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The Morning Download: Software's 'Giant Leap' in 1969 Hastened Today's Digital World
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Good day, CIOs. July 20, 1969, not only marked a "giant leap for mankind." It was a big day for software too, with a few lines of computer code coming to save the Apollo 11 moon mission in the critical minutes before touchdown. The Wall Street Journal's Robert Lee Hotz reports on the lead up to "one of the most important moments in the history of computing" and how it would set the stage for modern software development.
New machines. "The Apollo guidance computer—the first digital general-purpose, multitasking, interactive portable computer—laid the foundations of much of the digital world we know today."
New way of computing. "Spaceflight engineers discovered they could use it to perform tasks that otherwise required rods, cables and actuators. Code was cheaper, more adaptable and, most important, weightless. 'People started using the software to solve all their problems,' says James Kernan, 84, who oversaw assembly of the lunar-module software for Apollo 9."
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New talent. “They had to gamble that the kids would rise to the occasion,” says Don Eyles, a member of the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose job it was to guide the Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. “We were brought into a sort of loose managerial situation and allowed to thrive.” Noteworthy: Women coders were among the greatest contributors to the effort. [see more below]
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An 18-inch-thick printout in Don Eyles’s loft shows some of the computer code that controlled the Apollo lunar module’s descent to the moon. PHOTO: TONY LUONG FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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145,000
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The lines of code used by the Apollo computer for the moon mission. It takes about 62 million lines of code to operate Facebook and more than two billion lines of code for Google.
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A Girls Who Code rally in New York in 2017. PHOTO: RICHARD B. LEVINE/ZUMA PRESS
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Accenture CTO links gender diversity and business value. Paul Daugherty, chief technology and information officer of Accenture PLC, talks to CIO Journal about the importance of closing the gender gap in computer science. He is on the board of Girls Who Code, the nonprofit organization that educates young women in computer science and will have trained 185,000 girls to code by the end of this year.
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Q:
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What business value does gender diversity add?
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A:
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We believe that in our business, inclusion and diversity simply leads to better results. With the growth of transformative technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain and quantum computing, I’m more convinced than ever that computer science must be an accessible and fundamental component of education.
Accenture’s latest global Getting to Equal research looked at how a culture of equality can drive innovation. We found that in the most-equal and diverse cultures, an employees’ innovation mindset is 11 times greater than in the least-equal and diverse cultures. And the opportunity is enormous: Accenture calculates that global gross domestic product would increase by up to US$8 trillion over 10 years if the innovation mindset in all countries were raised 10 percent.
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Q:
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Are there any examples of how gender diversity really benefited a specific project?
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A:
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Our work in responsible artificial intelligence is a great example of how equality and diversity leads to better results. AI raises concerns on many dimensions—including fairness, bias, transparency, jobs, the role of people. We have a very talented, diverse team working in this area that are recognized as leaders in responsible AI. The diverse perspectives are essential to success as you create practices, principles, and solutions that need to be representative of the world that we live in.
-- Sara Castellanos
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A general view of the CERN Control Centre at The European Organization for Nuclear Research commonly know as CERN in Cedex, France. PHOTO: DEAN MOUHTAROPOULOS/GETTY IMAGES
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Decision making in our increasingly complex organizations. The emerging data and AI revolution holds the promise to help us make smarter, more effective decisions. But our growing organizational complexity has clouded decision-making accountability, writes CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger.
IBM strengthens hybrid cloud with Red Hat acquisition. The company’s $34 billion deal to buy Red Hat, which closed last week, boosts its standing in the hybrid cloud market, says CIO Journal's Angus Loten. Companies use the hybrid cloud to manage software and other systems across different cloud services and their own data centers.
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“Increasingly, we are getting the defensive technologies we need, as well as the policies on how to use them. What we lack is the will to implement the technological advances and policy shifts that will keep our companies safe.”
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— Richard A. Clarke, former White House counterterrorism and cybersecurity chief and Robert K. Knake, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
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VisiCalc originally ran only on the Apple II. The software cost $100, while the computer cost $2,000 or more. PHOTO: DAN BRICKLIN
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The story of VisiCalc, a humble spreadsheet program that set the tech world ablaze 40 years ago, has reverberated through the industry and still influences the decisions of executives, engineers and investors. Its lessons include the power of simplicity and the difficulty of building a hypergrowth company in a hypergrowth industry.
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Analysis by Christopher Mims
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Amazon.com is a finalist for a large cloud-computing contract the Pentagon plans to award by the end of August. PHOTO: JASON ALDEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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Pentagon wins lawsuit over massive cloud-computing contract. A federal judge on Friday ruled against Oracle Corp., which had sued to protest a Defense Department decision last year to move forward with the bidding process for a contract to provide the military cloud-computing power. The contract is estimated to be worth up to $10 billion. Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp. are both in the running for the contract, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. (WSJ)
FTC approves roughly $5 billion Facebook settlement. Commissioners this past week voted 3-2 in favor of the agreement, with the Republican majority backing the pact. Democratic commissioners have pushed for tougher oversite. A settlement is expected to tighten government restrictions on how Facebook Inc. treats user privacy. The additional terms of the settlement couldn’t immediately be learned. (WSJ)
The investigation. It began more than a year ago after reports that personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users improperly wound up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that worked on President Trump’s 2016 campaign. The FTC investigation centered on whether that lapse violated a 2012 consent decree with the agency under which Facebook agreed to better protect user privacy.
More to come. Next week, Facebook is sending executives to two Capitol Hill oversight hearings: one examining whether action is needed to rein in the market power of big technology companies, and another focused on Libra, the cryptocurrency Facebook is planning to launch with other corporate partners. Abroad, Ireland’s privacy regulator alone is pursuing 10 investigations related to Facebook’s gathering and processing of personal data.
Huawei plans extensive layoffs in the U.S. Layoffs are expected to affect workers at Huawei Technologies Co.’s U.S.-based research and development subsidiary, Futurewei Technologies. The unit employs about 850 people in research labs across the U.S., including in Texas, California and Washington state. (WSJ)
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Everything Else You Need to Know
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Fixing the Boeing 737 MAX’s flight-control software and completing other steps to start carrying passengers is likely to stretch into 2020. (WSJ)
President Trump said on Twitter Sunday that a group of liberal lawmakers, all minorities and all but one born in the U.S., should "go back" to countries they came from. (WSJ)
Immigration officials carried out small-scale raids over the weekend, kicking off what President Trump had promised would be a broad effort to round up people in the country illegally. (WSJ)
Con Edison engineers are examining power equipment to root out the cause of a massive outage that plunged a swath of Manhattan into darkness Saturday. (WSJ)
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