It is, I suppose, inevitable that 2011 should have seen the deaths of so many pioneers of computers & computing, since many would have been young men in the 1940s & 1950s. None of these has been met with the global outpouring of grief which we saw at the death of Steve Jobs.
One such was John McCarthy, who died on October 24. He invented the LISP programming language & is credited with coining the term Artificial Intelligence in 1955. He is said sometimes to have regretted not having come up instead with the term Computational Intelligence since AI came to be mixed up with the notion of making robots with human emotions – an idea which McCarthy rejected on the grounds that to simulate emotional behaviour is not at all the same thing as to experience it.
He also helped develop time-sharing, in the days when, rather than a kind of holiday home, the term referred to a way of making it possible for many users to have remote access to the same computer at the same time. Eventually this allowed users access via a phone line & a teletype machine &, with the development of satellite communications, regardless of the distance between them. For people of my generation this was every bit as exciting as the later developments of Apple & i; since few organisations could afford their own multimillion pound machine, pay-as you-go was our only hope of access.
But the benefits were considerable even if the machine was local. No longer did you have to write out your programs laboriously by hand on specially designed pads of green & white paper, deliver them to an office where someone had the equipment to transcribe them into a format which the computer could understand, then wait for a week to see if your program had worked. Now you could just type it in directly yourself & get the result straight away, printed out at the astonishing speed of 10 characters per second.
The Times obituarist described him as a rational humanist, optimistic about the role of science & technology in sustainable human development, an advocate of nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, dismissive of the ‘superstitious’ belief in the benefits of organic food, despairing of media headlines about health & scientific research, & sceptical about the scale of the threat from global warming.
Sounds like a man I wish I had known.
