Speaker
David Williams
Description
"Where are your Wares"
Computing in the broadest sense has a long history, and Babbage (1791-1871),
Hollerith (1860-1929) Zuse (1910-1995), many other early pioneers, and the wartime
code breakers, all made important breakthroughs. CERN was founded as the first
valve-based digital computers were coming onto the market.
I will consider 50 years of Computing at CERN from the following viewpoints:-
Where did we come from? What happened? Who was involved? Which wares (hardware,
software, netware, peopleware and now middleware) were important? Where did
computers (not) end up in a physics lab? What has been the impact of computing on
particle physics? What about the impact of particle physics computing on other
sciences? And the impact of our computing outside the scientific realm?
I hope to conclude by looking at where we are going, and by reflecting on why
computing is likely to remain challenging for a long time yet.
The topic is so vast that my remarks are likely to be either prejudiced or trivial,
or both.
