A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits (1936) [pdf]

dspace.mit.edu

72 points·espeed··8 comments

And thus the boolean algebra entered digital circuit design. Shannon was such a boss.

The book "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation"[1] is a must read for those interested in Shannon and the history of Bell Labs.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

Yeah, I'd say Shannon's master thesis was the start of the modern computing era.

or herald of a dark age of network technology (in no way am I insulting Shannon)

there are problems that come up in web development that were solved by electrical engineers 100 years ago

Examples, if you please? I am very interested, as computer science (broadly speaking) seems to be a field in which, with higher incidence than might be expected, the ancients knew certain things better (or knew fewer worse things) than the present.

Not web development per se, but Clos Networks[0] were originally designed for telephone systems and re-emerged in large datacenter networks[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clos_network

[1] http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43837.html

Robert Gallager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Gallager) talk at MIT on Claude Shannon, "the most important master's thesis ever written": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neA0NJNUEfM

Imagine the pain this guy went through when typesetting this thesis. All Hail TeX!

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