Embedded Files
Associations :
Gary Arlen Kildall (born 1942) (Gary received his computer science doctorate at UW under Hellmut Golde)
Robert Gordon Gillespie (born 1933) (long-time peer at the computer at University of Washington)
Paul Gardner Allen (born 1953) (Famously kicked little Allen out of the lab at the University of Washington )
The Allen School family is mourning the loss of our friend and colleague Hellmut Golde, who passed away earlier this month after a brave battle against cancer. As one of the founding members of the Computer Science Group at the University of Washington and leader of the team that developed the wildly successful VAX Pascal compiler, Golde’s legacy includes the emergence of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering as an education and research powerhouse and the emergence of the Seattle region as a hub of computing innovation.
Golde, who grew up in Germany, joined the UW faculty in 1959 as a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering after earning his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He was one of the founders of the Computer Science Group in 1967, the precursor to the Department of Computer Science, formed in 1974, which evolved into the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in 1989 and eventually into the Paul G. Allen School in 2017. In those early days, Golde played a crucial role in establishing the culture for which the Allen School is widely known — one of friendship, support, and community.
A few years after he helped lead the creation of the Computer Science Group, Golde became director of the Computer Science Laboratory, the research and educational facility that hosted a couple of aspiring computer scientists, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, in the days before they set out to put a computer on every desktop. Back then, the pair would sneak into the lab and “borrow” computer time, as Gates would later describe it. Golde would cement his place in campus lore by famously expelling Allen and Gates from the lab.
“Dear Mr. Allen….”
Delivering his rebuke via a polite yet sternly worded letter, Golde directed Allen to “turn in your keys and terminate your activities” owing to offenses such as “you removed the acoustic coupler from Dr. Hunt’s office without authorization and without leaving at least a note.” At the celebration of the naming of the Allen School more than 40 years later, Allen astonished Golde and the rest of the audience by pulling out the letter and reading it in its entirety as he reminisced about his long-standing affection for UW. Allen subsequently framed two copies of Golde’s letter as mementos for the school and for Golde, while we attempted to make amends for the decades-old rebuke by gifting Allen an acoustic coupler purchased on eBay.
Professor emeritus Richard Ladner, who joined the department in 1971, fondly recounted the ease with which Golde bridged the divide in their academic interests and became not only a colleague but lifelong friend. “Hellmut was one of the first people I met when I interviewed for a faculty position at the University of Washington. We were miles apart in terms our academic interests, me a mathematician and he an electrical engineer,” Ladner recalled. “Nonetheless, we hit it off because of his infectious sense of humor and overall kindness. Some of my fondest memories of days with Hellmut are skiing with him and his family at Alpental, Mount Baker, Stevens Pass, and Big Sky. It was always hard for me to keep up with him on the slopes.”
Golde later stepped in to serve as acting chair of the department from 1976 to 1977. It was a period of transition for our program, and Golde wasn’t given much of a choice in the matter — the first department chair, his dear friend Jerre Noe, had declared himself a sabbatical after coming to the realization that if he didn’t leave town, he might wind up being chair for life. At the time, the department had a grand total of 11 faculty and had graduated 25 students.
Hellmut Golde served as acting chair of UW CSE from 1976 to 1977
As Golde was completing his time as chair, Ed Lazowska arrived to join the UW faculty one week after completing his Ph.D. — and just one week before the start of the school year. His new colleagues tried to reassure him that he didn’t need to worry, because “the course you’ve been assigned has been taught for many years by Hellmut Golde. He’s the best teacher in the department. Ask him for his notes.” Unfortunately for Lazowska, “Hellmut was such a good teacher that those ‘notes’ consisted of a single page, with a single line for each day of the course specifying the topic to be covered that day,” Lazowska laughed. “Let’s just say that my course evaluations were not as good as Hellmut’s had been.”
Although Golde’s time at the helm was short-lived, he had an outsize impact on the program beyond the recruitment of Lazowska and Ladner — each of whom went on to have an outsize impact of their own on the growth of our program and on our emergence as a leader in accessible computing, respectively. In October 1977, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) introduced the VAX-11/780 computer, which became the mainstay of many computer science departments and companies nationwide. UW managed to acquire an early VAX on the understanding that Golde and a group of graduate students would write a VAX compiler for the Pascal programming language, which was widely used for introductory programming.
“DEC was willing to give Hellmut a portion of sales for the VAX Pascal compiler because they greatly underestimated the demand for Pascal and the market for the VAX computer in education,” explained Allen School Director Hank Levy, who was a member of DEC’s VAX design and development team at the time. “Partly as a result of the compiler that Hellmut and his team built, the VAX become highly successful in educational institutions, resulting in more than $1 million in royalties flowing from DEC to the department — a not insignificant sum in those days. These funds were crucial in allowing the department to grow during difficult financial times on campus. It was Hellmut’s foresight, technical acumen, and generosity which allowed the department to preserve its momentum — and later, to climb into the ranks of the top 10 computer-science programs in the nation.”
It appears that Hellmut neglected to return a Selectric typewriter that he borrowed in 1976. We trust that UW’s Equipment Inventory Office is on the case!
The VAX-11/780 computer on display in the Allen Center atrium stands as a monument to those days, when this single computer could support the entire department’s computing needs.
As Ladner noted, Golde enjoyed a good joke — even if it came at his own expense. He was particularly amused at people’s inability to reckon with the pronunciation of his German name. “Hellmut used to display on his office door a montage of address labels from letters people sent him on which his name had been butchered,” recalled Lazowska. “He would say ‘Hellmut Golde’ on the phone, and often the person on the other end wouldn’t get it quite right. My personal favorite was the time someone addressed a letter to ‘Hal McGoldy.’”
Always a leader and forever a friend, Hellmut retired from UW as emeritus professor in 1992 but remained actively engaged with his Allen School family. We miss him greatly.
A celebration of Hellmut’s life will be held on Sunday, June 2, 2019 at 2 pm at the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Please contact Beth Golde (beth at golde.org) for details if needed. Remembrances, in lieu of flowers, may be made to the Hellmut Golde Endowed Scholarship in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, or the Golde Family Scholarship Fund at Heritage University.
An official obituary may be found here. Photographs of Hellmut through the years may be found here.
Hellmut Golde
Hellmut Paul Oscar Golde was born in Berlin, Germany on February 6, 1930. He passed away in his home surrounded by his family on April 17, 2019. He came to the United States in 1952 as one of the first German Fulbright Scholars at Stanford University. After receiving his PhD, he and his wife Marcy moved to Seattle, where he took a faculty position at the University of Washington. In the 1960s, Hellmut helped found the UW Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He also headed the Computer Laboratory, and famously revoked access privileges from then high-school students Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Teaching was his real love, and he is remembered with deep affection by many former students.
Paul Allen’s historic gift to the University of Washington’s computer science and engineering program came with another bit of history on Thursday.
The letter to Paul Allen. (LinkedIn Photo)
In a post on LinkedIn, the Microsoft co-founder shared a 1971 letter that he received as a high school senior, informing him that he would no longer have access to the UW’s graduate computer lab.
Allen said that it is “truly an honor” that his name will be attached to a new computer science school thanks to his $40 million gift. But the letter, which Allen held onto for 46 years, shows a less-welcoming attitude toward the future billionaire philanthropist.
While his father was associate director of libraries, Allen and his friends from Seattle’s Lakeside School spent a good amount of time in the Computer Science Laboratory. The letter from the lab director, Dr. Hellmut Golde, informed Allen that that privilege was being revoked and why.
We squinted and attempted to re-type it here for easier reading:
March 17, 1971
Dear Mr. Allen,
I regret to have to write this letter to you and your friends from the Lakeside School, but the needs of the Computer Science Program leave me with no other alternative.
During the past months, you and your friends have been using the facilities of the Computer Science Laboratory to develop a software product for a commercial timesharing system in Portland. While I am basically in sympathy with such activities, your use of the laboratory facilities has caused a number of complaints and tends to disrupt the intended use of the laboratory. To be more specific, let me cite a number of specifics:
1. You have used the teletypes (at times all of them simultaneously) for prolonged periods of time and occasionally unattended, to produce endless listings. This creates a noise level in the laboratory which is detrimental to the normal activities and also is not the intended mode of operation for a remote console.
2. You have used the EMIAC system to connect to the Portland system without prior checkout on that device. While you and some of your friends subsequently obtained a drivers license for the EMIAC, I have just discovered that your friends did not get a drivers license for the Sigma 5, which was clearly announced to be a prerequisite.
3. Earlier this week you removed the acoustic coupler from Dr. Hunt’s office without authorization without leaving at least a note. Such behavior is intolerable in any environment.
In view of these and other occurrences which caused a number of complaints from the regular users of the laboratory, I must ask you to turn in your keys and terminate your activities in the laboratory immediately. Please inform you friends of this letter.
Sincerely,
Hellmut Golde
Director, Computer Science Laboratory
Allen goes on to explain in his LinkedIn post that the UW is a special place for him because it’s where he and fellow Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates built their Traf-O-Data machine. That effort, to automate the traffic-measuring process, ultimately ended up being a failure, but Allen said “the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success.”
“If it hadn’t been for our Traf-O-Data venture, and if it hadn’t been for all that time spent on UW computers, you could argue that Microsoft might not have happened,” Allen said.
Sharing the Supercomputers
Sharing the Supercomputers
By John Markoff
Dec. 29, 1988
Computer scientists and Government officials are urging the creation of a nationwide ''data superhighway'' that they believe would have a dramatic economic impact, rivaling that of the nation's interstate highway system.
This highway would consist of a high-speed fiber-optic data network joining dozens of supercomputers at national laboratories and making them available to thousands of academic and industry researchers around the country. Vital Competitive Tool
A national research network is vital, backers of the concept say, because it will help protect an important area where the United States now has a clear technological advantage over Japan and Europe.
America's lead in computer networking is largely a result of Pentagon financing in the mid-1970's for Arpanet, a system that linked universities, corporate research centers and military laboratories.
The new network would cost about $400 million and could be in place by the mid-1990's, its proponents say. Many existing high-speed networks can send 1.5 million bits of data a second, equivalent to one good-sized novel every five seconds. Each second the new network could carry 3 billion bits of data, or 3 gigabits -about 500 copies of that hefty novel. New Kind of Research
Legislation introduced in October by Senator Albert Gore, Democrat of Tennessee, included initial financing for development and construction of a National Research Network. Backers of the measure say that Federal financing for the project is necessary to develop the technology and convince industry that vastly speedier computer networks are commercially viable.
The network would pave the way for a new kind of scientific research in which thousands of scientists around the country could use the most complex and expensive equipment as if they were seated right in front of it.
Officials at the National Science Foundation envision computerized ''collabatories'' in which scientists using computer work stations could directly view and control the output of complex machines, such as particle accelerators, wind tunnels, telescopes and nuclear reactors, even though they were thousands of miles from the actual apparatus.
''I believe we can make an electronic laboratory in which people can collaborate and access information, effectively independent of location,'' said William Wulf, an assistant director of the National Science Foundation. ''You'll never replace eyeball-to-eyeball communication, but you can substitute a lot.'' Remote Control
For example, a fiber-optic computer network would permit astronomers using a radiotelescope array in California to process the images on a Cray supercomputer in Illinois and then view pictures instantly, while at the same time controlling the telescope remotely from locations in both California and Maryland.
However, proponents of the idea note that putting it in place requires development of new fiber-optic communication links that are thousands of times faster than today's commercially available networks. All this could take as long as five years.
Fiber-optic networks, based on glass strands roughly the size of a human hair, use pulses of laser light instead of electricity to send computer data. They permit hundreds or thousands of simultaneous computer conversations by packaging each message into small packets consisting of 1's and 0's.
Because messages are broken up into packets, many of them can be simultaneously interwoven onto a single fiber cable and then recombined as separate messages at the other end. High-speed fiber-optic cable is already used widely for voice and video applications, but data applications have lagged until now because further technological developments are still necessary. Electronic 'Handshakes'
Researchers say they still need to develop special computer switches capable of handling the high rates of data and perfect the necessary high-speed electronic ''handshakes'' that one computer must make with another when data are exchanged. But the experts believe these tasks will not be difficult to accomplish within five years.
When the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency built the Arpanet network, it paved the way for the industry that links commercial computers.
However, many researchers point to big government-financed high-speed computer networking projects now under way in both Japan and Europe. They are concerned that without a coordinated response United States industry will be in danger of losing its lead in developing the next generation of technology.
''It's possible that if we simply let a completely self-motivated marketplace develop our data communications infrastructure for the future it will be either inferior to what is being developed in Japan or Europe or owned by companies in Japan and Europe,'' said Russell Neuman, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. Difficult to Put to Use
One continuing problem that worries researchers is that in the past it has proved difficult to put the technology to use.
''Many times the technology has been there but there doesn't seem to be a path for transferring it from the research laboratories to the commercial market,'' said David Farber, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. ''We want to show the commercial side that there is a use for this technology.''
The proposed network would serve as a demonstration project to encourage private industry to develop similar super-fast commercial data links.
''The infrastructure we will need in the 21st century goes beyond traditional public works projects,'' Senator Gore said. ''I envision a national computer network linking academic researchers and industry, using the nation's vast data banks as the raw material for increasing industrial productivity and creating new products.''
Until now, supercomputers -which are increasingly essential for scientific and technical progress -have largely functioned as computing oases, isolated from thousands of potential users. The idea underlying the construction of a high-speed network is based on what economists refer to as the ''turnpike factor.'' Modern highway interchanges have been found to attract traffic simply by their existence. Distance Is No Object
''We want to eliminate distance as a factor,'' said Robert Haber, a mechanical engineer who directs a high-speed networking project at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ''You can compare this to the kind of things that happened in the 50's in the United States. We need a project of the scale of a National Highway Project for computer information.''
Researchers also believe that an initiative to build a national system is essential because existing networks are badly overloaded, causing the equivalent of computer traffic jams.
''We have 2,000 users who need to transfer huge amounts of data, and the current networks aren't set up for that,'' said Steven Christensen, an astrophysicist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. ''There is already a large bottleneck for many of those who want to use our machines from remote cities.''
During the last two years the National Science Foundation has attempted to alleviate some of the worst overcrowding by establishing a new research network known as Nsfnet. In July, a 1.5-megabit-per-second expansion of that network, which links the five national supercomputing centers with about 200 universities, was installed. Stopgap Measures
However, such incremental increases in speed are viewed as only stopgap measures. Senator Gore's bill provided for a network that sat at the top of a hierarchy of existing networks now operated by different Government agencies, like the Energy Department, the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The smaller branches would feed into the faster N.S.F. network just as smaller streams feed into a large river.
Once the gigabit network is in place, researchers will be able to begin developing new applications.
For example, Hellmut Golde, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, is beginning to work out a way to control complex instruments over a high-speed network. He is working with a nuclear physicist at the University of Washington who is interested in permitting students at different campuses to share a training reactor. These training systems are scarce, and Mr. Golde's idea is to re-create the control room for such a system at several locations.
He acknowledged that advances in computer security would have to be made before a nuclear reactor would be accessible on a computer network.
Researchers at campuses around the country have already begun planning regional high-speed networks that will offer a preview of some of the services of the future gigabit network. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton and researchers at I.B.M.'s Watson Research Laboratories have proposed a fiber-optic network to link the three research centers. Named the Hourglass Project, the network would permit medical specialists at Princeton and Penn to share high-resolution X-rays or other radiological images. 'Video Wall'
The network would also make possible a ''video wall,'' a video conference system with extraordinary resolution. Such a system would in many ways permit researchers to interact as if they were seated in the same room even though they were actually separated by hundreds of miles.
Another proposal by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va., calls for the creation of a digital library, a computer data base that would permit vastly improved access to information for researchers and students. ''From any work station you should be able to specify a document if it exists anywhere in the country and then view it directly,'' said Robert Kahn, president of the corporation. Mr. Kahn, a former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been a key sponsor of the idea of creating a gigabit network to link research centers and universities.
Herman Khan ??
Technology for creating such a national library is one area where Japan may be ahead of the United States. Researchers at Japan's National Center for Science Information Systems are well on their way toward putting the entire scientific literature of the country on-line.
Page updated
Report abuse