Episode 42: Punched Cards

In this episode: Punched Cards! Three technologists who grew up in Israel and Brazil during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, talk about the computing landscape while they were in college. 

Episode Guide

In this Episode: Punched Cards! Three technologists (all of whom have been both Profs and worked in industry) talk about their experience with early computing and punched cards while in their college in the 1960s-80s. And how the shift from punched card machines to terminals was sudden! Features immigrants from Israel and Brazil. Featuring: Moshe Vardi, Rico Malvar, Tal Rabin. Remix Episode from Seasons 1 & 2.

• mm.ss: Segment Info (Index)
• 1.22: Act 1 – Moshe Vardi, Professor Rice University and winner of Gödel Prize and Knuth Prize (Immigrant from Israel) – When Punched Cards became obsolete!
  • “1970s was a time of revolution in computing… theory and systems.”
  • “President came to drink champagne… mainframe was updated to 1 MB.”
  • “Nobody uses keypunch machines anymore.”
• 7.20: Act 2 – Rico Malvar. Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft. Former Director of Microsoft Research. (Immigrant from Brazil) – Punched Cards in 1970s Brazil
  • “We would write our code by hand.”
  • “We would submit it, and they would say — Come back tomorrow, or in a couple of days, and your tiny program will be ready.”
• 18.49: Act 3 – Tal Rabin, Head of Research at Algorand Foundation, and Professor at U. Penn (Immigrant from Israel) – Email in the 1980s
  • Email in 1980 was Monitored!
  • Doing Computer Science on Pen and Paper.
• 24.19: End.

Episodes Like This One 

This is a remix episode from Seasons 1 & 2. If you’re interested in hearing the full interviews with these three Computer Scientists, they are available in the links below (see “Recently on Season 1 & 2).

You may also like the other remix episodes of Season 2 (see section “Recently on Season 2” below).

Featured in this Episode

• Moshe Vardi (also Episode 27), Professor Rice University and winner of Gödel Prize and Knuth Prize
• Rico Malvar (also Episode 5). Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft. Former Director of Microsoft Research.
• Tal Rabin (also Episode 27), Head of Research at Algorand Foundation, and Professor at U. Penn

Useful and Relevant Links

• You may also like the following episodes that feature these guests
  • Episode 20 (CS in 1970s and 80s, on three continents)
  • Episode 27 (From Israel)

Recently on Season 2

Season 2 featured many episodes where we visited 5 continents, and 7 countries. Check them out!

• Remix Episodes: [Alternate Realities] [Pregnancy and Career] [Random Ways to Start Research] [Impostor Syndrome 2] [Comparing oneself to others]
• Anonymous 2 (Finale of Season 2): Featuring multiple anonymous stories and a hate mail response from the host [Episode 36}
• Latin America (Central and South America): 2 Episodes
  • Interview with Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Prof. Northeastern (Silicon Valley), Entrepreneur, Yahoo! Labs Worldwide VP and Leader. Immigrant from Chile. [Episode 35]
  • Interview with Thamar Solorio, Prof U. Houston and stalwart researcher in NLP and ML. Immigrant from Mexico. [Episode 34]
• Romania Segment: 3 Episodes
  • Interview with Rada Mihalcea, Prof U. Michigan, and stalwart researcher in NLP and ML. [Episode 33]
  • Interview with Ion Stoica, Founder/Creator of Apache Spark, Ray, Mesos, and founder of Databricks, Anyscale, Conviva. Prof at UC Berkeley. [Episode 32]
  • From Romania: Episode featuring 2 distinguished Computer Scientists (Ion Stoica, Rada Mihalcea). [Episode 31]
• Israel Segment: 4 Episodes
  • Interview with Regina Barzilay, Prof MIT, and Cancer Survivor. Double Immigrant from Moldova to Israel, and then Israel to US. [Episode 30]
  • Interview with Moshe Vardi, Prof Rice Univ, and Winner of Gödel Prize and Knuth Prize. [Episode 29]
  • Interview with Tal Rabin, Prof UPenn and Head of Research, Algorand Foundation. [Episode 28]
  • From Israel: Episode featuring 3 distinguished Computer Scientists (Tal Rabin, Moshe Vardi, Regina Barzilay). [Episode 27]
• India Segment: 3 Episodes
  • Interview with Pratima Rao Gluckman, author of book “Nevertheless, She Persisted: True Stories of Women Leaders in Tech”, and immigrant from India, and leader in Silicon Valley. [Episode 26]
  • IIT Madras, Computer Science Batch of 1998: Interview with 7 graduates from that batch (comprising about 25% of the batch). 4 PhDs + 3 Masters. 3 entrepreneurs, 3 industry long-timers, and 1 Professor (host). [Episode 24, Episode 25]

In case you missed it | Season 1 

Season 1 featured 13 episodes where we visited 5 continents, and 7 countries. Check them out!

• Remix Episodes featuring Impostor Syndrome, Balkan Wars, Wars in Lebanon and Egypt, Industry vs. Academia, Computer Science in 1970s and 80s, Diversity and IOI, PhD and Entrepreneurship.
• Several anonymous narrators, from across many continents. (Episode 15).
• Our interview with Danqi Chen, Gold Medal winner at IOI (Informatics Olympiad) in 2008 (only woman Gold medal winner), and student in famous Yao Class at Tsinghua University. (Episode 14).
• Our interview with Jelani Nelson, “immigrant” from US Virgin Islands and creator of AddisCoder program in Ethiopia (Episode 13), especially his last segment on IOI data inequity analysis.
• Our third segment (Episodes 9, 10, 11, 12) on Middle East, featuring entrepreneurs and a famous academic family from Iran, Lebanon, and Egypt, starting with the Middle East Entrepreneurs lead episode.
• Our second segment (Episodes 5, 6, 7, 8) featuring Computer Scientists from Brazil, all of whom spent careers in both academia and industry, going To and Fro between Brazil and US, and to and fro between academia and industry.
• Our first segment (Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4) featuring Computer Scientists from Yugoslavia, A Country That No Longer Exists?
• Check them out!

• Credits
  • Music Credits for Podcast
  • The caption picture at top of page is by Gwernderivative, and is taken from the Public Domain,

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