Wow, right away in January there are things I find relevant to our work today. One such is an article on a test to see if documentation of control flow or data structures helps more in understanding a piece of code, coming down firmly on the side of the data structure. Of course, that was a very limited test done with a short program and without the benefit of today's tools and practices, but it's nice to see where we were at the time.
I lived through the Morris Worm in 1988, and I knew the name came from a Brunner SF novel, but I either didn't know or had forgotten there were not just technical analyses but implementations and tests of worms before 1988! (The image at the top is taken from this article.) Fascinating study there on a multi-node, multi-segment worm that is extremely hard to kill. Prescient, and frightening. It has been a long time since we had something quite like it, despite the many forms and instances of malware; let's all hope we have built a resilient system, robust and well-defended against it happening again. The article also includes a nice summary of early ARPANET distributed programs, including pointing out that routing is itself a distributed computation -- an under-appreciated insight even today.
One article that I teach, even today, is on Grapevine, which is one of the seminal distributed systems. Everyone in computer systems should know about that work at Xerox PARC.
The ACM Classification System originated in 1964, and was redone here in 1982. With the obvious exception of quantum computing, I find that classification surprisingly solid, more than forty years later. It has since been revised, in 1991 and 1998, but not in over a quarter of a century, so people either don't use it or our forebears Simply Got It Right.
State of the art in AI in 1982? A 20-page effort to build an English grammar diagram useful for parsing sentences.
I haven't stopped to look more closely, but the February issue has several articles on queueing systems analysis.
A couple of personal interest: one on debugging via program slicing, a technique one of my Ph.D. graduates used for quantum programs, and one by Bill Swartout and Bob Balzer on the intertwining of specification and implementation. Just a few years later I would be the juniorest worker at USC/ISI, where they worked.
For what it's worth, fall of 1982 is when I entered college. Next year is my fortieth reunion, looking forward to seeing people I haven't seen in a long time.
