Ruth Stalker-Firth

When Jurassic Park was on at the cinema, I remember laughing out loud with a couple of my computing mates when the young girl, Lex, looks at a computer screen and says: “It’s a UNIX system. I know this.” At the time, UNIX didn’t have much in the way of a graphical-user interface (GUI), unless you wanted to write one yourself. And it definitely looked nothing like the screen she recognised. Nowadays, a quick look around the many Linux and UNIX distributions demonstrates that GUIs are everywhere. There are probably some as fancy as the screen she was looking at before she got the Jurassic system up and running again to save them all from being eaten by dinosaurs.

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In 1996, I listened to Lofty Zadeh, the daddy of fuzzy logic, give his keynote speech at the ‘Artificial Intelligence in Design’ conference, Stanford University. He described the excitment of artificial intelligence in the 1950s and how Marvin Minsky, father of frames, told a press conference that 50 years on, computers would read and understand Shakespeare. When Zadeh asked Minsky what possessed him make such a claim, Minsky said that he didn’t know, he had just gotten carried away.

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I created my first webpage in 1995, which has since disappeared forever as even www.archive.org thinks it’s too old to store. Fingers poised over my keyboard, I felt shy about what to write. Eventually, I restricted myself to my research interests as I didn’t think that anyone would care to know about my favourite beer. How times have changed. The web nowadays is full of people talking about their favourite beers (mine, by the way, are Theakston’s Old Peculiar and Franziskaner). Everyone likes to chat. (more…)