diary60s

Dijkstra during the 1960s. The following post refers to my journal article about the Dijkstra of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Subsequent posts on this page either discuss this article or address EWDs that Dijkstra wrote during the 1960s.

Strachey and ApSimon, 1965

Dated: 

1 November 2017

In 1965 Christopher Strachey introduced his termination problem, which I also call Strachey's Halting Problem in my writings, to the readership of The Computer Journal. Specifically, Strachey provided a “proof” that it is

impossible to write a program which can examine any other program and tell, in every case, if it will terminate or get into a closed loop when it is run. [5]

Tags: 

Multiprogramming: from Symmetries to Cases

Dated: 

early 1963

Dijkstra tackled the problem of allowing multiple users share the university's X8 computer and its peripheral hardware devices (EWD 51). To solve this problem, Dijkstra first reformulated it in terms of as many symmetries as he could find, thereby obtaining a more general problem description.

Tags: 

Program Execution as a Living Tree

Dated: 

early 1963

In the first half of 1963, Dijkstra described the execution of a program as a living “tree” that can grow “branches” and “twigs”. As the tree gets older — that is, as the execution of the program progresses — branches and twigs can fall off the tree, and others can grow in their place. Dijkstra used the metaphor of the living tree to unify three seemingly disparate topics: dynamic memory management, subroutine invocations, and multiprogramming.

Tags: 

Disobedient John

Dated: 

early 1962

In early 1962, Edsger W. Dijkstra presented an analogy of a classroom teacher calling upon one of her pupils. By doing so, he conveyed some subtleties of “dynamic memory management” and “concurrent process behavior”.

Tags: 

Three Snapshots of Dijkstra's Career

“I still remember it well, the day my future husband entered my life”, Ria Debets-Dijkstra recalls. “He was a good-looking man, 20 years of age. He entered our Computing Department with a cane!” [1]. The Computing Department was part of the newly founded Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam. Ria Debets-Dijkstra had already been working there for two years before she saw Edsger Dijkstra on that eventful day in 1951. Dijkstra officially joined the Computing Department in March of the following year.

Tags: 

Dijkstra's Unifications versus the Case Distinctions of Irons & Feurzeig

Dated: 

1960

Toward the end of my paper `Dijkstra's Rallying Cry for Generalization ...' I briefly describe the work of Irons and Feurzeig. These two men had by 1960 also implemented ALGOL60's recursive procedure just like Dijkstra and Zonneveld. Their solution, however, was very different from the solution proposed by Dijkstra and Zonneveld.

Tags: 

McKeag's account of T.H.E.

Dijkstra's Rallying Cry for Generalization is pleased to offer to its readers Chapter III of the book Studies in Operating Systems by R. M. McKeag and R. Wilson, edited by D H. R. Huxtable and published in 1976 by Academic Press:

T.H.E. Multiprogramming System (18.6 MiB PDF)
by R. M. McKeag

For personal use only. Republished here with the kind permission of McKeag and Fujitsu Services Ltd.

Human communication versus communication with a machine

Dated: 

October 1961

In his technical report (MR 34) of October 1961, Dijkstra made an analogy between human communication and communication with a machine and noted that the analogy is ineffective, an observation which complies with the earlier analogy he made between mathematics and programming, which he viewed to be effective.

Tags: 

Pages

 
Subscribe to RSS - diary60s