
Dijkstra: Philips and I – a few snapshots (2001) [pdf] - tomrod
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1316.PDF
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loquor
The eminent researchers in Distributed Systems are so interesting. I find
Edsger Dijkstra and Leslie Lamport to be very colorful and inspiring
characters.

Edsger Dijkstra was a pioneer in computing. Yet he lived like a luddite. He
did not own a television or go to the movies and did not even own a personal
computer until much later in his career! He enjoyed playing the piano and left
behind a large amount of papers and documentation - both personal and
technical.

Leslie Lamport wrote one seminal paper after another in the field of
distributed computing and concurrency. He co-created LaTex and the Paxos
algorithm. He then rigorously defined the temporal logic of actions (TLA)
which is a mathematically correct basis for a checking a program's
behaviour/models at a high level. I took his TLA+ web course recently. The
presentation of the course is fantastic. His mirthful yet sincere attitude
really shines through in it.

Are there any pioneering researchers who you find fascinating?

~~~
tomrod
Thanks for pointing out TLA!

Hawking was great, and wrote a fantastic book called "God Invented the
Integers" where he details fascinating seminal math contributions.

I'm a geek for Horn and Johnson of Matrix Analysis fame.

Munkres topology has been bedtime reading for a long time.

Quite a few philosophers strike my fancy, especially the existential school.

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tr352
The history of Philips' computer divisions through the years is interesting
and rather obscure. After building mainframes in the 60ies (P1000) they went
on to develop minis such as the P800 and P4000 in the 70ies/80ies. As far as I
know this was both developed and marketed mainly in Europe, the P800 for
industrial control and P4000 as an office computer. This was very proprietary
stuff (both hardware and software) and details are sadly hard to find online
these days. Later, Philips abandoned their home-grown efforts and went on to
produce PC clones, although I believe there was also something Unix-based
(P9000?).

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SJSque
> ... I was introduced to the people who built computers at Philips Research
> Laboratories in Eindhoven. It was a type of people I did not know, I found
> them very strange and they did not inspire confidence at all. Later I
> learned that I had been introduced to electronic engineers.

Brilliant. I'll be sure to share this with my electronic-engineer colleagues
on the High Tech Campus (the former Philips Research campus) here in
Eindhoven. :)

