Classical papers/books/articles.

1. Complexity in the Sciences Milnor's collection of essays on complexity. He talks about complexity theory, molecular basis of life, game theory. His claim is that at some point a unified theory tying all these together will come up.
2. An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances. The classic Bayes theorem paper that was published in 1763.
3. As we may think by Vannevar Bush in 1945. A nice article looking out into the future. He talks about an interesting device called the memex. The Endeavour project is pretty close to what Bush was thinking about.
4. There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom Transcript of the classic talk Feynman gave in 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society.
5. What Next? A dozen remaining IT problems. Jim Gray's Turing Award lecture. Local copy Not suprisingly Jim Gray devoted some time to talk about Bush's article and the memex.
6. Digital immortality A paper by Jim Gray and Gordon Bell on digital immortality and passing on data to future generations. Local copy
7. "MOORE'S LAW" The Benchmark of Progress in Semiconductor Electronics A good article on Moore's Law by Bob Schaller.
8. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences by Rene Descartes
9. The Hacker Crackdown - Amazing electronic book on hacking of telephone systems in the 80's.
10. The Nature of Space and Time Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose present their views on the universe. This appeared in Scientific American, July 96. Local copy
11. Ken Thompson's Turing award lecture Thompson sympathised with the hackers during this lecture. Thompson was awarded the Turing award in 1983 at the height of the Hacker crackdown. This is what he said:

    ....After trying to convince you that I cannot be trusted, I wish to moralize. I would like to criticize the press in its handling of the "hackers," the 414 gang, the Dalton gang, etc. The acts performed by these kids are vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution. The companies that are vulnerable to this activity (and most large companies are very vulnerable) are pressing hard to update the criminal code. Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.
    There is an explosive situation brewing. On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. On the other hand, the acts performed by these kids will soon be punishable by years in prison.
    I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts. There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked. The press must learn that misguided use of a computer is no more amazing than drunk driving of an automobile.

12. Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks Robert M. Metcalfe classic Ethernet paper
13. Max Planck's Nobel address (1920) This is an excerpt. Please send me mail if you can find the full text somewhere.
14. The document prepared by the International Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda and the Surrounding Events A very illuminating role on how the western world ignored the situation in Rwanda and knowing fully well the magnitude of the problem and knowing that a UN military presence would have stopped the genocide.
15. Effects of Communication Latency, Overhead, and Bandwidth in a Cluster Architecture, Richard P. Martin, Amin M. Vahdat, David E. Culler and Thomas E. Anderson. Proc. of the 24th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, pp. 85-97, June 1997. I really like this paper. I wish someone would do such a study for memory latency/bandwidth/bank-size for single threaded applications on a single processor with SDRAM/DDR-DRAM or Rambus memory. Please send me mail if you find such a reference.

    The only such paper I could find was The Relative Importance of Memory Latency, Bandwidth, and Branch Limits to Performance (1997) Norman P. Jouppi and Parthasarathy Ranganthan. But this is a paper with numbers got from a simulator and their memory model is really bad. I dont think this is that good a paper. I loved their color 3-D bar charts :-)

16. 25 Years of the International Symposia on Computer Architecture (Selected Papers). ACM, 1998 I think this is a really good collection. I especially liked the retrospectives.
17. Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good An article that appeared in the Jan 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly dealing with natural and artifical flavors. Long and exhaustively detailed.
18. Gao Xingjian's Nobel Lecture 2000 (Literature) This is not a particularly earth shattering lecture - but some really interesting thoughts on what literature is.
19. Dead computer architecture society This is not really a paper but a discussion on dead computer architecture designs and machines. 11 May 1999.

Other papers/articles/interviews

• Auto-Summarization of Audio-Video Presentations. Some really interesting work on auto-summarizing videos. Work being done at Microsoft research. They currently have methods to summarize football games to 10 minutes capsules! Combining this technolgy with Tivo should be really cool :-) This paper appeared in IEEE Proceedings on Multimedia, 1999. Local copy
• Automatically Extracting Highlights for TV Baseball Programs. Followup paper to the previous one. Also from Microsoft research. The Collaborative and Multimedia Systems group at MSR is working on this. Local copy
• Protein Folding
  • An essay developed by FASEB for the general public on protein folding.
  • Another article on protien folding. This appeared in the Washington Post.
• Data structures for the Rubiks Cube
• Optimal Juggling A very thorough analysis of juggling patterns
• Juggling a 4 ball cascade A very thorough and mathematical analysis on whay jugglign a 4 ball cascade is impossible. Local copy
• Creationism From New Scientist.
• Why Creationism cannot be science This is a really good article and explains what are the requirements of a scientific theory. Local copy
• Excellent resource for information on creationism
• Three Times a Lady: The History of Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover. Lady Chatterly's lover was published in 3 versions. You can read the online version here
• An interview with Gene Kranz - the legenedary NASA flight director. Local copy
• A report of the mysterious Pathfinder (the unmanned probe that landed on Mars - 1997) resets and how they were solved. Very interesting.
• The paper published in 1989 which solved the problem of priority reversal (which was what was causing the Pathfinder resets). The JPL engineers actually used the results from this paper and corrected the problem on the Pathfinder!
• The Introduction of Pharmaceutical Product Patents in India: "Heartless Exploitation of the Poor and Suffering" by Prof. Jean O. Lanjouw Economics Department, Yale University and the NBER. Online HTML version
• Documents on the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am flight 103 on 21 December 1998
  
  1. CASE CONCERNING QUESTIONS OF INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION OF THE 1971 MONTREAL CONVENTION ARISING FROM THE AERIAL INCIDENT AT LOCKERBIE. Order of the International Court of Justice. Added Jan 18, 2000.
  2. DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE EL-KOSHERI. Added Jan 18, 2000
  
  The case deals with Libya's claim that the US and UK had no jurisdication in trying the Libyan nationals invovled in the bombing and Libya has stuck to the Montreal Convention in trying them in Libyan soil. The dissenting opinion of Judge El-Kosheri is very interesting. The Montreal Convention is the only international treaty for crimes of this nature.
• An article on Pentagon's secret aircraft projects. From Jane's Intelligence review Added Jan 18, 2000
• Black Hawk DownReview of a book by Mark Bowden. A reconstruction of a military operation in Somalia in which 17 US soldiers died and more than 500 Somalis died. Many believe this to be a watershed in US foreign policy.
• Framsticks : Artifical Life Added Feb 14, 2000
• Microprocessor Timeline Added March 2, 2000
• A History of Microprocessors. Added March 2, 2000
• An article about Exponential which appeared in Fast Company - Feb 1999.Local copy
  The dream behind Exponential Technology was bold -- to build the world’s fastest computer chip. The reality was messy. The end was bloody -- $30 million of wasted capital, four years of wasted effort. So why are so many people grateful for the experience? Added March 2, 2000
• A Java ILP Machine Based on Fast Dynamic Compilation. This is a paper from IBM's research division. It was published in July 1997 and their processor does exactly what Transmeta's Crusoe does except that instead of working with the x86 instruction set they use Java bytecodes. PDF version of paper is available from download from the website.
  Abstract For desktop machines for network computing (called Webtops), one needs high performance execution of Java programs, since these machines will be expected to run substantial applications that will be written in Java. On a Webtop, a chip designed to run only Java programs along with a lean operating system to support it, can theoretically provide a cheaper and faster solution compared to a general purpose PC. We believe that, compared to a stack machine, higher Java performance can be achieved by state of the art ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism) compiler and hardware technology. To this end, we propose a simple ILP architecture (a small VLIW machine), together with a Java Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler hidden within the chip architecture. This approach extends the DAISY system described in IBM Cyberjournal Entry 8502.

  The first time a fragment of Java code is executed, the JIT compiler transparently converts the Java byte codes to highly optimized RISC primitives, then parallelizes them, so multiple RISC primitives can be executed in one machine cycle. The VLIW code is saved in a portion of main memory not visible to the Java architecture. Subsequent executions of the same fragment do not require translation (unless cast out). We describe fast compiler algorithms for dynamic translation of Java byte codes to VLIW code. These algorithms parallelize across multiple paths and loop iteration boundaries. In addition, they map the Java stack and local variables to real registers, thereby eliminating the pushes and pops between local variables and the stack by appropriate register allocation.

• Extending the life of a patent - A very informative document on the process of how a patent extension is granted in the US.
• Searle & Co. patent extension on Daypro - An amazing account of how Searle & Co. (a subsidiary of drug giant Monsanto) got an extension on Daypro, an anti-inflammatory drug this is the second best-selling drug for arthiritis. The patent extension was granted in a budget bill!
• A diatribe on why system software research is irrelevant. Very intersting slides by Rob Pike (Bell Labs). Thanks to AK for forwarding me the link.
• The Trial of the Octopus The scary role that the US played in the Pan Am 103 bombing.
• The Microarchitecture of Superscalar Processors. This paper appeeared in the IEEE Proceedings, December 1995.
• Unleashing Telecom and Internet in India Interesting paper with really good analysis on the problems and economic impact.
• Logical Effort: Designing for Speed on the Back of an Envelope An excellent tutorial. Based on Sutherland's work.
• Micropipelines - Turing award lecture of Ivan Sutherland
• The Advanced Computer System (ACS) Perhaps the most ambitious systems envisionsed. Started by IBM in 1964 - it had a whole host of features that some of which aren't present in processors even in 2001.