Thursday
Room 4
15:00 - 16:00
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
A People's History of ABI
ABI is one of the most fundamental concepts in the programming of computers. It is where we turn mathematical abstraction into the ability to control the world of machines. Fundamentally, ABI is a story of human collaboration, of an agreement which allows communication across time, between people who may never meet.
Often, ABI is implicit and often unconsidered – but never untouched. It is
everything we do. This talk will run from the early world of massive Computers, filling a room (or multiple), running calculations with FORTRAN or COBOL, simple batch processing operating systems; then onto minicomputers, ALGOL, C the world of time sharing and UNIX; and finally our modern world of microcomputers and the languages and systems that we use every day.
We will discuss decisions taken by operating systems, languages, and computer designers across the decades to create the ideal binary interface – or at least, the best compromise. I hope that this talk will give you a renewed
respect for the people who helped design the world you live in, and the machines you work with.
Nicole Patricia Mazzuca
Nicole is a C++ programmer of nearly a decade. She is from Seattle, USA, and now lives in Oslo, Norway. She worked first at Microsoft with on the standard library, then at reMarkable on build systems, and now with Squarehead on core libraries. She has often curiously looked back on the history of programming, from its early days on mainframes, into minicomputers and the invention of Unix, and on to the modern microcomputer revolution.