how did your career start?
It all started in 1951, when my father
enabled me to go to a programming
course in Cambridge, England. It was
a frightening experience: the first time
that I left the Netherlands, the first time
I ever had to understand people speaking English. I was all by myself, trying
to follow a course on a totally new topic.
But I liked it very much. The Netherlands was such a small country that
Aad van Wijngaarden, who was the director of the Computation Department
of the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, knew of this, and he offered me a
job. And on a part-time basis, I became
the programmer of the Mathematical
Centre in March of 1952. They didn’t
have computers yet; they were trying to
build them. The first eight years of my
programming there I developed the
basic software for a series of machines
being built at the Mathematical Centre. In those years I was a very conservative programmer. The way in which
programs were written down, the form
of the instruction code on paper, the
library organization; it was very much
modeled after what I had seen in 1951
in Cambridge.
When you got married in 1957, you
could not enter the term “programmer”
into your marriage record?
That’s true. I think that “
programmer” became recognized in the early
1960s. I was supposed to study theoretical physics, and that was the reason for
going to Cambridge. However, in 1955
after three years of programming, while
I was still a student, I concluded that the
intellectual challenge of programming
was greater than the intellectual challenge of theoretical physics, and as a
result I chose programming. Programming was so unforgiving. If something
went wrong, I mean a zero is a zero and
a one is a one. I had never used someone else’s software. If something went
wrong, I had done it. And it was that unforgivingness that challenged me.
I also began to realize that in some
strange way, programs could become
very complicated or tricky. So it was
in 1955 when I decided not to become
a physicist, to become a programmer
instead. At the time programming
didn’t look like doing science; it was
just a mixture of being ingenious and
being accurate. I envied my hardware
i had never
used someone
else’s software.
if something
went wrong, i had
done it. and it was
that unforgivingness
that challenged me.
friends, because if you asked them
what their professional competence
consisted of, they could point out that
they knew everything about triodes,
pentodes, and other electronic gear.
And there was nothing I could point to!
I spoke with van Wijngaarden in
1955, and he agreed that there was no
such thing as a clear scientific component in computer programming, but
that I might very well be one of the people called to make it a science. And at
the time, I was the kind of guy to whom
you could say such things. As I said, I
was trained to become a scientist.
What projects did you work on in Am-
sterdam?
When I came in 1952, they were
working on the ARRA,a but they could
not get it reliable, and an updated version was built, using selenium diodes.
And then the Mathematical Centre
built a machine for Fokker Aircraft
Industry. So the FERTA,b an updated
version of the ARRA, was built and installed at Schiphol. The installation
I did together with the young Gerrit
Blaauw who later became one of the
designers of the IBM 360, with Gene
Amdahl and Fred Brooks.
One funny story about the Fairchild
F27: On my first visit to Australia, I flew
on a big 747 from Amsterdam to Los
Angeles, then on another 747 I flew to
a Automatische Relais Rekenmachine Amsterdam = Automatic Relay Calculator Amsterdam.
Sydney or Melbourne. The final part of
the journey was on an F27 to Canber-
ra. And we arrived and I met my host,
whom I had never met before. And he
was very apologetic that this world
traveler had to do the last leg of the
journey on such a shaky two-engine
turboprop. And it gave me the dear
opportunity for a one-upmanship that
I never got again. I could honestly say,
“Dr. Stanton, I felt quite safe: I calcu-
lated the resonance frequencies of the
wings myself.” [laughter]
In 1956, as soon as I had decided to
become a programmer, I finished my
studies as quickly as possible, since I
no longer felt welcome at the univer-
sity: the physicists considered me as
a deserter, and the mathematicians
were dismissive and somewhat con-
temptuous about computing. In the
mathematical culture of those days
you had to deal with infinity to make
your topic scientifically respectable.
there’s a curious story behind your
“shortest path” algorithm.
In 1956 I did two important things,
I got my degree and we had the festive
opening of the ARMAC.c We had to have
a demonstration. Now the ARRA, a few
years earlier, had been so unreliable
that the only safe demonstration we
dared to give was the generation of random numbers, but for the more reliable
ARMAC I could try something more ambitious. For a demonstration for non-computing people you have to have a
problem statement that non-mathema-ticians can understand; they even have
to understand the answer. So I designed
a program that would find the shortest
route between two cities in the Netherlands, using a somewhat reduced road-map of the Netherlands, on which I had
selected 64 cities (so that in the coding
six bits would suffice to identify a city).
What’s the shortest way to travel
from Rotterdam to Groningen? It is the
algorithm for the shortest path, which
I designed in about 20 minutes. One
morning I was shopping in Amsterdam
with my young fiancée, and tired, we sat
down on the café terrace to drink a cup
of coffee and I was just thinking about
whether I could do this, and I then
c Automatische Rekenmachine MAthematische
Centrum = Automatic Calculator Mathematical Centre
