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ALL POSTS
Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 21
Naval Engineer Raye Montague and the Tale of the World’s First Computer-Designed Naval Vessel.
In March 1971, a computer science whiz with an unlikely background was given six months to complete a seemingly impossible project for...
102 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 1
Transformations: Lynn Conway and the VLSI Revolution in Microchip Design.
Last week my stepfather, a retired electrical engineer, passed away at the age of 89, and in the boxes and boxes of papers he had kept as...
253 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 10, 2023
Ada Lovelace and the Curious Practice of Programming for Non-Existent Computers
What did Ada Lovelace do? She is one of the most fetishized scientists today - at conventions when I'm taking sketch commissions she...
385 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 9, 2023
Grace Hopper and the Democratization of Computer Programming
In a room across the hall from where I teach, a group of a dozen kids between the ages of nine and thirteen are learning how to program...
1,578 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 4, 2023
Hedy Lamarr: The Movie Star Who Invented Bluetooth… in 1942.
A movie star. An avant-garde composer. A radio-controlled torpedo. Wi-Fi. One of the unfortunate truths about our web of modern...
427 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 9, 2023
The Billion Roads from Here to There: The Graph Theory Combinatorics of Fan Chung
‘Well, some go this way, some go that way. But as for me, myself, personally, I prefer the short-cut.’ – The Cheshire Cat Every morning...
44 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 14, 2023
Has the Curse Been Broken? Ada Lovelace: The World’s First Computer Programmer by Beverley Adams
If you’ve been reading my Women in Science column here and there over the last decade, you’ll have been subjected to my intermittent...
17 views
Dale DeBakcsy
May 3, 2023
From Shakespearean Sleuth to International Codebreaker: The Cryptography of Elizebeth Friedman
Before Elizebeth and William Friedman, American cryptanalysis did not exist. The best thing we had were the puzzle-bestrewn musings of...
127 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 25, 2023
The Early Days of IBM at NASA: Evelyn Boyd Granville.
The IBM 650 was a marvellous beast. The world’s first mass-produced (and first profitable) computer, it was the mainstay machine of the...
231 views
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