
MIT-related work that has transformed computer science - kp25
https://www.csail.mit.edu/node/2223
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madhusudancs
I think many of these claims as "MIT's contribution to transform Computer
Science" is unjustified. Particularly, wasn't Bob Kahn already out of MIT when
Vint Cerf and him created TCP/IP? What was MIT's role here? Just that they
paid salary to Bob Kahn in the distant past?

On the other hand, when I think of MIT, the most important contribution to
Computer Science that comes to my mind is Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch's proof
to Brewer's Conjecture, famously called CAP theorem. This proof is so
profound, so important to Computer Science and the way we build large-scale
computer systems today. And d'uh, it has been left out.

This looks like pure marketing to me. And in some sense misleading.

~~~
ekianjo
Yeah, and if I remember correctly, RMS's work on GNU was not affiliated with
MIT and he did it on top of his actual responsibilities in the AI Lab. It's
like saying your high school is a great place to be educated because you
became famous down the road.

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lispm
The World Wide Web was INVENTED at CERN in Europe, I thought.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web)

After that Tim Berners-Lee went to the MIT and founded the W3C.

~~~
Create
You mean the botched SGML clone sent over RPC clicked together in NextStep?

~~~
Create
dear downvoter: I am happy to counter each and every argument you may have, in
case you should have any.

Otherwise forget the PR and dig deeper than usual.

ps: Actually, this MIT piece is like the CERN web pieces, run by the PR
department of said institutions.

Such accomplishments are rarely if ever obtained by a single lab, or
institution for that matter. They are rather embodiments of the spirit of the
times, the effort of many of a given era implemented with the technology then
available (see Otlet). The only question is, who gets to win the (often
propaganda) fight for the claim and who gets to write history.

~~~
abalone
You're most likely being downvoted for tone and for lack of any support for
your argument. HTML was based on SGMLguid... with one exception.

 _The only radical change was the addition of the all important anchor ( <a>)
link, without which the WWW wouldn't have taken off._ [1]

Minor detail.

[1]
[http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/](http://infomesh.net/html/history/early/)

~~~
Create
prewar networked knowledge-base, pre-Bush:

[https://archive.org/details/paulotlet](https://archive.org/details/paulotlet)

or google youtu.be Paul Otlet, visioning a web in 1934

biased incomplete list of link implementations pre HTML:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext#Implementations)

The reason why WWW has taken off is very well described in:

High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet
Wars.

and has very little, if anything to do with the <a> incarnation, which as you
say is a minor detail.

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abalone
Most of this work is publicly funded. They whole VC industry is built on it.
It should return more of its profits to the public, just as it would to early-
stage investors.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The industries have returned value to the public in the form of taxes, jobs,
and improved quality of life. It's already a two way street.

~~~
abalone
Ok, I'll bite. Next time you invest in a startup, or if you ever were to, you
agree to forego equity. Instead take a cut of the sales tax, a job, and the
opportunity to purchase the product. Fair deal?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
That's basically what I do as a tax payer anyways...especially when it comes
to investing in basic research, I can live with that.

~~~
abalone
The question is, would an angel investor take that deal? The answer is
obvious: no way.

An analogy would be if we all belonged to a VC fund, and the fund manager took
a deal where instead of equity they take a cut of future sales tax. Imagine
that. No way you'd consider that a fair deal, even if the startup produced
some nice products and job opportunities.

You'd want equity if it was your personal investment. Why should it be any
different for taxpayer funds?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Individuals are generally selfish and don't think very well about collective
society good, but ever since the Neolithic revolution we've been pretty good
about collective investment and risk.

Asking for direct obvious returns from research funds means much useful
research won't get done, and researchers will focus on more incremental surer
bets (like industrial research or startups). We'd just completely kill our
society's competitiveness and might as well start learning Chinese to better
welcome our Han overlords.

~~~
abalone
The entire U.S. system of public high tech investment is mostly done under the
pretext of military spending. The military has specific objectives and is
looking for clear ROI, but that doesn't impair their ability to invest in core
science. They just take a longer term view.

Licensing core tech (instead of giving it away) is not the same as asking for
direct returns. It's just giving the taxpayers their fair share of the
eventual returns on their investment, instead of letting VCs collect it all.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The whole space program was about developing ICBMs. WII led to huge
technological advances (computers for one), etc...

I'm not sure what the mix today is between military-oriented and social-
oriented spending is. The fed obviously give lots of money to lots of research
universities, medical oriented research with no obvious military applications
coming up at the top of list.

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muneeb
The title is misleading. It makes you think all this research happened at MIT.

~~~
muneeb
For example: #12 The PC (1973), this is Butler Lampson's work on Alto while at
PARC. MIT (the university) had nothing to do with it. Also, #17 TCP/IP (1977),
Bob Kahn was at MIT for 2 years or so a decade before working on TCP/IP.

Including such things takes away attention from "pure" MIT inventions e.g.,
RSA (all of that work was done by Ron Rivest while at MIT).

~~~
dang
That's a fair point, and we edited the title accordingly.

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dalek2point3
my favorite is the GUI. While many credit XEROX with the GUI, most of the
ideas came out of the quite amazing Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland. As an MIT
student, this list makes awesome reading!

Here is the relevant snippet:

Nearly 50 years before the iPad, an MIT PhD student had already come up with
the idea of directly interfacing with a computer screen. Ivan Sutherland’s
“Sketchpad” allowed users to draw geometric shapes with a touch-pen,
pioneering the practice of “computer-assisted drafting” that has proven vital
for architects, planners, and now even toddlers.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The work demonstrated by Engelbart in his MOD was actually done at SRI, which
then inspired XEROX.

When Alan Kay started his PhD at U of Utah, he was given Sutherland's
dissertation to start off with (where Sutherland was a professor). That
eventually led to his ground breaking Dynapad concept.

Anyways, back then, everyone knew everyone.

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chiachun
I believe that SICP should also be counted as one itself.

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randomsearch
"50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science"

This is really misleading and makes MIT look bad. It's just spin.

MIT has done plenty of great work; there is no need to try to take credit for
things that they really can't lay claim to.

Many examples elsewhere in the comments, but I'll throw in that Ethernet was
not invented at MIT. I know the main title now says "MIT-related", but the
article is not so modest.

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christiansmith
#24 caught my attention with the poem/song about the algorithm behind the
Spanning Tree Protocol:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE_AbM8ZykI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE_AbM8ZykI)

Somewhere in between music school and programming for a living, I had the
superficially nonsensical epiphany that algorithms and data structures were
essentially music... just another language for expressing ideas about
combinations and time. It's interesting to see this other perspective... an
algorithm expressed as a song for the purpose of clearly communicating how it
works.

The interview with Radia Perlman is a good read too:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/radia-
perlman-dont-call-me-the-mother-of-the-internet/284146/)

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kercker
The title should be "50 ways that MIT has transformed computer industry". Not
too much are about "computer science". To say that MIT has transformed
computer industry, it should include include someone like Leslie Lamport.

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rbanffy
So, Lisp machines get a mention, but Lisp itself does not.

Who writes these things?

~~~
anaphor
Well Lisp itself is a Stanford invention. Scheme is an MIT invention. I agree
that Scheme deserves a mention though, even though it isn't widely popular, it
certainly transformed how people thought about education and things like
garbage collection.

~~~
lispm
Sure not.

'Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT). '

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dmolony
Dan may not be happy -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin)

~~~
Al__Dante
Also because spelling is apparently not one of MIT's 50 achievments...

~~~
Al__Dante
And not mine either :-)

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puppetmaster3
Some PR?

When I think MIT I think of Aaron Swartz.

~~~
TTPrograms
Because inaction in response to federal charges being brought against an
unconnected individual outweighs more than 100 years of academic contribution.

~~~
sitkack
That isn't how it works. You don't get to bank being a not-immoral so you can
use it later.

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serf
even if it did , MIT would likely still be working on the morality-debt
incurred during their involvements with various wars.

(along with every other famous tech school)

[http://web.mit.edu/physics/about/history/1940-1945.html](http://web.mit.edu/physics/about/history/1940-1945.html)

~~~
sitkack
I think this actually played into Swartz case. That possibly MIT didn't want
waken a moral/ethical discussion around technology which is exactly what Aaron
was trying to do. His message wasn't dangerous, but the conclusion of it means
that the the army of engineers who work on MIT's weapons programs could
disrupt a huge cash cow.

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stillsut
Clearly one of them is not writing click bait headlines:

50? Ain't nobody got time for that...

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nkozyra
Is there a school that's done more for computer science than MIT? I can think
of a few contenders - and obviously this is largely subjective - but when I
think computer science in the U.S. I think MIT, Stanford and Cal-Poly in that
order.

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aroman
...you think Cal-Poly over Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley? Really?

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thesimpsons1022
probably went to cal-poly lol.

~~~
nkozyra
I'm not familiar with the lol campus.

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kijin
It's interesting that they include the FSF, Internet Archive, Creative
Commons, and Open Courseware among their "computer science" contributions.
These are more political than scientific, although some of them did end up
contributing massively to the development of computer science.

Now let's talk about some ways in which MIT _hindered_ the development of
computer science, including political hindrances.

1\. Complicity in the persecution of Aaron Swartz (2011)

2\. Anyone else?

