined subdisciplines, though speciation was starting to occur. For example, computational linguistics, which has brought us Alexa and Siri, was evolving from three roots. Linguists were trying to use mathematical methods to make sense of human language. Designers of programming languages needed an engineering toolkit with which to build interpreters and compilers, so that the higher-level codes programmers wrote could be executed on real machines. And logicians had for decades studied the limits of computability, and what sorts of decisions could and could not be made by automata. The specific research problem of automated translation of Russian texts financed Cold War attempts to integrate these directions and develop new ones (though the fear of Soviet scientific supremacy ended before much success had been achieved in language translation).
当有人建议将我们的领域称为“计算机科学”时，我抗议说，已知的全部最多相当于一门科学。在 1960 年代，该领域太小，无法有明确定义的子学科，尽管物种形成开始发生。例如，为我们带来 Alexa 和 Siri 的计算语言学就是从三个根源演变而来的。语言学家试图使用数学方法来理解人类语言。编程语言的设计者需要一个工程工具包来构建解释器和编译器，以便程序员编写的更高级别的代码可以在真实机器上执行。几十年来，逻辑学家一直在研究可计算性的极限，以及哪些决定可以和不能由自动机做出。俄罗斯文本自动翻译的具体研究问题资助了冷战时期整合这些方向并开发新方向的尝试（尽管对苏联科学霸权的恐惧在语言翻译取得重大成功之前就结束了）。
These roots were all sprouting at Harvard. Oettinger worked on Russian translation. His student Susumo Kuno wrote his dissertation on automatic syntax analysis of English and became a professor in Harvard’s linguistics department. Kuno’s student Bill Woods wrote his dissertation on semantics and question-answering, and then developed his work at BBN into a system that was used during the Apollo space program to answer questions about moon rocks. In the meantime, Sheila Greibach, a Radcliffe summa, wrote her Ph.D. dissertation under Oettinger on automata and formal language theory. It was not only an important contribution to the design of parsers and compilers for computer programming languages, but a founding document of theoretical computer science—one of the first success stories of the science of computing.
这些根都是在哈佛发芽的。厄廷格从事俄文翻译工作。他的学生 Susumo Kuno 写了一篇关于英语自动句法分析的论文，并成为哈佛大学语言学系的教授。Kuno 的学生 Bill Woods 写了一篇关于语义和问答的论文，然后将他在 BBN 的工作发展成一个系统，在阿波罗太空计划期间用于回答有关月球岩石的问题。与此同时，拉德克利夫的摘要希拉·格雷巴赫 （Sheila Greibach） 在 Oettinger 的指导下撰写了关于自动机和形式语言理论的博士论文。它不仅对计算机编程语言的解析器和编译器设计做出了重要贡献，而且是理论计算机科学的奠基文件，也是计算科学的首批成功案例之一。
With both Woods and Greibach teaching at Harvard and with BBN nearby, computational linguistics and theoretical computer science began to emerge as identifiable disciplines. Bonnie Lynn Webber was Woods’s Ph.D. student and followed him to BBN, where she continued working on semantics of natural language while remaining part-time in the graduate program. Harvard finally pressured her to finish or drop out. She chose to finish and began an extraordinary academic career, first at Penn and then at Edinburgh. My recently retired colleague Barbara Grosz, Higgins research professor of natural sciences, a leader in computational discourse analysis, has been a collaborator of Webber and of Webber’s eminent student Martha Pollack, who is now president of Cornell University.
随着伍兹和格雷巴赫都在哈佛大学任教，并且附近有 BBN，计算语言学和理论计算机科学开始成为可识别的学科。Bonnie Lynn Webber 是 Woods 的博士生，她跟随他去了 BBN，在那里她继续研究自然语言的语义，同时在研究生课程中保持兼职。哈佛最终向她施压，要么完成学业，要么辍学。她选择完成并开始了非凡的学术生涯，首先是在宾夕法尼亚大学，然后在爱丁堡。我最近退休的同事芭芭拉·格罗兹（Barbara Grosz）是希金斯自然科学研究教授，也是计算话语分析的领导者，她一直是韦伯和韦伯的杰出学生玛莎·波拉克（Martha Pollack）的合作者，玛莎·波拉克（Martha Pollack）现在是康奈尔大学（Cornell University）的校长。
Another of Woods’s students, Lyn Bates, Ph.D. ’75, arrived as a graduate student at Harvard knowing no one, and happened to find Woods’s door open while she was wandering the Aiken hallways. She finished her dissertation on syntax and then joined her adviser at BBN, initially sharing an office with Webber. Her research interests broadened over time; she was involved in early projects on speech understanding, use of natural language for database query, and an award-winning language synthesis project for use by the deaf.
伍兹的另一位学生，75 届博士林恩·贝茨 （Lyn Bates） 以研究生身份来到哈佛，不认识任何人，当伍兹在艾肯走廊上徘徊时，碰巧发现伍兹的门开着。她完成了关于语法的论文，然后加入了她在 BBN 的顾问，最初与 Webber 共用一个办公室。随着时间的推移，她的研究兴趣不断扩大;她参与了语音理解、使用自然语言进行数据库查询以及一个屡获殊荣的聋人使用的语言合成项目的早期项目。
So the research that eventually gave us talking appliances was aborning under our noses 50 years ago, but the linguists in our group emphasize that the problem of language understanding and synthesis is not nearly solved yet. Woods himself spent most of his career in industry and says he is still trying to figure out how to get computers to think.
因此，最终为我们提供会说话设备的研究是在 50 年前在我们的眼皮底下诞生的，但我们小组的语言学家强调，语言理解和综合的问题还没有得到解决。伍兹本人的大部分职业生涯都在工业界度过，他说他仍在努力弄清楚如何让计算机思考。
Henry Leitner was another Woods Ph.D. student; he is now acting dean of Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education at the same time as he teaches computer science. Bill Joyner was a Woods student, too. Now retired from his long career with IBM, he provided to the reunion group his complete graduate-adviser ancestral chart, 100 percent Harvard, back not just to Aiken but another five generations before him: Aiken’s adviser was Emory Chaffee, Ph.D. 1911; Chaffee’s was George W. Pierce, Ph.D. 1900; Pierce’s was John Trowbridge, S.D. 1873; Trowbridge’s was Joseph Lovering, A.M. 1836; and Lovering’s was Andrew Peabody, A.M. 1829.
亨利·莱特纳 （Henry Leitner） 是伍兹大学的另一位博士生;他现在是哈佛大学继续教育部的代理院长，同时教授计算机科学。比尔·乔伊纳 （Bill Joyner） 也是伍兹的学生。现在，他从 IBM 的长期职业生涯中退休，向团聚小组提供了他完整的研究生顾问祖先图表，100% 的哈佛，不仅追溯到 Aiken，而且追溯到他之前的另外五代人：Aiken 的顾问是 Emory Chaffee，1911 年博士;查菲的博士是 George W. Pierce 博士，1900 年;皮尔斯的妻子是 John Trowbridge，S.D. 1873 年;特罗布里奇的妻子是约瑟夫·洛夫林（Joseph Lovering），1836 年上午;洛夫林的妻子是安德鲁·皮博迪（Andrew Peabody），1829 年上午。
Ivan Sutherland’s group was full of people doing things that had never been done before. For my undergraduate thesis I wrote a processor for ordinary algebraic notation: if the user wrote an equation using superscripts and division bars, the computer would interpret it as an instruction to transform one geometric figure into another. The PDP-1 computer was a disused hand-me-down from an Air Force lab, but it had unheard-of affordances: you could sit down at its console, flip its switches, and type on its keyboard and get it to type back, with no ritual passing of IBM card decks to data processing officiants as was customary with big machines of the day. A room-sized “minicomputer,” the PDP-1 had a tablet with a stylus for writing the equation, a display for showing the equation as interpreted, and two more screens for showing the shape before and after its transformation. The code that recognized handwritten characters was written by Ken Ledeen ’67; we would today say that it did machine learning, extracting features and learning by reinforcement to classify its inputs. Ken was an English major, so instead of proclaiming that it was 92 percent sure that what you had written was a “G,” his program reported in mock-Shakespearean diction “Would that it were ‘G’”—and then invited you to correct it if your scrawl was meant to be a “C” instead.
伊万·萨瑟兰 （IVAN SUTHERLAND） 的团队里到处都是做以前从未做过的事情的人。在我的本科论文中，我编写了一个普通代数符号的处理器：如果用户使用上标和除法线编写一个方程式，计算机会将其解释为将一个几何图形转换为另一个几何图形的指令。PDP-1 计算机是空军实验室的废弃遗作，但它具有闻所未闻的功能：您可以坐在它的控制台前，拨动它的开关，在它的键盘上打字，然后让它重新打字，而无需像当时大型机器那样仪式性地将 IBM 卡组传递给数据处理官员。PDP-1 是一台房间大小的“微型计算机”，它有一台平板电脑，上面有一根用于编写方程式的手写笔，一个用于显示方程式解释的显示器，以及另外两个用于显示变形前后形状的屏幕。识别手写字符的代码由 Ken Ledeen ‘67 编写;我们今天会说它进行了机器学习，提取特征并通过强化学习来对其输入进行分类。Ken 是英语专业的学生，所以他没有宣称你写的东西是 92% 的把握是“G”，而是用模拟莎士比亚的措辞报告“会不会是’G’”——然后如果你的潦草字应该是“C”，请你纠正它。
The masterwork of Sutherland’s Harvard tenure was the first virtual-reality system. It consisted of a head-mounted display attached to a helmet that was in turn connected to the ceiling by telescoping tubes used to detect the position and orientation of the viewer’s head. The PDP-1 was programmed to display a 3-D object that seemed to hang motionless in the air while the viewer’s head moved around and through it. Wearing it was a magical experience, even though the computer was too slow to display anything more complicated than the 12 edges of a wireframe cube.
Sutherland 在哈佛任期内的杰作是第一个虚拟现实系统。它由一个连接到头盔的头戴式显示器组成，头盔又通过用于检测观众头部位置和方向的伸缩管连接到天花板。PDP-1 被编程为显示一个 3-D 物体，当观众的头部在空中移动时，该物体似乎一动不动地悬挂在空中。佩戴它是一种神奇的体验，尽管计算机太慢了，无法显示比线框立方体的 12 条边更复杂的东西。
Danny Cohen’s great achievement—a flight simulator on which you could try to land a schematic airplane—spawned hugely profitable businesses.
Danny Cohen 的伟大成就 — 一个飞行模拟器，您可以尝试在上面降落示意图飞机 — 催生了利润丰厚的业务。
While still an undergraduate, Bob Sproull ’68 helped design a critical part of Sutherland’s head-mounted display system. He went to Stanford for graduate school, and when BBN shipped an IMP to the university in 1970, it arrived with a note from Ben Barker to Sproull scrawled on the shipping crate. In 1973 Sproull co-authored an early and highly influential computer-graphics textbook; while at PARC he was part of the team that designed the first networked personal computer system. As part of a distinguished career in academia and industry, he was for 20 years in a leadership role at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.
当 Bob Sproull 还是一名本科生时，68 届他帮助设计了 Sutherland 头戴式显示系统的关键部分。他去了斯坦福大学读研究生，当 BBN 于 1970 年将 IMP 运送到该大学时，它到达时，装运箱上潦草地写着 Ben Barker 写给 Sproull 的便条。1973 年，Sproull 与人合著了一本早期且极具影响力的计算机图形教科书;在 PARC 期间，他是设计第一个联网个人计算机系统的团队的一员。作为学术界和工业界杰出职业生涯的一部分，他在 Sun Microsystems Laboratories 担任了 20 年的领导职务。
Sutherland’s student Danny Cohen, Ph.D. ’69, joined the faculty and kept Sutherland’s graphics program alive at Harvard for a few more years. Cohen’s great achievement was a flight simulator. Using switches and a joystick, you could try to land a schematic airplane on a schematic landing strip. It was a fun game that spawned hugely profitable businesses building realistic flight simulators. Commercial airlines and the military, it turned out, would pay a lot of money to have their pilots crash-land a simulator rather than an actual airplane. Cohen had been a paratrooper in the Israeli military and said he built the simulator so he could learn to fly. As it was, Barker insists that he was the first one ever to land a simulated airplane safely.
Sutherland 的学生 Danny Cohen 博士 '69 加入了教师队伍，并在哈佛大学继续开展了几年的图形课程。Cohen 的伟大成就是飞行模拟器。使用开关和操纵杆，您可以尝试将原理图飞机降落在原理图着陆跑道上。这是一款有趣的游戏，催生了构建逼真飞行模拟器的利润丰厚的企业。事实证明，商业航空公司和军队会花很多钱让他们的飞行员在模拟器而不是真正的飞机上迫降。科恩曾是以色列军队的一名伞兵，他说他建造了模拟器，这样他就可以学习飞行。事实上，巴克坚称他是有史以来第一个安全降落模拟飞机的人。
Like Barker’s first ARPAnet message, it was amazing any of this worked at all. Computers were slow, expensive, and unreliable. Cohen collaborated with Bob Metcalfe to split the flight simulator’s computing load between Harvard’s PDP-1 and a faster computer at MIT, using the nascent ARPAnet to exchange partially constructed images. Even the basic ARPAnet protocols were not yet in place, so Cohen and Metcalfe had no toolkit to work with: they were pushing bits through a network that was little more than bare metal. Cohen went on to use the same real-time engineering skills for internet voice communications. Internet telephony and video (including Zoom calls) all stemmed from Cohen’s primitive flight simulator running at Harvard and at Metcalfe’s MIT node.
就像 Barker 的第一条 ARPAnet 消息一样，这一切竟然奏效了，真是太棒了。计算机速度慢、价格昂贵且不可靠。Cohen 与 Bob Metcalfe 合作，在哈佛大学的 PDP-1 和麻省理工学院的一台更快的计算机之间分配飞行模拟器的计算负载，使用新生的 ARPAnet 交换部分构建的图像。甚至基本的 ARPAnet 协议也还没有到位，因此 Cohen 和 Metcalfe 没有可以使用的工具包：他们通过一个只不过是裸机的网络推送比特。Cohen 继续使用相同的实时工程技能进行互联网语音通信。互联网电话和视频（包括 Zoom 通话）都源于 Cohen 在哈佛大学和梅特卡夫麻省理工学院节点运行的原始飞行模拟器。
All PDP-1 users remember the “yen board.” We each got a certain number of yen—grad students more than undergrads, and so on. The yen board showed the hours we could sign up to use the machine—a week’s worth of 24-hour days—and we could spread our allotted yen over a segment of time, on the understanding that someone else could outbid us by allocating more yen per hour, and none of us could have more yen outstanding than our quota. Among the high-yen crowd was the visionary J.C.R. Licklider, by 1968 a professor at MIT. In our ignorance we took him for a superannuated graduate student and helped him debug his code. Naturally, those of us at the bottom of the totem pole claimed blocks in the 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. range, when our yen went the furthest, and we emerged best friends with those who had the blocks before and after us.
所有 PDP-1 用户都记得“日元板”。我们每个人都得到了一定数量的日元——研究生比本科生多，依此类推。日元板显示了我们可以注册使用机器的时间——相当于一周的 24 小时工作日——我们可以将分配的日元分摊到一段时间内，前提是其他人可以通过每小时分配更多的日元来出价超过我们，而且我们中的任何人的未付日元都不能超过我们的配额。在高日元人群中，有远见的 J.C.R. Licklider，到 1968 年，他已经是麻省理工学院的教授。在我们无知的情况下，我们把他当作一个退休的研究生，并帮助他调试他的代码。自然地，我们这些处于图腾柱底部的人在凌晨 2 点到 5 点的范围内要求区块，当时我们的日元走得最远，我们与那些在我们之前和之后拥有区块的人成为最好的朋友。
And friends we were, all of us. We supported each other, not because anybody was against us, just because we all got along. We dressed up for dinner parties together, with Julia Child prepping the chefs from her TV screen. We climbed mountains in New Hampshire, not always wisely: Peter Downey, Ph.D. ’74, now professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Arizona, remembers realizing, rather too late, that he might better have worn orange during hunting season and could have turned back sooner in the face of an incipient Mount Washington blizzard.
我们是朋友，我们所有人。我们互相支持，不是因为有人反对我们，只是因为我们都相处融洽。我们一起盛装出席晚宴，Julia Child 在她的电视屏幕上为厨师们做准备。我们在新罕布什尔州爬山，并不总是明智的：Peter Downey，74 届博士，现在是亚利桑那大学计算机科学名誉教授，他记得为时已晚，他意识到他最好在狩猎季节穿橙色衣服，在面对初期的华盛顿山暴风雪时可以早点折返。
Joyner had never lived outside Virginia until he came to Harvard, and had trouble making himself understood. It was worse for his wife, Mary Brenda, a fellow Virginian whose job entailed reading numbers over the telephone—mostly to northerners. Joyner claims I discovered a bug in his dissertation, which he was able to fix at the eleventh hour, and also that Rob Shostak and I tried to teach the Greek alphabet to his two-year-old daughter. I know for sure Joyner taught me his mother’s whisky-sour recipe: a can of frozen lemonade, a canful of Rebel Yell bourbon, and ice, mixed in a blender to the consistency of melting snow. Drinking was a great deal more casual then, before alcohol became a controlled substance on college campuses. Wine and cheese parties every Friday afternoon in the basement of Aiken brought together undergrads, graduate students, staff, and faculty.
乔伊纳在来到哈佛之前从未住在弗吉尼亚州以外的地方，因此很难让自己被理解。他的妻子玛丽·布伦达 （Mary Brenda） 的情况更糟，她是弗吉尼亚州的同胞，她的工作需要通过电话阅读数字——主要是给北方人看的。乔伊纳声称我在他的论文中发现了一个错误，他能够在最后一刻修复这个错误，而且我和罗伯·肖斯塔克 （Rob Shostak） 还试图教他两岁的女儿希腊字母表。我肯定知道乔伊纳教了我他妈妈的威士忌酸食谱：一罐冷冻柠檬水、一罐 Rebel Yell 波旁威士忌和冰块，在搅拌机中混合成融化的雪的稠度。在酒精成为大学校园的受控物质之前，饮酒要随意得多。每周五下午在 Aiken 地下室举行的葡萄酒和奶酪派对汇集了本科生、研究生、教职员工和教职员工。
The group of women in our cohort was large for the time. Judy Townley, Ph.D. ’73, from the University of Texas, worked in Cheatham’s programming-languages group and joined him for a time in a software consultancy. Emily Friedman from Atlanta, via Cornell, became a professor at UCLA before spending most of her career at Hughes Aircraft. Radcliffe grad Brenda Baker also wrote a theoretical dissertation, but took a position at Bell Labs expecting to work on speech synthesis. She soon found “the freedom to do curiosity-driven research” and became a jack-of-all-trades in the design of algorithms for mathematical problems. During a career spanning several decades, she has published on program analysis, computer-aided design, and robotics, among other subjects. Nancy Neigus, A.M. ’70, joined Ornstein, Barker, and Thrope at BBN. Miriam Lucian, Ph.D. ’72, from Romania, was one of only two international members of our group; she went on to a long career as an engineer at Boeing, but her Harvard dissertation research in mathematical logic earned her an adjunct philosophy professorship at the University of Washington. The other immigrant in our group, Peter Chen from Taiwan, was inspired to attend Harvard by the example of industry pioneer An Wang, Ph.D.’48, inventor of magnetic core memory and founder of computer company Wang Laboratories.
我们队列中的女性群体在当时很大。Judy Townley，73 届博士，来自德克萨斯大学，曾在 Cheatham 的编程语言小组工作，并曾与他一起在一家软件咨询公司工作过一段时间。来自亚特兰大的艾米丽·弗里德曼 （Emily Friedman） 通过康奈尔大学成为加州大学洛杉矶分校的教授，然后她职业生涯的大部分时间都在休斯飞机公司度过。拉德克利夫大学毕业生 Brenda Baker 也写了一篇理论论文，但在贝尔实验室工作了一个职位，希望从事语音合成方面的工作。她很快就找到了“做好奇心驱动的研究的自由”，并成为数学问题算法设计的万能手。在几十年的职业生涯中，她发表了关于程序分析、计算机辅助设计和机器人技术等主题的文章。Nancy Neigus，70 年上午 10 岁，加入了 BBN 的 Ornstein、Barker 和 Thrope。来自罗马尼亚的 Miriam Lucian 博士 '72 是我们小组仅有的两名国际成员之一;她继续在波音公司担任工程师，但她在哈佛大学数理逻辑的论文研究为她赢得了华盛顿大学的兼职哲学教授职位。我们小组中的另一位移民，来自台湾的 Peter Chen，受到行业先驱 An Wang 博士 48 的启发，他也是磁芯存储器的发明者，也是计算机公司 Wang Laboratories 的创始人。
For a time, the women in our group had a faculty mentor and role model in Greibach, who taught many of us. The women generally remember having been treated as equals—by us, though not always by others at Harvard, and certainly not after they left Harvard and moved into academia and industry. Independently, three different individuals in our group reported having been told by a Radcliffe dean that “girls” weren’t good at science or shouldn’t be majoring in math. It was typical of the time—as was Greibach’s departure in 1969 for a permanent position at UCLA when Harvard didn’t offer her tenure. Greibach’s student Ron Book, Ph.D. ’69, took over theory teaching from her until he too left for California, having advised six Ph.D.s as a junior faculty member, including four women: Baker, Friedman, Lucian, and Celia Wrathall, Ph.D. ’76 (who married him).
有一段时间，我们小组中的女性在 Greibach 有一位教师导师和榜样，她教了我们中的许多人。这些女性通常记得自己被平等对待——被我们对待，尽管并不总是被哈佛的其他人对待，当然在她们离开哈佛进入学术界和工业界之后也没有。独立地，我们小组中的三个不同的人报告说，拉德克利夫学院的一位院长告诉他们，“女孩”不擅长科学或不应该主修数学。这在当时很典型——1969 年，格雷巴赫离开加州大学洛杉矶分校，在哈佛大学没有提供她的终身教职时，她离开了加州大学洛杉矶分校。Greibach 的学生 Ron Book，69 届博士，从她那里接管了理论教学，直到他也前往加利福尼亚，作为初级教员为六位博士提供咨询，其中包括四位女性：Baker、Friedman、Lucian 和 Celia Wrathall，76 届博士（嫁给了他）。
We were privileged to work with one more underappreciated giant in those days. Ugo Gagliardi never held a ladder appointment on the Harvard faculty. He had his own consulting firm and, like Woods, taught in an adjunct role as professor of the practice of computer science. Educated in Italy at a university older than Harvard and experienced with the early computer company Olivetti, Gagliardi brought a wealth of practical wisdom to the courses he taught on operating systems and related software. His student Jeff Buzen was a founding figure in the statistical modeling and analysis of computer systems; only after Buzen’s work did it become possible to estimate accurately where to spend money to expand an overloaded computer system. Buzen too joined the faculty and several of us learned computer-system design from him and Gagliardi—and from Metcalfe, when he was Gagliardi’s TF and Buzen’s reassigned Ph.D. student. Buzen and two other Gagliardi students, Bob Goldberg, Ph.D. ’73, and Harold Schwenk, Ph.D. ’72, eventually started their own very successful business, BGS Systems. Peter Chen, who studied under Gagliardi, Buzen, and industry veteran George Mealy ’51, passed on the opportunity to join the BGS team and went on to receive broad acclaim as a database scholar for his Entity-Relationship model.
在那些日子里，我们很荣幸能与另一家被低估的巨头合作。乌戈·加利亚尔迪（Ugo Gagliardi）从未在哈佛大学担任过阶梯式教师。他拥有自己的咨询公司，并且像伍兹一样，担任计算机科学实践教授的兼职教授。Gagliardi 在意大利的一所比哈佛大学更古老的大学接受教育，并在早期的计算机公司 Olivetti 工作过，他为他教授的操作系统和相关软件课程带来了丰富的实践智慧。他的学生 Jeff Buzen 是计算机系统统计建模和分析的奠基人;只有在 Buzen 的工作之后，才有可能准确地估计将资金花在哪里来扩展超负荷的计算机系统。Buzen 也加入了教职员工，我们中的几个人从他和 Gagliardi 以及 Metcalfe 那里学习了计算机系统设计，当时他是 Gagliardi 的 TF 和 Buzen 的重新分配的博士生。Buzen 和另外两名 Gagliardi 学生 Bob Goldberg （73 届博士） 和 Harold Schwenk （72 届博士） 最终创办了他们自己非常成功的企业 BGS Systems。Peter Chen 曾在 Gagliardi、Buzen 和行业资深人士 George Mealy '51 的指导下学习，他错过了加入 BGS 团队的机会，并继续因其实体关系模型而作为数据库学者获得广泛赞誉。
And that is a good place to end the chronology of that period, because the computing world started to change dramatically soon after I joined the faculty. A smart sophomore named Bill Gates took a course from me in 1975. A building named for the mothers of Gates ’77, LL.D. ’07, and his poker buddy Steve Ballmer ’77 would eventually replace Aiken, but at this point Gates was spending most of his time on Harvard’s PDP-10 writing code for a microcomputer he neither owned nor had ever seen. Some on the faculty discouraged him; the intellectual challenges, they said, were in disk scheduling, and here he was toying with code for a machine that didn’t even have a floppy. And so, for a second time the action in computer science moved away from Harvard, this time to the West Coast, where many of our group, students and faculty alike, had already emigrated. I stayed and started to bring order to the undergraduate curriculum, while a series of junior faculty came and went, including one who later won the Turing Award but Harvard judged not promising enough for tenure. A serious intellectual resurgence would not take root at Harvard until Barbara Grosz, Michael Rabin, Watson professor of computer science emeritus, and Leslie Valiant, Coolidge professor of computer science and applied mathematics, arrived in the early 1980s.
这是结束那个时期年表的好地方，因为在我加入教职员工后不久，计算机世界就开始发生巨大变化。1975 年，一位名叫比尔·盖茨 （Bill Gates） 的聪明大二学生选修了我的一门课程。这座建筑以 Gates '77、LL.D. '07 和他的扑克朋友 Steve Ballmer '77 的母亲命名，最终取代了 Aiken，但此时 Gates 将大部分时间花在哈佛的 PDP-10 上，为他既没有也没有见过的微型计算机编写代码。教职员工中的一些人劝阻他;他们说，智力上的挑战在于磁盘调度，而他在这里正在为一台甚至没有软盘的机器编写代码。因此，计算机科学的活动第二次从哈佛转移到了西海岸，我们小组的许多学生和教职员工都已经移民到那里。我留下来，开始让本科课程井井有条，而一系列初级教师来来去去，包括一位后来获得图灵奖但哈佛认为不够有前途的终身教职。直到 1980 年代初，芭芭拉·格罗兹 （Barbara Grosz）、沃森计算机科学名誉教授迈克尔·拉宾 （Michael Rabin） 和柯立芝计算机科学和应用数学教授莱斯利·瓦利安特 （Leslie Valiant） 到来，哈佛才开始真正的知识复兴。
So what made Aiken so generative in those days?
那么，是什么让 AIKEN 在那个年代如此具有生成性呢？
Part of the magic was that it was full of smart students, and the faculty “stood back and let you go,” as one of us said. But we also remember Tom Cheatham’s benevolent generosity. Tom was “an academic magnet” and “a river to his people”—in particular, he funded students’ travel. Those trips, and the regular visits to Harvard by Cheatham’s scientific collaborators, opened students’ ears to intellectual hatching noises coming from the world beyond Harvard. Tuttle remembers a specific incident that exposed a tension with which the field of artificial intelligence is still struggling. Data rules in AI today; systems get smart by generalizing from millions of examples. But for the first generation of researchers, whose computers were not large enough to store or process large data sets, AI was all about symbolic logic and automated reasoning. So when Tuttle was able to attend an AI conference in California, he witnessed “an open battle between the AI speakers—symbol manipulators all—and those in the audience from Silicon Valley who foresaw the role of statistics and probability.… [Marvin] Minsky [’50, JF ’57] and Seymour Papert tried to prevent their field from engaging in empirical—data-driven—approaches to problems. Obviously, their efforts were successful only in the short term.” What an educational experience! (What logic-based systems could do that remains a challenge for data-driven systems is to explain their decisions. It is morally untenable to have judgments about human lives—how long to incarcerate a criminal, for example—emerge from inexplicable numerical parameters magically distilled from mountains of training data.)
神奇的部分之处在于，这里到处都是聪明的学生，正如我们中的一个人所说，教职员工“退后一步，让你走”。但我们也记得 Tom Cheatham 的仁慈慷慨。汤姆是“学术磁铁”和“人民的河流”——特别是，他资助学生旅行。这些旅行，以及 Cheatham 的科学合作者对哈佛的定期访问，让学生们听到了来自哈佛以外世界的知识分子孵化的声音。塔特尔记得一个具体事件，它暴露了人工智能领域仍在努力应对的紧张局势。当今 AI 中的数据规则;系统通过从数百万个示例中进行概括而变得智能。但对于第一代研究人员来说，他们的计算机不够大，无法存储或处理大型数据集，AI 就是符号逻辑和自动推理。因此，当 Tuttle 能够参加在加利福尼亚举行的 AI 会议时，他目睹了“AI 演讲者——都是符号操纵者——与来自硅谷的听众之间预见到统计数据和概率作用的人之间的公开战斗…[马文]Minsky ['50， JF '57] 和 Seymour Papert 试图阻止他们的领域采用实证——数据驱动的——方法来解决问题。显然，他们的努力只在短期内取得了成功。多么有教育意义的经历！（基于逻辑的系统可以做什么仍然是数据驱动系统面临的挑战是解释它们的决策。从海量训练数据中神奇地提炼出的莫名其妙的数字参数中得出对人命的判断——例如，将罪犯关押多长时间——从道德上是站不住脚的。
Colloquia with outside speakers were important for us. Big names—and names like Alan Kay that later became big—came by and talked to our little group of faculty and students. Bates and Selinger remember Hopper’s dramatic talk, with a fistful of wire segments representing nanoseconds, at a time when female speakers were rare. I remember Edsger Dijkstra, who like Kay would later win the Turing Award, advocating formal thinking with the commitment and the intolerance of a religious zealot. Mark Tuttle made sense of the principles presented at a colloquium by Jim Gray, who also would win the Turing Award, only decades later when a situation required him to make use of them.
与外部演讲者的座谈会对我们来说很重要。大牌——以及像 Alan Kay 这样后来成为大名鼎鼎的名字——过来与我们这一小群的教职员工和学生交谈。贝茨和塞林格记得霍普的戏剧性演讲，在那个时代，女性演讲者很少见，他用一捏线段代表纳秒。我记得 Edsger Dijkstra，他和 Kay 一样后来获得了图灵奖，以宗教狂热者的承诺和不宽容倡导形式化思考。马克·塔特尔 （Mark Tuttle） 理解了吉姆·格雷 （Jim Gray） 在座谈会上提出的原则，吉姆·格雷 （Jim Gray） 也获得了图灵奖，只是几十年后，当情况需要他使用这些原则时。
Ironically, the growth and professionalization of our discipline and of the Harvard program have made such memorable encounters less frequent today. Theorists go to the weekly theory talk and an almost disjoint set of people go to the weekly talks on computation in society; assemblies of the whole are infrequent and unwieldy. Fifty years ago, smallness and immaturity fostered cross-fertilization and excitement.
具有讽刺意味的是，我们学科和哈佛项目的发展和专业化使得这种令人难忘的相遇在今天变得不那么频繁了。理论家们参加每周一次的理论讲座，而一群几乎不相干的人参加每周一次的关于社会计算的讲座;整体的集会不频繁且笨拙。50 年前，渺小和不成熟促进了交叉受精和兴奋。
Everybody seems to remember deeply meaningful acts of kindness by each other or by our faculty mentors. And everyone has such a story about Pauline Mitchell, the DEAP administrator who ran everything having to do with students. Mine is typical. In those pre-cell phone, pre-email days, Mitchell figured out that I was abroad, that I needed money, and that there was a postal strike in Italy. She called her brother (who worked in Harvard’s bursar’s office) and her sister (who worked at the bank in Harvard Square) to get Harvard to wire me the funds. No wonder Harvard felt like family. And that sense of security spawned freedom and creativity.
每个人似乎都记得彼此之间或我们的教师导师所做的有意义的善举。每个人都有这样一个关于 Pauline Mitchell 的故事，她是 DEAP 管理员，她负责与学生有关的一切。我的是典型的。在那些没有手机、没有电子邮件的日子里，Mitchell 发现我在国外，我需要钱，而且意大利发生了邮政罢工。她打电话给她的哥哥（在哈佛的财务总监办公室工作）和她的姐姐（在哈佛广场的银行工作）让哈佛给我电汇。难怪哈佛感觉就像家人一样。这种安全感催生了自由和创造力。
“Each of us was working on something very different,” Emily Friedman wrote, “but listening to the progress of the others pushed me on.”
“我们每个人都在做一些非常不同的事情，”艾米莉·弗里德曼 （Emily Friedman） 写道，“但听到其他人的进展促使我继续前进。
We talked a lot. Perhaps the southerners loosened the tongues of the northerners, but I remember endless banter and chatter, sometimes idle and sometimes about ideas. “Each of us was working on something very different,” Emily Friedman wrote, “but listening to the progress of the others pushed me on.” We did not hesitate to tell the others what we were doing or to acknowledge what we didn’t understand. We could open up because we were not in competition. Skepticism of intellectual property prevailed, perhaps an inheritance from Howard Aiken: as his student and Turing Award winner Fred Brooks, Ph.D. ’56, put it, Aiken thought “the problem was not to keep people from stealing your ideas, but to make them steal them.” And most of us knew how to write; we were largely alumni of liberal arts colleges, and several had been humanities majors before falling into computing. Those term papers, gabfests, and teaching fellowships yielded success in countless technical pitches we gave over the years.
我们聊了很多。也许南方人放松了北方人的舌头，但我记得无休止的玩笑和喋喋不休，有时是闲聊，有时是关于想法的。“我们每个人都在做一些非常不同的事情，”艾米莉·弗里德曼 （Emily Friedman） 写道，“但听到其他人的进展促使我继续前进。我们毫不犹豫地告诉其他人我们在做什么，或者承认我们不明白的地方。我们可以打开局面，因为我们没有参加比赛。对知识产权的怀疑占了上风，这可能是从 Howard Aiken 那里继承下来的：正如他的学生、图灵奖获得者 Fred Brooks（56 届博士）所说，Aiken 认为“问题不在于阻止人们窃取你的想法，而在于让他们窃取它们。我们大多数人都知道如何写作;我们大部分是文理学院的校友，其中有几人在进入计算机领域之前是人文专业的。这些学期论文、演讲和教学奖学金在我们多年来提供的无数技术推介中取得了成功。
I am glad to have had tenure and I have defended it as essential to academic freedom. But our experience in Aiken provided little evidence that the institution was either useful or rationally awarded. Our cadre of part-time faculty with one foot in industry and the other at Harvard provided not only superb teaching but exactly the sort of continuity and institutional loyalty that tenure is supposed to promote. Woods, Gagliardi, Buzen, Mealy, Ornstein, McQuillan, Dave Walden from BBN, and others made major contributions, both scientific and educational. And some of our most memorable faculty mentors, not just Cheatham but my own Ph.D. adviser, Pierce professor of philosophy Burt Dreben, had gained permanent positions without a Ph.D. and seemed no less professorial for that deficit. The untenured “professor of the practice” title still exists, but none of today’s incumbents split their time with industry. Faculty hiring has become vastly more competitive, specialized, and systematic—and, to be sure, less inbred. Yet I am not confident that, all things considered, today’s students find their more objectively selected faculty “better” than we found our devoted irregulars.
我很高兴能获得终身教职，我捍卫它对学术自由至关重要。但我们在艾肯的经验几乎没有提供任何证据表明该机构是有用的或合理的奖励。我们的兼职教师骨干，一只脚涉足工业界，另一只脚在哈佛大学，不仅提供了一流的教学，而且正是终身教职应该促进的那种连续性和机构忠诚度。来自 BBN 的 Woods、Gagliardi、Buzen、Mealy、Ornstein、McQuillan、Dave Walden 等人在科学和教育方面做出了重大贡献。我们一些最难忘的教师导师，不仅是 Cheatham，还有我自己的博士导师，皮尔斯哲学教授 Burt Dreben，在没有博士学位的情况下获得了永久职位，并且似乎同样因为这种缺陷而失去了教授的地位。无终身教职的“实践教授”头衔仍然存在，但今天的在职者中没有一个在工业界工作。教师招聘已经变得更具竞争力、专业化和系统化——而且，可以肯定的是，近亲繁殖更少了。然而，我不确定，考虑到所有因素，今天的学生会发现他们更客观地选择的教师比我们发现的忠实的非正规教师“更好”。
The last word goes to the Harvard bean counter who was keeping the books on the PDP-10 in 1975 and noticed that a sophomore had used more connect hours in the month of February than there were in the month of February. Bill Gates had, it seemed, invited in some programming assistants. Concerned about how this could be explained to a federal auditor, the administrator summoned Gates for an interview and reported the outcome of his cross-examination in these deathless words: “He did not understand the ramifications of his activities.” Perhaps true of Gates and perhaps not; but the same could be said of most of us who were in Aiken during that momentous decade. And it was true of Harvard too.
最后一句话要归功于哈佛 bean counter，他在 1975 年保存了 PDP-10 的账簿，并注意到一名大二学生在 2 月份使用的连接时间比 2 月份多。比尔·盖茨 （Bill Gates） 似乎邀请了一些编程助理。由于担心如何向联邦审计员解释这一点，这位行政长官传唤盖茨进行面谈，并用这些不死的话语报告了他的交叉询问结果：“他不明白他的活动的后果。也许盖茨是这样，也许不是;但在那个重要的十年里，我们大多数人在艾肯也是如此。哈佛也是如此。
Corrected 8/26/20: Danny Cohen, Ph.D. ’69, was an Israeli paratrooper, not a pilot. We regret the error.
20 年 8 月 26 日更正：Danny Cohen，博士 '69，是一名以色列伞兵，而不是飞行员。我们对这个错误感到遗憾。
Harry Lewis ’68, Ph.D. ’74, is Gordon McKay research professor of computer science. His collection of classic computer-science papers, Ideas That Created the Future, will be published by MIT Press in 2021.
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Computer science at Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/features-a-science-is-born