Placeholder Image

字幕表 動画を再生する

  • >> Sean: Just to remind people here who, perhaps, haven't seen our earler videos with you, Brian.

  • So, you worked at Bell Labs and at AT&T. I mean you did research there. You

  • were looking to the future! How right were you? How wong were you? Can you tell us? >> BWK:Yeah, so I was

  • at AT&T. I went there for a couple of summers, starting in the in the late

  • 1960s and I stayed there, essentially full-time, until 2000. I was in Bell Labs.

  • So at the time AT&T was a very big company. It was well over a million

  • people. It was the biggest company in the country and it provided communication

  • services - telephone - for essentially all of the United States. And Bell Labs was

  • the research arm of that. So that's the part that in theory is looking at the

  • future, trying to improve the services that they have and build the

  • technology, in all kinds of ways, that will make it easy for -- or make it

  • possible to improve -- telecommunications services. And so AT&T did things like

  • the transistor and the laser and miscellaneous other things that were

  • useful. And also a lot of computing-related things as they gradually

  • realized that computers were here to stay. And that a lot of mechanical things

  • like relays, and so on, could be replaced by electronic devices and then

  • controlled by programs, running on general-purpose computers. In some sense

  • the Golden Age for me was probably the 1970s. I had just gotten out of School

  • and with the early days of computing there were a lot of really interesting

  • work going on and that was when UNIX was developed, in the early 1970s, and the C

  • programming language and a variety of other things. And it's also when I played

  • with programming languages as well. So that was definitely a good time. Sort of

  • behind your question, I think, is: "Well, how good were you at seeing the future?"

  • And the answer is: "Pretty awful!". I think most people are pretty awful at seeing

  • the future and I'm quite - I could hardly deny it so I'm perfectly willing to

  • admit it - I don't think we had and I wouldn't say all my colleagues and

  • friends at Bell Labs. had much of a clue of how the world would change. We I guess

  • knew about Moore's Law. Moore's Law, I think came from I think he published

  • that paper in 1965 based on a fairly a short period of data, like maybe five

  • years. And I don't think - certainly not I - but I don't think many people realized

  • the implications of an exponential rise in capability at a fixed price, if

  • applied for 40 or 50 years. I don't think we realized any of that >> Sean: So, nobody believed it?

  • Nobody took it that seriously for this period of time? >> BWK: I don't know whether I would

  • say: "Nobody believed it", but I don't think people realize the implications.

  • Certainly I did not realize the implications and we were, I think, often

  • surprised when we discovered that something we had done had actually been

  • noticed in the outside world. I remember at one point Dennis Ritchie saying to me

  • something like: "We have arrived!", because he had found in the New York Times, which

  • was still running classified ads for programmers, they'd wanted a

  • programmer who knew UNIX. And this was, I would guess, in maybe late 70s or

  • something like that. And this was us [saying]: "Boy, what we've done has actually had some

  • influence in the outside world", in a way that was completely unpredictable.

  • >> Sean: So is there anything you can think of that you think should have made it but didn't?

  • I'm kind of putting you on the spot here! >> BWK: Yeah! that's definitely on the spot.

  • It's hard to say. One gets the feeling that a lot of things that were obvious

  • to us have been kind of lost in going forward. One [is] UNIX, the operating system;

  • C the programming language. Many of the tools. Those all had a flavor of

  • minimality, of being small and compact and good for their particular purpose,.

  • and not with too many bells and whistles and very carefully written, and so on. And

  • as Moore's Law came along and we got more and more processing power and more

  • and more memory capacity people sort of forgot the merits of simplicity, perhaps.

  • And so things became rather more baroque or rococo or - pick your architectural

  • period - and I think that that is in some ways to everyone's detriment that

  • systems are very complicated. The other thing is that at one point there was

  • really only one - let's call it UNIX - system and so things were fairly

  • compatible. And another thing that I think we've lost is

  • compatibility - that it's harder to get things to work together perhaps than it

  • was. But in some ways perhaps that's necessary. You think the big change in a

  • lot of things has been the rise of networking: the idea that computers are

  • not self-contained things any more but, rather, they are devices that talk to

  • other devices using a variety of networking technology - Internet itself.

  • And of course increasingly phones. The phone system. And in fact there's no real

  • difference between the phone system and the Internet in some sense, it's kind of

  • an accidental separation that will disappear over time. And as different

  • things talk to each other what happens there gets more and more

  • complicated. There are more ways that things can break. You need standards but the

  • standards aren't necessarily there. And so, yeah, I think that's the place where we

  • need the most improvement in some sense. It's ways to make things work better

  • together and make them simpler and I guess those are related. >> Sean: I think there's

  • a kind of irony, as well, that you've got this massive phone company

  • effectively pushing forward on computer technology, and now the many computer

  • people use is the phone in their pocket! >> BWK: Yes, right, I think that's again something

  • that people didn't predict. There's a famous story that a consulting company

  • in the United States, McKinsey, did a study for AT&T and told AT&T that there

  • was basically no market for cell phones; that people didn't want portable phones.

  • And this I think is a triumph of how consultancy can go wrong and yet not

  • suffer for it. in any sense. But AT&T didn't back that stuff as well - a lot of

  • the early work on mobile telephony was done at AT&T.

  • Absolutely. They figured out this the notion of cells and how you would pass

  • conversations from one cell to another something that's completely invisible to

  • people today but all of that was in fact invented originally at AT&T. And then of

  • course evolved tremendously by other people over the years. And again cell

  • phones today profit from Moore's law. That you've got incredible power in a

  • very, very compact device, would not have been possible

  • thirty years earlier. >> Sean: And the last thing they're used for is phone calls >> BWK: It's hard to say.

  • You're hinting that people don't use their phones to talk and I think that's

  • true. As far as I can tell students that I deal with in the United

  • States use their phones primarily for texting each other and perhaps for

  • checking their Facebook pages - or whatever the modern equivalent is.

  • And this is so foreign to me that I don't actually know how to use a phone in many

  • ways. I had an extended discussion with Dave [Brailsford], earlier this morning, about how you

  • deal with with phone numbers and whether you need a 44 and not a zero or is it ... ?

  • Hopeless! And that was the reason I had trouble

  • communicating with him this morning. So culture shock in some sort of way.

>> Sean: Just to remind people here who, perhaps, haven't seen our earler videos with you, Brian.

字幕と単語

ワンタップで英和辞典検索 単語をクリックすると、意味が表示されます

A2 初級

ベル研究所の研究(ブライアン・カーニガン教授) - コンピュータマニア (Bell Labs' Research (Prof Brian Kernighan) - Computerphile)

  • 1 0
    林宜悉 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
動画の中の単語