CUCPS 1999-2000

In the academic year 1999-2000 CUCPS held the following talks, in the Hopkinson lecture theatre on the New Museums Site.

• On 12th October 1999, David Hartley spoke to an audience of 8 on Serving the University. Computing in Cambridge, from the foundation of the Mathematical Laboratory through EDSAC and to the present day, has always been intended to provide useful services to real users; Dr Hartley, Director of the University Computing Service from its foundation in 1970 to 1994, spoke about the history of computing services in Cambridge.
• On 26th October 1999, David Braben, author of the excellent Elite game on the BBC micro, along with Zarch, gave a question and answer session on the computer game industry, from Elite to the future; this attracted a record audience of 27.
• On 25th January 2000, Arthur Norman spoke to an audience of 11 on Writing compilers for Acorn: Cambridge Lisp and the Norcroft C compiler, discussing his work for Acorn including an implementation of floating point, shrinking code to fit in the ROM space available, documentation for a Lisp system, a chess program, an interim assembler for the 32016, another Lisp system, and the Norcroft C compiler written with Alan Mycroft and still in use.
• On 15th February 2000, Andy Hopper spoke to an audience of 10 on the Cambridge Ring network, a 10Mbit/s network the design of which started in 1974, and which led on to the 100Mbit/s Cambridge Fast Ring in 1983-5, a precursor to ATM, and provided inspiration for other computing developments. Ultimately there were three rings, including a fibre section, with about 100 diverse devices connected.
• On 29th February 2000, Tony Duell spoke to an audience of 5 on The HP9100 Calculator. The HP9100A was Hewlett-Packard's first calculator, introduced in 1968 costing just under $5000. It used a CRT for display (of three stack levels, with seven-segment digit displays emulated) and contained no ICs except for some opamps in the magnetic card reader. Tony, having acquired an HP9100B, the next model, noted that HP were unable to supply a service manual for what remained a perfectly useful calculator, so set out to produce his own; over a thousand diode gates later he emerged with a good idea of how the machine worked. At the talk he dismantled an HP9100 (but unfortunately could not demonstrate it because it had developed a fault that afternoon, and he did not have the necessary replacement transistor with him), and gave us an insight into some of the ideas behind the design. Dr Duell has kindly permitted us to distribute his notes for this talk.
• On Thursday 15th June 2000, Eugene Miya of NASA Ames Research Center spoke to an audience of 8 on succ(succ(ARPAnet)): the US Federal Government's next big thing: Digital Libraries. He discussed the history of US Federal Government computing projects, from the ARPAnet through supercomputing in universities and now digital libraries, with the DLI1 and DLI2 initiatives, which now extend to international collaboration which brought him to the UK for a conference, the occasion of his being in the UK providing for this talk to CUCPS. The most visible result of the DLI1 initiative is the Google search engine.

Minutes of the AGM of 15 February 2000, which took just two minutes and twenty seconds, are also available.

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