Dr. Dobb's Journal February 2001
Victor Grinich, one of the "Traitorous Eight" — the eight defectors from Shockley Semiconductor who founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 — has died at the age of 75. Grinich was the only electrical engineer among the eight scientists who founded Fairchild Semiconductor (the others were physicists and materials scientists).
Born to Croatian immigrant parents, Grinich was an expert in integrated circuits and, after leaving Fairchild, taught at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley and was the author of the widely used college textbook, Introduction to Integrated Circuits (ISBN 0070248753). Among the traitorous eight were Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore (the cofounders of Intel), Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kliner, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni, and Jay Last. Led by Robert Noyce, these scientists left Nobel Prize winner William Shockley's company due to Shockley's notoriously harsh and unpredictable management style (as well as his controversial views about race and intelligence) and founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which is credited with building the first mass-produced integrated circuit.
Frances Allen, Vinton Cerf, and Thomas Kilburn have been named Fellows of the Computer History Museum Center (http://www.computerhistory.org/).
Frances Allen, a pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers, helped create one of the first automatic debuggers as well as the Alpha code-breaking language. She is currently a consultant to IBM's Solutions and Services division, and in 1989, became the first woman to be named an IBM Fellow.
Vinton Cerf, together with Robert Kahn, developed TCP/IP in 1973. He founded The Internet Society in 1992 and served as its president for three years. He is a senior vice president at MCI/Worldcom and recently joined a team of engineers at NASA, charged with developing a wireless communications network for enabling Internet access in outer space.
Finally, Thomas Kilburn, working at the University of Manchester in the 1940s and '50s, is credited with many computer "firsts," including the Williams Tube (the first random access electronic storage device); Baby (the first working stored-program computer); the ATLAS machine (which pioneered new concepts such as paging, virtual memory, and multiprogramming); and in 1972, the MU5 programming language. Speaking via video link from Manchester, Kilburn said that he especially valued the museum's award "because I believe it has been suggested by peers in the States."
Competing in the southwest regional round of the Siemens Westinghouse Science and Technology Competition, two high school students from Saratoga High School in California won the team competition by developing a new lossless data compression algorithm called "LZC&L." Allan Chu, a sophomore, and Chun-Chieh Lin, a senior, came up with an enhanced and faster version of the LZ77 compression algorithm in wide use today.
According to Martin Wong, one of the judges of the competition and a computer science professor at the University of Texas, the new compression algorithm is based on two new techniques: the "composite fixed-variable-length coding" and the "offset-difference coding." The composite coding technique unifies fixed-length coding and variable-length coding into a single coding scheme. The offset-difference coding technique removes an inherent redundancy in previous coding schemes and hence can produce smaller compressed files. Experimental results on a set of standard benchmark test problems show that the new algorithm LZC&L outperforms published compression algorithms in the LZ77 family.
The Siemens Westinghouse competition is open to individuals and teams of high school students who develop independent research projects in the physical or biological sciences, or mathematics. For more information, see http://www.siemens-foundation.org/.
Jim Gray, manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center and senior researcher in the Scalable Servers Research Group, operates the TerraServer web site, a public database of high-resolution U.S. Geological Survey aerial imagery and topographical maps (http://terraserver.microsoft.net/). With 20 terabytes of disk storage, the TerraServer is one of the world's largest online databases. But the world is no longer enough. Gray has now set his sights on the skies, and is working with the astronomy community to build an international "virtual observatory."
In a presentation given at Stanford University, Gray estimated that all existing astronomy data sets would add up to a few petabytes — a size he calls "huge, but not impossible." The storage challenge is not so much one of memory, but of access. It would take about five and a half years to restore a petabyte database from tape. So Gray wants to do away with tape, store the data on mirrored disks at a federation of observatories, and have each observatory also mirror another site, so that ultimately the entire database would be stored online four times over. Automatic parallelism would then quadruple the read bandwidth. Because astronomers are unusually generous about sharing data, Gray is optimistic that his dream will become a reality.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/) is "looking for diverse, real-world examples of the ways in which the lives of ordinary fair users are strangled by the anticircumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)." The recent ruling against Eric Corley, who was ordered to take down DeCSS, makes it illegal to circumvent access controls, regardless of the reason. According to the EFF, Section 1201 of the DMCA violates the First Amendment right to Fair Use, and is hoping to find solid examples of how Fair Use applies to digital copying. "Points will be given for brevity, concreteness, and the ability to have your grandmother easily grasp the problem."