About
Using my own life as a timeline, I will illustrate some of the immense changes that have marked 60 years of computing progress between 1958 and 2018. I will include anecdotes as well as technical details. Life is often as interesting and surprising as technology: accidents and chance encounters strongly affect both. Most of my story takes place at CERN, but as major changes of style and personal attitudes have occurred here, some of the background may seem surprising to younger listeners.
There will be two talks, split between the first and second 30 year periods. The first period covers some really "ancient" computing environments, while the second shows the emergence of modern techniques and will seem relatively familiar.
Because it is a personal narrative I need to add that I was always part of various teams, sharing most of the work discussed, and strongly dependent on managers and work environments which changed over time. Overall I consider my career as a continual apprenticeship, beginning from zero but, thanks to mentors and a good deal of chance, becoming able to contribute to a wide variety of projects at CERN and elsewhere.
Outline: No more mainframes at CERN / Launching Grid computing / Volunteer computing and virtualisation / Reflections of a retiree
About the speaker
Ben Segal graduated in Physics and Mathematics in 1958 from Imperial College London, then worked for 7 years on nuclear reactor development, first for the UK Atomic Energy Authority and later in the USA. In 1971 he completed a Ph.D. in Engineering at Stanford University.
Ben joined CERN's Data Handling Division in 1971 and worked in the field of computer communications. An early project was "STELLA" – an experiment that linked CERN via satellite connections with five other European research laboratories. He also worked on networking heterogeneous computer systems at CERN, including the gatewaying of workstations and UNIX systems to each other and to the CERN mainframes (IBM, Cray…
The talk
Credits and licence
- Institution
- CERN
- Department
- CERN Computing Seminar
- Speaker
- Ben Segal
- Year
- 2019
- Language
- English
- Subjects
- Computer science
- Source
- CERN
- Licence
- CERN, as CERN states it. CERN's terms
- Attribution
- © CERN. CERN provides its audiovisual media free of charge for educational and informational use, credited to CERN; this lecture is shown in CERN's own player.
- Who can watch
- CERN gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Tweens profiles and older, judged from what the source says about it. How courses are placed