Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by
John P. Carlin
and
Garrett M. Graff
Published 15 Oct 2018
It made sense back during an era when punch cards could only store a limited number of characters, and, even though it was identified as early as 1958 as a future problem, the practice continued through the 1970s because memory remained expensive, costing as much as $1 a byte. For each individual company at the time, the trade-off seemed worth it in the moment. “It was the fault of everybody, just everybody,” said computer pioneer Bob Bemer, who was one of the first to identify the looming glitch.12 Ultimately, fixing the Y2K bug cost US companies and the US government an estimated $100 billion.13 Twenty years after Clark’s original paper on the internet’s goals, he’d revised the list. When in 2008 he was asked by the National Science Foundation to imagine a new internet, he put at the top of his list of goals one thing: security.14 America’s early lead online allowed us to remain at the forefront of technology; the world’s technology titans—and the largest companies of the last ten years—are, for now, still mostly US companies—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and others.
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Craig Timberg, “Net of Insecurity: A Flaw in the Design,” Washington Post, May 30, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/30/net-of-insecurity-part-1//?utm_term=.0126c73b6f8. 11. David D. Clark, “The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols,” Computer Communication Review, vol. 18, no. 4, August 1988, 106–114, tdc.iorc.depaul.edu/media/internet-design-philosophy.pdf. 12. Patricia Sullivan, “Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer, 84,” Washington Post, June 25, 2004, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4138-2004Jun24.html. 13. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Y2K Repair Bill: $100 Billion,” Washington Post, November 18, 1999, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-11/18/077r-111899-idx.html. 14. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity: A Flaw in the Design.” 15.
The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise
by
Nathan L. Ensmenger
Published 31 Jul 2010
What caught the eye of the “Talk of the Town” columnists, however, was the curious addition of an appeal to candidates who enjoyed “musical composition and arrangement,” liked “chess, bridge or anagrams,” or simply possessed “a lively imagination.”2 Struck by the incongruity between these seemingly different pools of potential applicants, one technical and the other artistic, the columnists themselves “made bold to apply” to the IBM manager in charge of programmer recruitment. “Not that we wanted a programming job, we told him; we just wondered if anyone else did.”3 Figure 3.1 IBM Advertisement, New York Times, May 31, 1969. The IBM manager they spoke to was Robert W. Bemer, a “fast-talking, sandy-haired man of about thirty-five,” who by virtue of his eight-years experience was already considered, in the fast-paced world of electronic computing, “an old man with a long beard.” It was from Bemer that they learned of the fifteen thousand existing computer programmers.
Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by
Andrew L. Russell
Published 27 Apr 2014
Jesiek, Between Discipline and Profession: A History of Persistent Instability in the Field of Computer Engineering, circa 1951–2006 (PhD dissertation, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2006). 50 See “X3.2 Documents 100–599,” Honeywell, Inc., X3.2 Standards Subcommittee Records, Charles Babbage Institute, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Box 1, Folder 21 [hereafter X3.2 Standards Subcommittee Records] and “Materials on proposed American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), 1962,” X3.2 Standards Subcommittee Records, Box 1, Folder 2. See also Gerald W. Brock, “Competition, Standards, and Self-Regulation in the Computer Industry,” in Richard E. Caves and Marc J. Roberts, eds., Regulating the Product: Quality and Variety (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1975), 85–91. 51 Bob Bemer, “Thoughts on the Past and Future,” http://www.bobbemer.com (accessed May 22, 2011); W. E. Andrus to Business Equipment Manufacturers Association, June 6, 1962, X3.2 Standards Subcommittee Records, Box 1, Folder 2. The alternative code was EBCDIC, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code. 52 Brock, “Competition, Standards and Self-Regulation in the Computer Industry,” 88. 53 Brock, “Competition, Standards and Self-Regulation in the Computer Industry,” 91. 54 FORTRAN history has been documented in great depth and breadth.
The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet
by
David Kahn
Published 1 Feb 1963
Only a handful of commercial codes—probably all private—were compiled in the 1950s, and it is almost certain that since 1960 not one has been. There is today not a single practicing code compiler in the United States, and probably not one in the world. Even an injection of the wonder drug of modern business—the electronic computer—failed to stem the decline. Robert W. Bemer of I.B.M. proposed placing a business vocabulary in a computer memory and assigning digital “codewords” to its words and phrases on the basis of frequency—shorter groups of digits for the common phrases, longer groups for the less used ones. The computer would automatically encode the message.
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Hardie translation. 848 unpopularity of pronounceability: Friedman, Report, 50-58. 849 Cortina proposals: Friedman, Report, 59-70. 849 three vowels per codeword: Friedman and Mendelsohn, “Notes on Code Words,” 394. 849 effect of teletypewriters: Friedman, Report, 62. 849 effect of 1932 regulations: Jesse F. Gelders, “The Strange Language of the Cables,” Popular Science Monthly, CXXVIII (March, 1936), 22-23, 86. 850 not a single practicing code compiler today: Mitchel interview. 850 “digital shorthand”: Robert W. Bemer, “Do It By the Numbers—Digital Shorthand,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, III (1960), 530-536; mimeographed I.B.M. press release, “ ‘Digital Shorthand’ Can Triple Data Link Capacity,” July 5, 1960. Chapter 23 CIPHERS IN THE PAST TENSE For the problem in general, see F.