» A list of interesting papers and documents I have read.

  1. Complexity in the Sciences Milnor's collection of essays on complexity. He talks about complexity theory, molecular basis of life, game theory. His claim is that at some point a unified theory tying all these together will come up.
  2. An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances. The classic Bayes theorem paper that was published in 1763.
  3. As we may think by Vannevar Bush in 1945. A nice article looking out into the future. He talks about an interesting device called the memex. The Endeavour project is pretty close to what Bush was thinking about.
  4. There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom Transcript of the classic talk Feynman gave in 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society.
  5. What Next? A dozen remaining IT problems.Jim Gray's Turing Award lecture. Local copy Not surprisingly Jim Gray devoted some time to talk about Bush's article and the memex.
  6. Digital immortality A paper by Jim Gray and Gordon Bell on digital immortality and passing on data to future generations. Local copy
  7. "MOORE'S LAW" The Benchmark of Progress in Semiconductor Electronics A good article on Moore's Law by Bob Schaller.
  8. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences by Rene Descartes
  9. The Hacker Crackdown - Amazing electronic book on hacking of telephone systems in the 80's.
  10. Ken Thompson's Turing award lecture Thompson sympathized with the hackers during this lecture. Thompson was awarded the Turing award in 1983 at the height of the Hacker crackdown.
  11. Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks Robert M. Metcalfe classic Ethernet paper
  12. Max Planck's Nobel address (1920) This is an excerpt. Please send me mail if you can find the full text somewhere.
  13. Optimal Juggling A very thorough analysis of juggling patterns
  14. Juggling a 4 ball cascade A very thorough and mathematical analysis on why juggling a 4 ball cascade is impossible. Local copy
  15. An article about Exponential which appeared in Fast Company - Feb 1999.Local copy
    The dream behind Exponential Technology was bold -- to build the world's fastest computer chip. The reality was messy. The end was bloody -- $30 million of wasted capital, four years of wasted effort. So why are so many people grateful for the experience? Added March 2, 2000
  16. A diatribe on why system software research is irrelevant. Very interesting slides by Rob Pike (Bell Labs). Thanks to AK for forwarding me the link.
  17. The Microarchitecture of Superscalar Processors. This paper appeeared in the IEEE Proceedings, December 1995.
  18. Logical Effort: Designing for Speed on the Back of an Envelope An excellent tutorial. Based on Sutherland's work.
  19. Micropipelines - Turing award lecture of Ivan Sutherland

Page last modified on March 31, 2008