The CoMpUteR hiStoRY Museum has an active program to gather videotaped histories from people who have done pioneering work in this first century of the information age. These tapes are a rich aggregation of stories that are preserved in the collection, transcribed, and made available on the Web to researchers, students, and anyone curious about how invention happens. The oral histories are conversations about people’s lives. We want to know about their upbringing, their families, their education, and their jobs. But above all, we want to know how they came to the passion and creativity that leads to innovation.
Presented here are excerptsa from an interview with Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, U. K.
and Emeritus Professor of Computing at Oxford University, conducted in September 2006 by Jonathan P. Bowen, the chairman of Museophile Limited, and Emeritus Professor at London South Bank University.
What did you want to be growing up? I thought I would like to be a writer. I
didn’t know quite what I was going to be writing, but at school I was a rather studious and uncommunicative child, and so everybody called me “Professor.” I found the works of Bernard Shaw very inspiring. He’s of course an iconoclast, so he would appeal to an adolescent. Also Bertrand Russell, who wrote on social matters as well as philosophical and mathematical matters.
a Oral histories are not scripted, and a transcript of casual speech is very different from what one would write. I have taken the liberty of editing and reordering freely for presentation. For the original transcript, see http://archive. computerhistory.org/search/oh/.
—Len Shustek
What was your first exposure to computers? I began thinking about computers as a sort of philosophical possibility during my undergraduate course at Oxford University. I took an interest in
mathematical logic, which is the basis of the formal treatment of computer programming. I was sufficiently interested that one of my few job interviews was with the British Steel just after I finished my university course in 1956. I was attracted by their use of computers to control a steel milling line. A little later I attended an interview at Leo Computers Ltd. in London, who were building their own computers to look after the clerical operations of their restaurant chain. But I didn’t follow up on either of those prospects of employment.
What was the first program you wrote? In 1958 I attended a course in Mercury Autocode, which was the programming language used on a computer that Oxford University was just purchasing from Ferranti. I wrote a program that solved a two-person game using a technique which I found in a book on game theory by von Neumann and Morgen-stern. I don’t know whether it worked or not. It certainly ran to the end, but I forgot to put in any check on whether the answers it produced were correct, and the calculations were too difficult for me to do by hand afterward.
Photogra Ph courtesy of microsoft research
What was programming like in those days? Very different from today. The programs were all prepared on punched cards or paper tape. It might take a day to get them punched up from the cod-
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