A Simple Example of how CODIL works

J M asked "How would these symbiotic - easy to understand computers - look like? how would they work?"

The computer hardware would look like a conventional computer, and in fact any commercial system would probably combine both technologies. The difference is in the way you would interact with it.

The original idea (see The SMBP Story) related to a very large commercial sales contract program in 1967.  The workings can best be explained in terms of a very simple network model.

Imagine a board with a number of light bulbs on it - each light bulb represents a commercial concept such as CUSTOMER or PETROL - and some bulbs could also have numbers  associated with them. If a customer contract referred to a discount it might be written:

CUSTOMER = SMITH; PRODUCT = PETROL; 

QUANTITY >= 1000; DISCOUNT = 10%

This would indicate that the bulbs for CUSTOMER and SMITH were linked, as where the bulbs for PRODUCT and PETROL, etc. In addition there would be links between the linked pairs.

Similarly there would be a pricing table with statements such as:

PRODUCT = PETROL; QUANTITY >= 500; 

UNIT PRICE =  15

with the appropriate bulbs linked.

To Price a delivery the nodes equivalent to the following would be switched on:

CUSTOMER = SMITH; PRODUCT = PETROL; 

QUANTITY >= 1000

and the this would automatically turn on the lights for 

DISCOUNT = 10%  and UNIT PRice = 15

The important thing is that everything is done in terms of concepts the user can understand, and the system deduced what needs doing. The approach is application independent and can easily show the user what it is doing and why. Effectively it is a transparent system, where conventional computers are black boxes. 

In practice the experimental interpreters hold all the links in a table and for each input they automatically look up the relevant links. Instead of a very large pricing program which will price any sale, you have a table-lookup which - in effect - works out a purpose-build mini-program for each transaction. 

Papers on the Original CODIL System

A detailed paper is being drafted for this blog and will appear shortly

How plans for a user-friendly computer were rubbished 50 years ago

In 1968 David Caminer and John Pinkerton (who were responsible for the world's first business computer, the LEO I, and who were directors of English Electric Computer) decided to fund research into a project to build inherently user-friendly computers and it was estimated that the market for such systems would be several hundred million pounds a year.

However, as a result of the government inspired merger to make the UK computer industry more competitive, ICL was created, and the project was closed down with no serious attempt to assess the successful research into CODIL which had already been carried out.

This was, of course, about 10 years before the first personal computers, and it is interesting to speculate what might have happened if the research had not been so rudely interrupted. Perhap the UK based idea would have been successful and the first personal computers would have been inherently friendly. This would have meant that there would have been no need for the hard to use MS-DOS operating system - and no one would have heard of Microsoft.

To get details of what happened read 

The EEC ICL Story

To see how the idea originated read

The Unlikely Origins of my current Evolutionary Research

This is relevant to this blog because the rubbished 1968 proposal is orign of the model of human working memory at the heart to the current research into human short term memory.

The Unlikely Origins of my current Evolutionary Research

The origins of my current research were anything but planned. Between 1959 and 1962 I studied for a Ph.D. in theoretical organic chemistry (no computers then), and then worked as an information scientist - where I read about how computers might help - but had no access to them. However I came across the ideas of Vannevar Bush in "As we may think" and thought I ought to know more about computers.

 

In 1965 a casual conversation about salaries led me to decide to switch careers and work with computers. Shell Mex & BP had one of the most advance commercial computer systems inn the UK and my first day's experience dramatically showed me how computer systems can go wrong. As a result I became very interested in the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the stored program computer - and this interest led to my coming up with an unorthodox solution to getting people and computers to "understand" each other.

 

Details of my experiences at Shell Mex & BP, and of the design study that eventually led to the design of CODIL (a COntext Dependent Information Language) have been documented in a note, "The SMBP Story" that I have written for the archives of the LEO Computer Society. A further note is planned shortly extending the story to describe the later research, supported by the LEO computer pioneers David Caminer and John Pinkerton. It will also mention why the initial project closed following the formation of ICL.

 

Read: "The SMBP Story"

The story also includes much information on what went on inside large commercial computer installations in the mid 1960s