Sharla Boehm, the programmer whose code underpins the Internet

(scientificamerican.com)

50 points | by dxs 2 days ago

7 comments

  • anigbrowl 47 minutes ago
    This would have made for an interesting article, but as a podcast transcript it's virtually unreadable. It also reads like they're talking to children. The Wikipedia article is much better, but too short:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm

  • zimpenfish 2 hours ago
    • bdcravens 59 minutes ago
      For some reason that particular site sticks me into a CAPTCHA loop. (it does work after I open it incognito though, but I still get hit with a CAPTCHA the first time)
      • Imustaskforhelp 9 minutes ago
        https://web.archive.org/web/20260520202425/https://serjaimel...

        Here you go. Hope you enjoy the article, I am gonna go read it too now.

        (PS: I have created htmlpipe and I have written enough about it in submissions/comments etc. so I will hopefully let the project speak for itself now but feel free to ask me any questions as I love to talk and also a minor wish but I hope that more people could use my software but no biggies if they don't as I am happy using it for myself because I built it for myself and to help others! Have a nice day)

  • dijksterhuis 25 minutes ago
    topics like this are why i come to HN
  • readthenotes1 58 minutes ago
    And married to Barry Boehm of Software Engineering Economics fame. That was one smart couple!
  • firdunupsa2 1 hour ago
    See, Scientific American says that a woman’s code underpins the Internet.
    • throwawayk7h 59 minutes ago
      Many people's code underpins the internet. Some of them are women, yes. I wonder if you've ever heard of Grace Hopper.
    • readthenotes1 57 minutes ago
      And they deadnamed her:(
  • themafia 1 hour ago
    > If this was 2025, this would be called machine learning because that's really what it was.

    It would be called "machine learning" because that's the buzzword du jour.

    > She was teaching the network to learn how to respond to nodes dropping out.

    That's just called "writing software" not "teaching the network."

    > Machine learning was definitely nonexistent at that point.

    Are you sure about that?

    > And yet, if you look at this 1964 paper, it's kind of unquestionably what it is.

    The document: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3103.html

    The claim: highly questionable.

    The paper is interesting in it's own right, but, to hype it up in this way is gross.

  • CharlesW 1 hour ago
    TLDR: Sharla Boehm helped invent packet switching, a.k.a. "hot potato routing", and wrote the first implementation which proved that it could work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm
    • jagged-chisel 1 hour ago
      [And/But] whose code is [/not] present in today’s packet routing code

      Do we know which?

      • readthenotes1 59 minutes ago
        Since it was a simulation written in Fortran, the odds of it actually being used for routing is pretty small.
        • cmiles74 55 minutes ago
          I bet someone read the paper she co-authored and that might have had some influence on the code that they ended up writing. Her husband worked on ARPAnet, surely he would have mentioned that paper to someone!