50 Years Ago

Computer Logic: The Functional Design of Digital Computers. By Dr. Ivan Flores — The book ... contains a very solid treatment of logical design; the binary system, adders, multipliers, control units, input and output devices, magnetic tape, and so on, all will be found described here, together with the usual ration of Boolean algebra and formal logic ... Only a small part of the book is concerned with programming, but this part I found unsatisfactory. It seems a mistake, now that modifier registers are the order of the day, to introduce the reader first to the old-time procedure for modifying instructions in the arithmetic unit. The last chapter, on programming a particular scientific problem, is a veritable museum piece ... It exhibits the most primitive form of machine language coding possible, in which even the conversion of relative addresses in sub-routines to absolute addresses must be done by the programmer himself before his programme is punched.

From Nature 11 November 1961

100 Years Ago

There is not the slightest doubt that birds and mammals are now being killed off much faster than they can breed. And it is always the largest and noblest forms of life that suffer most ... And the worst of it is that all this wanton destruction is not by any means confined to the ignorant or those who have been brought up to it. We have had our warnings. The great auk and the Labrador duck have both become extinct within living memory ... When wild life is squandered it does not go elsewhere, like squandered money; it cannot possibly be replaced by any substitute, as some inorganic resources are: it is simply an absolute dead loss, gone beyond even the hope of recall.

From Nature 9 November 1911