![]() ![]() In 1972, Dennis Ritchie made a fateful decision: to represent text in his new language with something called a null-terminated string. Charlton McIlwain, author of Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the Afronet to Black Lives Matter As the story of the PBA reminds us, this is not the result of an unforeseen technological glitch: It is the perfection of the technology’s 50-year design. Today’s predictive policing practices disproportionately surveil and criminalize black and brown people. By combining the PBA with a crime database, police officials could produce automated suspect profiles based on the racial demographics of police beats and deploy resources (officers, weapons, and other equipment) accordingly-before any crime was actually committed. When President Lyndon Johnson formed the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1965, he asked it to examine how computers could help us solve the nation’s “crime problem”-a problem he and the commission defined as both “urban” and “black.” The answer to this call was the Police Beat Algorithm, which aimed to solve planning problems like how many officers should patrol a given area of a city. The start of modern predictive policing-and computerized racial profiling And support is still available.” -Arthur Daemmrich, director, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation There are no outstanding user complaints. ![]() Steve Russell, the lead coder, said at a 2018 Smithsonian panel, “It’s more than 50 years old. It lives on in emulations and is demonstrated regularly at the Computer History Museum on the last operational PDP-1. The program significantly influenced the small coding community of the 1960s and inspired generations of video game creators. It was later distributed by DEC with each PDP-1, preloaded in the core memory and ready to demonstrate when installed. Spacewar! spread quickly across the early “hacker” community. Over the course of five months, these programmers created a game in which two players control spaceships-the needle and the wedge-that engage in a one-on-one space battle while avoiding the gravity well of a star at center screen. The leading edge of nonmilitary computing, the PDP-1 sold for $120,000 (that would be a bit more than $1 million today), featured 18-bit word length, and used paper tape for program storage. In late 1961 a group of young MIT employees, students, and associates (many of them members of the Tech Model Railroad Club) gained late-night access to a recently donated DEC PDP-1 computer. Thomas Haigh, co-author of ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer The distant descendants of this code are still in use at Los Alamos today. Von Neumann and Metropolis sent more than 20,000 cards back to the nuclear scientists at Los Alamos, tracing the progress of simulated neutrons through detonating warheads. They simulated the explosion of several atomic bomb designs being evaluated at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, using the Monte Carlo technique by which a complex system is simulated, step by virtual step, to repeatedly map the probability distribution of possible outcomes. But a few years later, Klára Dán von Neumann and Los Alamos scientist Nicholas Metropolis wired ENIAC to run the first modern code ever executed on any computer: hundreds of numerical instructions executed from an addressable read-only memory ( ENIAC’s function table switches). When one task, such as an addition, finished, a pulse triggered the next. ![]() Completed in 1945, it was configured for each new problem by wiring connections between its many components. The Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer was the first programmable electronic computer. Ushered in both the use of computer code and the computer models of nuclear devastation that shaped the Cold War arms race ![]()
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