23 Feb
2018
23 Feb
'18
9:44 p.m.
We lost Claude Shannon on this day in 2001. He was a mathematician,
electrical engineer, and cryptographer; he is regarded as the "father" of
information theory, and he pioneered digital circuit design. Amongst
other things he built a barbed-wire telegraph, the "Ultimate Machine" (it
reached up and switched itself off), a Roman numeral computer ("THROBAC"),
the Minivac 601 (a digital trainer), a Rubik's Cube solver, a mechanical
mouse that learned how to solve mazes, and outlined a chess program
(pre-Belle). He formulated the security mantra "The enemy knows the
system", and did top-secret work in WW-2 on crypto and fire-control
systems.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
25 Feb
25 Feb
12:03 a.m.
In the early 70s I became aware of Shannon, the Nyquist Theorem, and digital
audio, and naively started collecting TTL parts to try to build my own music
computer (I still have bags of those parts in the garage...).
From
http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/etext/digital_audio/chapter5_digital.shtml:
"Twenty years later, Claude Shannon, mathematician and early computer
scientist, also working at Bells Labs and then M.I.T., developed a proof for
the Nyquist theory (thereby making it a theorem)*. The importance of their
work to information theory, computing, networks and digital audio cannot be
understated."
CHS
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Horsfall
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 3:44 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: [TUHS] RIP Claude Shannon
We lost Claude Shannon on this day in 2001. He was a mathematician,
electrical engineer, and cryptographer; he is regarded as the "father" of
information theory, and he pioneered digital circuit design. Amongst
other things he built a barbed-wire telegraph, the "Ultimate Machine" (it
reached up and switched itself off), a Roman numeral computer ("THROBAC"),
the Minivac 601 (a digital trainer), a Rubik's Cube solver, a mechanical
mouse that learned how to solve mazes, and outlined a chess program
(pre-Belle). He formulated the security mantra "The enemy knows the
system", and did top-secret work in WW-2 on crypto and fire-control
systems.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
12:44 p.m.
Maybe more accurate, "cannot be *overstated*"? :-)
- Mike Markowski
On 02/24/2018 07:03 PM, Charles H Sauer wrote:
In the early 70s I became aware of Shannon, the
Nyquist Theorem, and
digital audio, and naively started collecting TTL parts to try to build
my own music computer (I still have bags of those parts in the garage...).
From
http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/etext/digital_audio/chapter5_digital.shtml:
"Twenty years later, Claude Shannon, mathematician and early computer
scientist, also working at Bells Labs and then M.I.T., developed a proof
for the Nyquist theory (thereby making it a theorem)*. The importance of
their work to information theory, computing, networks and digital audio
cannot be understated."
CHS
-----Original Message----- From: Dave Horsfall
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 3:44 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: [TUHS] RIP Claude Shannon
We lost Claude Shannon on this day in 2001. He was a mathematician,
electrical engineer, and cryptographer; he is regarded as the "father" of
information theory, and he pioneered digital circuit design. Amongst
other things he built a barbed-wire telegraph, the "Ultimate Machine" (it
reached up and switched itself off), a Roman numeral computer ("THROBAC"),
the Minivac 601 (a digital trainer), a Rubik's Cube solver, a mechanical
mouse that learned how to solve mazes, and outlined a chess program
(pre-Belle). He formulated the security mantra "The enemy knows the
system", and did top-secret work in WW-2 on crypto and fire-control
systems.
2:26 p.m.
Of course -- wonder how many people have read that as intended vs. what it
says.
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Markowski
Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2018 6:44 AM
To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] RIP Claude Shannon
Maybe more accurate, "cannot be *overstated*"? :-)
- Mike Markowski
On 02/24/2018 07:03 PM, Charles H Sauer wrote:
In the early 70s I became aware of Shannon, the
Nyquist Theorem, and
digital audio, and naively started collecting TTL parts to try to build my
own music computer (I still have bags of those parts in the garage...).
From
http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/etext/digital_audio/chapter5_digital.shtml:
"Twenty years later, Claude Shannon, mathematician and early computer
scientist, also working at Bells Labs and then M.I.T., developed a proof
for the Nyquist theory (thereby making it a theorem)*. The importance of
their work to information theory, computing, networks and digital audio
cannot be understated."
CHS
-----Original Message----- From: Dave Horsfall
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2018 3:44 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: [TUHS] RIP Claude Shannon
We lost Claude Shannon on this day in 2001. He was a mathematician,
electrical engineer, and cryptographer; he is regarded as the "father" of
information theory, and he pioneered digital circuit design. Amongst
other things he built a barbed-wire telegraph, the "Ultimate Machine" (it
reached up and switched itself off), a Roman numeral computer ("THROBAC"),
the Minivac 601 (a digital trainer), a Rubik's Cube solver, a mechanical
mouse that learned how to solve mazes, and outlined a chess program
(pre-Belle). He formulated the security mantra "The enemy knows the
system", and did top-secret work in WW-2 on crypto and fire-control
systems.
11:31 p.m.
Mitchell Waldrop's "The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and
the Revolution That Made Computing Personal" book has probably
been discussed on this list in the past. It has pages full of
fascinating stuff about Claude Shannon & his work. For instance:
"A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" has
just the kind of cerebral exuberance you'd expect from a
very bright twenty-one-year-old. Shannon's thesis is
downright fun to read--and strangely compelling, given
what's happened in the six decades since it was written.
...
That ability, in turn, is ultimately what makes a modern
digital computer so much more than just an adding machine:
it can work its way through a sequence of such decisions
automatically. In a word, it can be programmed. And that's
why "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" is
arguably the most influential master's thesis of the
twentieth century: in it Claude Shannon laid the theoretical
foundation for all of modern computer design
...
Legend has it that Claude Shannon published "A Mathematical
Theory of Communication" in 1948 only because his boss at
Bell Labs finally badgered him into it. And whatever the
truth of that story, the point is that no one who knew
Shannon has any trouble believing it.
"He wrote beautiful papers--when he wrote," says Robert
Fano, who became a leader of MIT's information-theory group
in the 1950s and still has a reverential photograph of
Shannon hanging in his office. "And he gave beautiful talks-
when he gave a talk. But he hated to do it."
It wasn't a matter of Shannon's being lazy, Fano says; he
was constantly filling up notebooks with ideas, theorems,
and calculations. He just wouldn't publish--or not very
often, anyway. No, Shannon's reticence seems to have been
more a matter of extraordinary self-sufficiency.
and much more. A book well worth reading.
2246
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2248
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4 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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Bakul Shah -
Charles H Sauer -
Dave Horsfall -
Mike Markowski