TITLE: Encountering an Old Idea Three Times in Ten Days AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: August 08, 2019 2:42 PM DESC: ----- BODY: I hope to eventually write up a reflection on my first Dagstuhl seminar, but for now I have a short story about how I encountered a new idea three times in ten days, purely by coincidence. Actually, the idea is over one hundred fifty years old but, as my brother often says, "Hey, it's new to me." On the second day of Dagstuhl, Mark Guzdial presented a poster showing several inspirations for his current thinking about task-specific programming languages. In addition to displaying screenshots of two cool software tools, the poster included a picture of an old mechanical device that looked both familiar and strange. Telegraphy had been invented in the early 1840s, and telegraph operators needed some way to type messages. But how? The QWERTY keyboard was not created for the typewriter until the early 1870s, and no other such devices were in common use yet. To meet the need, Royal Earl House adapted a portion of a piano keyboard to create the input device for the "printing telegraph", or teleprinter. The photo on Mark's poster looked similar to the one on Wikipedia page for the teleprinter. There was a need for a keyboard thirty years before anyone designed a standard typing interface, so telegraphers adapted an existing tool to fit their needs. What if we are in that same thirty-year gap in the design of programming languages? This has been one of Mark's inspirations as he works with non-computer scientists on task-specific programming languages. I had never seen an 1870s teleprinter before and thought its keyboard to be a rather ingenious way to solve a very specific problem with a tool borrowed from another domain. When Dagstuhl ended, my wife and I spent another ten days in Europe on a much-needed vacation. Our first stop was Paris, and on our first full day there we visited the museum of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. As we moved into the more recent exhibits of the museum, what should I see but...
a Hughes teleprinter with piano-style keyboard, circa 1975, in the CNAM museum, Paris
... a Hughes teleprinter with piano-style keyboard, circa 1975. Déjà vu! I snapped a photo, even though the device was behind glass, and planned to share it with Mark when I got home. We concluded our vacation with a few days in Martinici, Montenegro, the hometown of a department colleague and his wife. They still have a lot of family in the old country and spend their summers there working and relaxing. On our last day in this beautiful country, we visited its national historical museum, which is part of the National Museum of Montenegro in the royal capital of Cetinje. One of the country's most influential princes was a collector of modern technology, and many of his artifacts are in the museum -- including:
a teleprinter with piano-style keyboard in the Historical Museum of Montenegro, Cetinje
This full-desk teleprinter was close enough to touch and examine up close. (I didn't touch!) The piano keyboard on the device shows the wear of heavy use, which brings to mind each of my laptops' keyboards after a couple of years. Again, I snapped a photo, this time in fading light, and made a note to pass it on. In ten days, I went from never having heard much about a "printing telegraph" to seeing a photo of one, hearing how it is an inspiration for research in programming language design, and then seeing two such devices that had been used in the 19th-century heyday of telegraphy. It was an unexpected intersection of my professional and personal lives. I must say, though, that having heard Mark's story made the museum pieces leap into my attention in a way that they might not have otherwise. The coincidence added a spark to each encounter. -----