Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective (Monographs in Computer Science)

About this book

Since the summer of 1973 when I became a Burroughs Research Fellow my life has been very different from what it had been before. The daily routine changed: instead of going to the University each day where I used to spend most of my time in the company of others I now went there only one day a week and was most of the time -that is when not travelling!- alone in my study. In my solitude mail and the written word in general became more and more important. The circumstance that my employer and I had the Atlantic Ocean between us was a further incentive to keep a fairly complete record of what I was doing. The public part of that output found its place in what became known as "the EWD series" which can be viewed as a form of scientific correspondence possible since the advent of the copier. (That same copier makes it hard to estimate its actual distribution: I myself made about two dozen copies of my texts but their recipients were welcome to act as further nodes of the distribution tree. ) The decision to publish a se1ection from the EWD series in book form was at first highly embarrassing but as the months went by I got used to the idea. As soon as some guiding principles had been adopted -preferably not published elsewhere as varied and as representative as possible etc.