alt Hacker NewsSharla Boehm, the programmer whose code underpins the Internet
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A great lightning talk on the same subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCdEhYVHvzw
I wish if it was article as @anigbrowl suggested too, the transcription format was a bit confusing but overall it was a very interesting read. I do dislike the fact that the article compares it to machine learning and AI buzzwords because what Sharla did was unique & great in her own regards but shouldn't be compared to ML.
but aside from that, The most interesting thing to me was that I must admit it but the level of humbleness within Sharla is quite something of another level.
Like she had PhD from UCLA in mathematics and she was teaching maths at high school, joining RAND in the side and taking the side and in some sense meaningfully contributing to the making of internet, yet still being humble all throughout.
I really enjoyed this statement: Friends who knew Sharla say she should absolutely be celebrated for her technological achievements, but not reduced to them because she did so much more with her life.
In a world so focused on achievements and advancements, money/fame. I really liked this line. Another one that I really liked: By the time Sharla Perrine Boehm died in 2023, at the age of 93, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population was using the internet that she had unknowingly helped usher in as a young computer programmer.
But throughout her decades as a teacher, mother, and community leader, she also touched many lives much more intimately. She was the woman supporting so many girls, focused not on her own legacy, but on theirs, on how much they could accomplish, now that the world was theirs.
I don't know but there is just something so profoundly fascinating when someone does good deeds when they are not visible. Just being a good person for the sake of it. I am sure her life had ups and downs but from reading this article, she did the things that she enjoyed which were programming and she was an interesting person. I do feel a bit greatful that I got to read about her and know about her.
My point is, reading the article, it seems that she did these things just because she could and that it was fun to her in some sense to her all at the same time being humble and being a person just so much more than just these achievements overall too. I do hope to take some aspects of that spirit from her hopefully too.
I sometimes get the impression that these people like Sharla only exist in a different century altogether but I sometimes feel like we might already be surrounded by people like Sharla's even in the present but just as Sharla's life, they were hidden and that is precisely why we mighn't know about them. This does give a bit of hope in humanity to me, lets hope that we are able to overcome our flaws and just get for a better future indeed.
And married to Barry Boehm of Software Engineering Economics fame. That was one smart couple!
topics like this are why i come to HN
> If this was 2025, this would be called machine learning because that's really what it was.
It would be called "machine learning" because that's the buzzword du jour.
> She was teaching the network to learn how to respond to nodes dropping out.
That's just called "writing software" not "teaching the network."
> Machine learning was definitely nonexistent at that point.
Are you sure about that?
> And yet, if you look at this 1964 paper, it's kind of unquestionably what it is.
The document: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3103.html
The claim: highly questionable.
The paper is interesting in it's own right, but, to hype it up in this way is gross.
TLDR: Sharla Boehm helped invent packet switching, a.k.a. "hot potato routing", and wrote the first implementation which proved that it could work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm
This would have made for an interesting article, but as a podcast transcript it's virtually unreadable. It also reads like they're talking to children. The Wikipedia article is much better, but too short:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm