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Sharla Boehm, the programmer whose code underpins the Internet

40 points by dxs 3 days ago | 14 comments

anigbrowl 14 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

https://archive.ph/VlbdQ

bdcravens 26 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)

readthenotes1 25 minutes ago

And married to Barry Boehm of Software Engineering Economics fame. That was one smart couple!

firdunupsa2 33 minutes ago

See, Scientific American says that a woman’s code underpins the Internet.

throwawayk7h 27 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 25 minutes ago

And they deadnamed her:(

Manuel_D 2 minutes ago

When people's most notable achievements were made under a previous name, it's common to mention that previous name. Otherwise readers will be confused when they see loads and loads of references to some other name for the achievements in question.

This is the policy on Wikipedia, by the way.

indigodaddy 3 minutes ago

Huh?

themafia 34 minutes 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 2 hours 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 44 minutes ago

[And/But] whose code is [/not] present in today’s packet routing code

Do we know which?

readthenotes1 26 minutes ago

Since it was a simulation written in Fortran, the odds of it actually being used for routing is pretty small.

cmiles74 23 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!