Sharla Boehm, the programmer whose code underpins the Internet

(scientificamerican.com)

60 points | by dxs 2 days ago

8 comments

  • anigbrowl 1 hour ago
    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

  • Imustaskforhelp 1 minute ago
    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.

  • zimpenfish 2 hours ago
    • bdcravens 1 hour ago
      For some reason that particular site sticks me into a CAPTCHA loop. (it does work after I open it incognito though, but I still get hit with a CAPTCHA the first time)
      • Imustaskforhelp 31 minutes ago
        https://web.archive.org/web/20260520202425/https://serjaimel...

        Here you go. Hope you enjoy the article, I am gonna go read it too now.

        (PS: I have created htmlpipe and I have written enough about it in submissions/comments etc. so I will hopefully let the project speak for itself now but feel free to ask me any questions as I love to talk and also a minor wish but I hope that more people could use my software but no biggies if they don't as I am happy using it for myself because I built it for myself and to help others! Have a nice day)

  • dijksterhuis 47 minutes ago
    topics like this are why i come to HN
  • readthenotes1 1 hour ago
    And married to Barry Boehm of Software Engineering Economics fame. That was one smart couple!
  • firdunupsa2 1 hour ago
    See, Scientific American says that a woman’s code underpins the Internet.
    • throwawayk7h 1 hour ago
      Many people's code underpins the internet. Some of them are women, yes. I wonder if you've ever heard of Grace Hopper.
    • readthenotes1 1 hour ago
      And they deadnamed her:(
  • themafia 1 hour ago
    > 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.

    • kristianp 14 minutes ago
      > That's just called "writing software" not "teaching the network."

      I would have expected better from Scientific American. The transcript read as very repetitive.

    • vasco 11 minutes ago
      Also if you read Wikipedia it looks like the main contribution was a simulator.
  • CharlesW 2 hours ago
    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
    • jagged-chisel 1 hour ago
      [And/But] whose code is [/not] present in today’s packet routing code

      Do we know which?

      • readthenotes1 1 hour ago
        Since it was a simulation written in Fortran, the odds of it actually being used for routing is pretty small.
        • cmiles74 1 hour ago
          I bet someone read the paper she co-authored and that might have had some influence on the code that they ended up writing. Her husband worked on ARPAnet, surely he would have mentioned that paper to someone!