One of the pleasures of Sun Labs is its weekly Intellectual Dessert lecture series. Recently, this series has been managed by Jeff Rulifson. Before that, Whit Diffie was the Intellectual Dessert impresario. Jeanie Treichel coined the series name.
Two Intellectual Dessert speakers who are both early developers of computer science:
- Last week, Sun Distinguished Engineer Danny Cohen gave a fascinating talk on “A Brief Prehistory of VoIP”. This was first given as an invited talk with Steve Casner at IPTComm (8 July 2009). Danny and Steve were at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute when the reported work was performed.
Danny pioneered visual real-time interactive flight simulation on general purpose computers. He also pioneered real-time radar simulation. Later, Danny lead projects that pioneered real-time interactive applications over the ARPAnet and the Internet, such as visual flight simulation, packet-voice (aka Voice over IP) and packet-video.
For fun, see Danny’s and my Homage to Beck Subway and Metro Maps. - In February 2008, Don Knuth took on the challenging topic of “All Questions Answered”. Dr. Knuth is Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.
Danny Cohen, 2009
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Donald Knuth, 2008
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Images Copyright 2008-2009 by Katy Dickinson
KatysBlog 
Katy,
Have these talks been recorded and are they available on SLX or other sites ? I woud love to hear what Donald Knuth had to say… The man is a legend.
Don Knuth had a "any question on a topic other than religion, politics, or the final exam answered" day as the last day of each class he taught. He was quite amazing. One time I asked him a question about a paper he had written ten years earlier and he picked up from my question as smoothly as if he had finished the paper the day before.
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