Thanks for posting this, Hugh. Very interesting. Peter
C. C. "Kelly" Gotlieb died on October 16 at age 95. Kelly was one of the zeroth generation of Canadian Computing. Probably the last I knew.
(I don't remember ever calling him "Kelly" to his face. I never felt that I was a peer of his. At one point he and I had neigbouring offices in a backwater of the Sanford Flemming Building so I got to have a few unhurried chats with him.)
Nit picking the Globe article:
- there was no reasonable way to send a gigabyte of data by teletype in the 1950s. The typical speed would be 10 characters per second (110 baud) or less. A gigabyte would take three years solid. And nothing could easily store it.
- I don't think that Kelly had long talks with Turing. I asked Kelly about Turing and my recollection is that Turing was not very conversational with Kelly. Of course my recollection is not 100% reliable.
- His PhD thesis my well still be classified -- Kelly liked to tell that story. But I don't think it was about "cybernetics". It came out of his work with the team that studied artillery shells with the new and secret "proximity fuse". This allied invention was perhaps as secret and important as the atomic bomb in World War II. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze> <https://www.npa.org/public/interviews/careers_interview_331.cfm> --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- Peter Hiscocks Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto http://www.syscompdesign.com USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator 647-839-0325