From Baker Street To Binary (Henry Ledgard)
From Baker Street to Binary (Henry Ledgard, E. Patrick McQuail, & Andrew Singer) – One of the first books I ever read on programming was Henry Ledgard’s BASIC tutorial, which used Sherlock Holmes’ milieu as a pedagogical conceit – Holmes uses the newly-invented Difference Engine to solve cases, and the reader writes or analyzes the programs he uses. It was fun – I was about ten at the time, and missed a lot of the point, but it was still fun and probably influenced the way I think today to some extent. This is not that volume, although it re-uses a chapter from it. It’s more of a tutorial on computers and what they’re capable of, written in 1983. A wonderful historical document, then showing something of the state of the art 25 years ago. It’s worth reading, just so you can remind yourself when you’re done that this is ten years before the world-wide-whatsit metastasized, and we stepped on the slippery slope down to the mess we’re in today.
In other oddly short periods of time, it’s worth noting that the steam engine in the United States had a run of just over a century, and that when UNIX was being written, steam engines were still being manufactured in this country. File this next to the notion that it’s a hundred years from the Civil War to Woodstock. One human lifespan could encompass the blues from emancipation to Jimi Hendrix.
And that’s why I like to read obsolete technical books – they remind you that life is long and history is short.
Leave a comment