25 years at UvA

Today I'm working for 25 years at the same employer (University of Amsterdam) doing the same kind of thing. And I still like it! The only thing that seems to have changed several times is the name of the department (could this stop). Some things you may not have experienced over the past 25 years (hope I have the facts right, dates omitted in most cases, my weblog only goes back for a year):

• A PDP/11 with 92 kb of memory supporting the entire cognitive science group multi-user, and we were using Lisp at the time.
• Installed the second connection to the internet in Europe (using uucp), had an email address since 1981.
• Seeing people switch from using typewriters to daisy wheel printers. They did need a lot of help using the software.
• Our department acquired a BNN BitGraph (one of the first bitmapped displays) without any software at all. First assignment: we need a window system and some fonts. Once finished, Apple launched the Macintosh. Four years later Bill Gates also thought windows were a good idea.
• Designed and developed the first GUI environment (PCE) for Prolog (in 1985). It was object-oriented, inspired by reading the SmallTalk books. It even went commercial.
• And the commercial version of PCE was used heavily by the software engineering group at Sun Microsystems (visited them in 1989). Don't blame me for the flaws in Java.
• We kindly called the only machine on which PCE could run (a SUN-2): the shoebox. It made an awful lot of noise.
• Over the past 15 years or so Jan Wielemaker has reimplemented PCE and integrated it into SWI-Prolog. SWI-Prolog is the most powerful programming environment I know (and I use it on a daily basis, keeps me ahead of the competition).
• Heavily involved in the KADS / CommonKADS methodology to structure the development of knowledge intensive systems. Developed several tools and languages for knowledge acquisition and modelling.
• Gertjan van Heijst suggested ontologies were a good idea during a research meeting (Gruber's Ontolingua). Everybody was confused. I wasn't, what was he talking about?
• Our department started taking ontologies seriously, by then I also was confused. Caught on.
• Knowledge management entered the arena. What is that about? Well, about nothing and everything really. Depends on who you talk to.
• Semantic Web. Strange idea, this cannot possibly work. Languages like RDF(S) and, to a lesser extent OWL, are valuable though and exploiting them to their full potential is a challenge worth pursuing.
• Discovered there are more languages than programming languages and delved into text analysis to support ontology development. Why are there so few applications of language technology available to the public? Am addressing that.
• Started a weblog. Anecdotal evidence has it that I was forced into this by Lilia. (This is a running joke, please don't comment).
• Suzanne Kabel wrote a sentence in the foreword of her Ph.D. thesis I treasure. Her thesis also sums up of what I think makes ontologies a serious proposition (for both research and application).

I probably forgot about a lot of things, systems like Google scholar are attempting to reconstruct. Cannot mention all people that influenced my ways of working and thinking. Apart from Jan Wielemaker, mentioned above, I would like to add Bob Wielinga (he hired me 25 years ago) and Saskia van Loo.

Comments

[Victor]

First of all: congratulations, Anjo!

This post again showed me that the things I'm working on are part of a much longer tradition of research at the research group.

[Rogier Brussee]

This beats me hands down on the computer nostalgia/machismo front. Not to be outdone however

1. did you use punchcards ?
2. did you program APL ?
3. did you boot a PDP 11/10 using the toggle switches on the front ?

:-)

[Anjo]

Yes to all, sorry Rogier:

1) Punchcards when I was 14 (computing the distance and speed pigeons travelled!)
2) APL: some little toy programs.
3) Yes, I think it was a PDP 11/40.