Two topics we're going to talk about, one is about Byron and
Babbage when they were at Cambridge.
And to answer the question, why is our language called Ada?
Now that's gotten out of the way, and there we are.
Not ADA the American Dental Association.
We always spell Ada not in capitals.
Lord Byron went to Trinity, Cambridge of course.
He went up in July 1805, he graduated an MA in 1808.
Being a noble, he did not have to take any examinations at all.
>> [LAUGH] >> He just didn't take the maths tripos.
Interestingly enough, in those days,
you had to take the maths tripos if you wanted to read anything else.
If you wanted to do classics, you had to do maths first.
If you wanted to do theology, you had to do maths first.
Jolly good idea, I always thought.
>> [LAUGH] >> However,
he didn't have to mess with commoners, he dined all the time on high table.
>> One story about him,
is that he wanted a dog, but the college law did not allow dogs.
So the act didn't prohibit any other sort of animals, so he had a bear.
And the big question is, I think really to this day,
fairly unanswered, did he keep it in college?
Well, according to Wright, another man who went to Trinity, in his book, Alma Mater,
which he published anonymously, in 1827.
Byron had a room in K-staircase in Great Court, and
kept his bear at the top of the so-called hexagonal turret.
And down below there, you'll see a little bit extract from Wright's book.
When Lord Byron was at Trinity,
he kept in rooms on this staircase, round which you might drive a coach and
six, and had, moreover, the use of the small, hexagonal one in the tower.
Here is Great Court from K staircase, rather beautiful, I hope you agree.
There's a fountain here in the middle.
See the fountain in the middle.
And then in the opposite corner, there's another turret thing, right.
That's actually the turret on E staircase, and
on the left of that is the master's lodge.
Well K staircase, diagonally opposite, also has a turret.
And here's the turret, clouds here, and
the question is, did bear live in this top of this turret?
Well, first thing that we notice is the turret is not actually hexagonal thing,
it's octagonal.
And the best room is K6,
which is the one with the slightly little window open there in the middle.
And the question is, did Byron live there?
Well, who knows?
I lived in K6, and I was told, John,
you're living in the one that Byron lived in.
But we don't know whether that's true or not.
Maybe or maybe not.
Byron keep a bear, probably outside the college in the ram yard with his horses.
Maybe he and the bear were in care as a temporary measure.
Anyway, Byron seems to have achieved little academically, but
wrote some poetry, generally had a good social time.
I have read that he was thrown into the fountain,
which is something that happened to a lot of people.
>> [LAUGH] >> Oh, by the way, Lady Butler, who was
the master's wife in about 1970, had a pet that looked remarkably like a dog.
It talked like a dog, but it was classified as a cat.
>> [LAUGH] >> I met Lady Butler, Molly Butler,
in her nightie once, and I'll explain that offline.
Babbage also went to Trinity in 1810.
He'd left for some unknown reason he moved to Peter House in 1812.
He offended examiners at the Viva.
Oh by the way, it's called a tripos because
in the old days the Viva part of it, the students sat on a three legged stool.
Well he offended examiners of the Viva, not quite certain why he offended them,
what he actually said, did not take the exam.
Maybe deliberate, but he did not want to be beaten by Herschel.
Herschel was Senior Wrangler.
Wrangler is someone who gets the first in maths at Cambridge so
Senior Wrangler was the person who's top of the list.
And Peacock was Second Wrangler in 1813.
Another source indeed says that Babbage did take the exam and was third,
so who knows.
So I have written to this other source.
I've had no replies yet.
It's awful, we'll find out.
Anyway, Babbage was very grumpy.
He thought the teacher was awful and founded the so
called Analytical Society with Herschel and Peacock, the first and
second wranglers, while they were both undergraduates still.
He was Lucasian professor from 1828 to 1839.
Remember that Newton was Lucasian professor sometimes before.
But Babbage never did anything at all about it.
He did not lecture anything.
And as we know, he was very grumpy with the government later,
wasn't he, on the funding of his various bits of stuff.
Babbage was also a consultant to Brunel when building the Great Western Railway.
And as senior consultant you might imagine these days you'd get a company car,
wouldn't you?
Or maybe a company horse.
Babbage had a company train.
So one Sunday morning, in 1838, he arrived at Paddington and demanded his train.
At that time the line just went to Maidenhead.
He was told to use either track since no one else was about that day.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
you can imagine he's going up to the station.
My train, my man.
And it puff, puff, puff, and it'll come and he'll jump on.
So he was just about to set off, when lo and behold they hear a distant noise.
And Brunel arrives unexpectedly on his train,
which he had obviously a private train for Maidenhead.
Well gosh, what if they had been on the same track and
the engines had collided, and both been killed?
Then maybe, this is 1838 remember, there'd be no analytical engine, and
no working with Ada Lovelace.
No language called Ada.
We wouldn't be here today.
So this potential disaster made them think about signaling.
So even today,
railways are only one of two industries who seem to care about correctness.
>> [LAUGH] >> The other is avionics.
The second theme of this hilarious talk is, why a language called Ada?
Well, two of mid 1970s considered many languages for
embedded systems such as process control.
In Europe, we had a language called COBOL 66, and for
the Ministry of Defence, a language called RTL/2 from Imperial Chemical Industries,
a language called LTR, that's French, that's RTL backwards, of course.
The French always spell things backwards.
And there was a German language called PEARL.
Now the EU decided that the new language all of Europe would be a good thing.
This could be an example of early, every closer attempt at union.
So anyway they established this long term procedural language-Europe group,
which had many meetings, most in Brussels.
They were, it was a jolly time actually.
>> [LAUGH] >> We were eating the beef mountain and
drinking the wine lake.
Anyway, experts advised the Europeans to join the US in a global effort.
Because meanwhile, the US had set up the high order language project.
And they had also two new languages, such as a language called JOVIAL.
And I thought it was called Jules Own Version of Industry ALGOL, but
a colleague has told me that's incorrect and it should be something else.
Anyway, was ALGOL 58 it was based on, not ALGOL 60.
CMS and TACPOL, and they established this High Order Language Project under
the leadership of one Colonel William Whitaker.
And the management team included Philip Wetherall,
of the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern.
The first task, of course, was to decide what it was all for.
What a good idea.
So, some requirements are written, and they were called STRAWMAN, WOODENMAN,
TINMAN, IRONMAN, and STEELMAN, getting stronger and stronger and stronger.
I actually have a sample of STEELMAN here today,
if you might like to browse that at some time.
Anyway, said greatest things like the language is strongly tied and
so on and so forth.
What's difficult know which way the [INAUDIBLE] went.
Anyway, the US let four contracts.
And they were meant to be secret,
not supposed to know who each contract was let to.
And they were color coded to enable unbiased comparisons in the end.
There's the green one, that was from Honeywell.
Actually, the contract was actually with Honeywell in Minneapolis,
the work was done in Versailles.
The leader of that team was a chap called Jean Ichbiah, sadly now deceased.
The red team were based in Intermetrics in Boston.
And the leader was a chap called Ben Brosgol, who now works for
AdaCore, in fact.
I think still in Boston.
He's still called Ben Brosgol as well.
The blue team- >> [LAUGH]
>> So, the blue team,
they're from a company called Softtek, also in Boston.
And they're run by a chap called John Goodenough, and he was pretty good.
And he retired from the Software Engineering Institute,
Pittsburgh [INAUDIBLE] place.
The yellow team, I'm not too sure about the yellow team.
I think they're Californian, I think they were from Stanford.
>> SRI. >> Yeah, SRI, yeah.
Thank you, Terry.
Anyway, so here we are.
There's a little picture there.
They are the four actual, I'm gonna show you, the four original versions,
drafts of the Faux Four.
After one year, blue and yellow were eliminated.
Blue was strange but interesting.
>> [LAUGH] >> Yellow was totally incompetent.
>> [LAUGH] >> Failed to meet the wretched
requirements.
The first thing to do is to meet the requirements.
Anyway, after another year red was eliminated.
It changed direction somewhat, whereas green had consolidated its position.
So green was acclaimed in 1978.
Oops.
What to call it?
The project had gone entirely to plan.
It said that they're set, that we had not chosen a name.
Eventually, in a bar in Paris, where else,
they decided they wanted Ada because they wanted to name it after a worthy person,
like Blaise Pascal of course, the Pascal language is named after him.
They wanted to to honor a women, because, as I mentioned earlier,
engineer Grace Hopper had done much for COBOL but she wasn't very well known for
it, so they wanted to honor a woman.
And Ada was clearly, I think clearly, the world was first programmer, okay.
>> [LAUGH] >> I was put notice this morning there was
some doubt about that.
Anyway, so it was decided to call it Ada,
however, permission had to be sought.
And so, Phillip Wetherall, at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment,
wrote to then Earl of Lytton.
Although, is the Earl of Lytton here today?
He's doing a banquet this evening, obviously.
He's here this evening.
Anyway, it was his father, you see.
So he wrote on the 10th of October, 1978,
I have copies of the letter on the stand outside, want to see them afterwards.
So the Earl replied on the 18th and said, yes, jolly good show, old chap,
and noted that ada was at the heart of radar,
which I think was rather clever to note that, actually.
Because the Royal Signals and
Radar Establishment wasn't particularly aimed at radar but there we go.
And the language community was absolutely delighted to have Ada as their mascot.
That's a sufferable joke for
only a small number of people here [LAUGH] the mascot was sort of a [INAUDIBLE].
Anyway.
Right so, we've done that bit.
So Ada appeared everywhere.
Books came out with pictures of Ada on
the cover and the ACM gave statuettes to people who'd done good stuff.
And they do that these days actually,
there's still these statuettes are still appearing.
So and we had to go conference, there's a particularly good conference in Langsley
in 1997, and the guest speaker was the Earl of Lytton, who is maybe here today.
And it was his father that gave permission to use his name, as I said.
And we had entertainment from the New York Village Opera group.
And they did a play.
I actually have the playbill here.
This is a playbill I kept from the time.
It was called The Maiden and the Mandate.
And it showed the conflict between Lady Ada, who wrote excellent software in
the Ada language, and the treacherous hacker, who wrote in C.
>> [LAUGH] >> And it was based on trial by jury.
So here's Lady Ada.
And she was played by a lady then called Karen Leah, now Karen Mason, and
I had hoped we might have managed to get her to come today, but
this was 20 years ago, maybe the dress wouldn't fit.
>> [LAUGH] >> Anyway, this was photographed,
this wasn't photographed in London,
this was photographed at a previous event in Philadelphia, I think.
All right, well, we crave freedom, don't we?
One of the goals of Ada was to give you freedom.
There's two forms of freedom, freedom from problems,
on the one hand, and freedom to do whatever you want on the other.
And these freedoms of course, they conflict very badly.
Ada aims provide freedom from problems by detecting difficulties early in
the development of software, that's the real goal here.
You don't hear an awful lot about Ada today, and
that's partly because many of the applications are confidential.
Because they're mostly used in avionics, and the railways, and space.
Space stuff is almost all in Ada.
But I can mention one, and this is iFAX,
the air traffic control system now in use over the London area and generally.
And I know you can talk about that,
because the demo of it at Bletchley in the Museum of Bletchley.
And it's written in Ada and a language called SPARK which is a proof language,
and actually my daughter was the system architect for the whole thing.
Spark is a proof tool, and the origins of Spark, amazingly,
are work done at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment again,
in the 70s, by a man called Bob Phillips.
And that was sponsored by a requirements board chaired by Dame Steve Shirley,
who will also be at the banquet tonight, but is not here at the moment.
So that's another curious coincidence.
So Ada 2012, the latest version incorporates contracts and
SPARK 2014 is now integrated into the Ada tool set.
The goal is to show that a program is correct through contracts and
formal proof, not by testing it.
All testing ever does is find bugs, it shows there are bugs still.
So not by testing, but by formal proof.
And if you want more details on that, please ask AdaCore for details.
And they have some various books that they'd like not to have to
carry back to Paris with them.
>> [LAUGH] >> So please, please remove them all.
But one other thing I'll show you is the book which talks about Wright,
who wrote the Alma Mater book and so on and so forth.
Is a book called, Mr. Hopkins' Men.
I think I've got a flat.
Here we are.
Oh well, beware automotive and medical software.
Very dangerous, medical software.
>> [LAUGH] >> And I was once told,
never buy a car built after 2007.
It won't work.
Oh, here's a very sad note.
Let's finish on this.
I think.
One day in Paris, a member of the HMO team said he would take
me to the wine bar on the Champs-Elysees.
The name Ada was chosen, we would celebrate with champagne.
But it had turned into a Burger King.
>> [LAUGH]
[APPLAUSE]
