Other
In 1980 I worked out that an Apple with two floppy disc drives was about 300 times as powerful as the Pegasus at 1/300th of the cost. Today we can assume that a further reduction of 100 times in cost per operation has taken place, though I haven' t done the sums with a 486-based micro. We must also bear in mind that the Pegasus represented an improvement of at least tenfold in cost per operation over earlier machines. An industry that has reduced its cost per operation by a factor of 10 million or so over 45 years is surely unique and certainly not easy to keep pace with mentally. We are now faced with the problem of what to do about software. The article, like a book, is easy to 'preserve', but to run it requires the original hardware or an emulator. Martin Campbell-Kelly has built an emulator of EDSAC I, and can run the programs on it. But it is difficult, even impossible, to give the flavour of what they did without the photoreader and the screen, since the ability to use these as input or output in unconventional ways, as in my noughts and crosses program where the players interrupted the light beam to input a move and viewed the storage monitor to see the 'board', cannot readily be reproduced on the emulating equipment. The matter becomes even more awkward with micros, where programs of similar nature, e.g. Wordstar, Wordperfect and Word, have been implemented on several different machines so as to look as nearly alike as possible to the user. No doubt this will be taken up by the CCS Working Parties in due course and some solutions found for working presentations, which must be our aim. All of us on the Committee look forward to welcoming assistance from whatever quarter, in our efforts to carry forward a memory of this fascinating and fast changing industry in working order!
He has been a consultant to various agencies of the United Nations over the past decade, including
- the Office of Science and Technology
- the Human Rights Commission
- the Statistical Office of the U.N., the I.L.O. and UNESCO
He has acted as a consultant also for several international companies including Shell, Philips, and ICI.
1970–1974: Acted as Expert Adviser to Sub-Committees D & A of the Select Committee of Parliament on Science and Technology for their enquiry into computing.
1976–1977: Sub-Committee C of the Select Committee on the Nationalised Industries for their enquiries into Cable and Wireless Ltd. and the Tote.
1973–1978: Non-executive Director of the Monotype Corporation.
October 1969 – ?: Professor of Computational Methods at the London School of Economics.
Vice-Chairman of the Academic Board on the Board of Management of the University of London Computer Centre
Moderator to the Computer Science Department of Hong Kong Polytechnic.
Founder member of the British Computer Society: helped to found the Leeds Branch and became its first Chairman. He has served on many of its Committees, and is a Fellow and past President (1971/1972).
Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
Member of the O.R. Society, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Data for Development.
Vice-President of IFIP, the international computer coordinating body and Chairman of its Committee on International Liaison. He also represented IFIP on the Five International Associations Coordinating Committee, which coordinates the work of IFIP with that of IFORS, IFAC, AICA and IMEKO
1977: awarded the IFIP Silver Core award.
Member of the British National Committee for support of the Unesco General Information Programme, and of the BNC for IIASA
Governor of the International Council for Computer Communication.
London School of Economics A S Douglas, CBE MA PhD (Cantab) BSc(EstMan) FBCS FIMA FRSA, Emeritus Professor of Computational Methods
CBE FBCS CEng (Prof. Dr. phut, economist born London, 21 May 1921 Andrey Parker
Read more about this topic: A.S. Douglas