Hackers at the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

Michael Karpeles, a 23-year-old techie in San Francisco, participated in the hack-a-thon.

“Fifth grade is when I definitely got interested in programming,” said Karpeles. “I started doing geeky summer programs.”

Last weekend, Karpeles took time off from his dot-com start-up to link up with 1,000 other techies—logged on in cities from Berlin to Bangalore—for a 48-hour software-making sprint. It’s the fourth year of Random Hacks of Kindness events, a movement started by a small team of programmers from Google, Microsoft, NASA, and the World Bank.

“There’s something special about a hack-a-thon,” said Karpeles. “It take it to the next level. It’s an opportunity to take action.”

During the event, Karpeles also meets Robert Munro, a computational linguist at Stanford. Their talk is pretty geeky, focusing on algorithms, preprocessing stages, and how different computer languages can be used across borders. It’s the stuff of Munro’s project, which involves complex computation but is a pretty straightforward project in the end.

Munro is building a new emergency response system for the Samoan Islands that quickly delivers emergency text and phone messages to rescue teams on the ground. The alerts could also be plotted on a Google map to pinpoint a trapped person’s whereabouts. Rescuers used similar technology after the Haiti and Japan earthquakes.

Now, Munro is further tuning the software—hacking it out—and testing it during a cyclone simulation in Samoa.

“We simulated the lead up to the cyclone yesterday,” Munro explained. “It hit overnight. We had a 12-hour blackout in communications. And now we’re in the process of mapping and translating all the different emergency reports.”

Karpeles thinks it’s a great idea. “I love this,” he said. “It’s a great way for people to get connected. And after something like this, a disaster, it’s pretty imperative.”

As Munro and Karpeles chat, Dave Leng, who actually runs Somoa’s emergency response network is on Skype following the software test, too. He said the hackers are offering him expertise and test-runs his small agency’s budget could never afford.

“There is software that does the type of things that we need it to do. To buy it, it’s about $200,000,” said Leng.

And the overall pay-off could be huge.

“The end result for us is about saving lives,” said Leng. “So any way that we can do that more efficiently is going to be good.”

Other projects were equally ambitious. In Portland, developers created an application to allow medical workers to track disease outbreaks in real-time. In Bangalore, hackers built a job database for unskilled workers. In Montreal, developers created an app that can scan a microscopic photo of bacteria taken from water to test for drinking safety—a key tool for poorer countries.

Munro said that, sure, while these projects help others, he also gets something out of it, too.

“The majority of people who study computational linguistics go on to work, you know, at the search engines. They’ll spend their career making a search engine five percent more accurate,” Munro said. “Whereas in one weekend, I can apply the same technology and create a more robust emergency response system for an entire nation.”

And that’s not a bad two day’s work.

Programming language tree featuring at the computer history museum (Photo: Corey Takahashi)

In Mountain View, California a new exhibition is opening. It’s called Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.

The exhibition, at the Computer History Museum, was more than six years in the making, a lifetime in computer years.

But unlike most technological enterprises it doesn’t look forward, but back.

This exhibition is on show in the heart of Silicon Valley, just down the road from Google’s worldwide headquarters. But according to exhibition launch director Paul Connolly the region is by no means the center of the computing world. Not if you take the long view.

The story of computing is “very much international,” says Connolly. He says it begins with Chinese abacuses all the way up to PCs, and even the web. France had an early version of the web, called the Minitel system, which has since been completely eclipsed by the web.

All of this is on display — the serious, the mathematical, and the whimsical. There’s an original Pong machine, from 1972, which is one of the earliest examples of a video game. There are archaic census machines, and Cold War-era defense and radar systems, complete with built-in ashtrays for the Air Force personnel who watched them.

There are plenty of obsolete items, like a Kookaburra laptop from an Australian company, or a Dragon 32, that may be the only computer ever mass-produced in Wales.

The Revolution exhibition is roughly chronological. As you step in deeper –beyond the hardware breakthroughs of World War II and the Cold War — the focus shifts to themes like artificial intelligence and data.

“People now tinker less with building hardware and more with building software,” says Alex Bochannek, one of the exhibition’s curators. “To build software, you need programming languages.”

Programming is something that to a lot of people who are not in the computing field is something of ”a black art, ” says Bochannek. It’s “somewhat magic.”

To demystify that magic, the exhibition has a family tree of programming languages that dates back to 1954.The chart features about 150 of the thousands of programming languages invented worldwide.

The languages’ names are far from familiar: Fortran, Lisp, Snobol, Algol, Simula, Basic, Pascal, Smalltalk.

But Bochannek says programming languages behave like regular spoken languages. They have “a syntax, a semantics,” and follow other conventions.

Programming languages are used in everything from automated banking to website building. This diversity of use is the reason so many exist.

Bochannek says it’s important to maintain that diversity. “There was an idea early on in programming languages that there’s going to be this one language that solves all problems,” he says. “And it’s similar in the spoken-language community, as well, with things like Esperanto and so forth. But oftentimes there are nuances you can not very easily express.”

Gio Wiederhold, started his own computer exhibition at Stanford University, where he is an emeritus professor. The Stanford museum shares some items with the Computer History Museum.

Wiederhold says it’s more difficult to capture computer history, than, say, art history. He says the true intellectual value of computing is represented less by artifacts than by ideas and ‘evolving code.’ As he puts it, an artifact “once it exists … is very hard to change.”

So what distinguishes ‘beautiful code’ that belongs in a museum from code that should just be tossed in the trash?

According to Wiederhold, “some ugly code works, so it won’t be tossed in the trash. But beautiful code is … just like beautiful text in writing, where somebody can read it. It is clear what is meant.”

As a young emigré programmer, Wiederhold wrote the code for combustion equations in the Polaris missile. He says that code was still in use as recently as a decade ago.

But, of course, the software has hugely increased in volume. Today there are millions of lines of code written just for say, an iPhone.

Wiederhold’s current research deals with the flow of intellectual property. He says the rapid flow has turned many programming languages into commodities, and it complicates old notions of software authorship.

He says all programming languages are converging. “We have many fewer languages than we used to have. So that’s a good thing.”

“It helps communication a great deal. When people were more narrow, they thought they needed different languages in their own country.”

“It means that I can send a program that’s written by a programmer here, at 6 p.m., to India, for somebody to help me in testing and de-bugging it.”

It’s a phenomenon called the 24-hour software factory.

Programming languages are completely universal, says Wiederhold. They’re no longer bound by countries.

Wiederhold hopes exhibitions like Revolution can help to explain these languages, so the next generation gets inspired to write new code. Perhaps, even beautiful, gallery-worthy code.

Wow. It’s not often the Technology Podcast gets to celebrate the very reason, figuratively and literally, for its existence. But this week, the Internet celebrated its 40th anniversary/birthday/whatever you want to call it. That’s UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock, with the Interface Message Processor. Forty years ago this week, Kleinrock and his team sent the first message between two computers. One of the computers was at UCLA, and the other was up at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). That message was supposed to be “L-O-G-I-N.” Prophetically, maybe poetically, only the “L” and “O” got through before the Net experienced its first system crash. Anyone know how to say “Fail Whale” in 1969-speak? Anyway — to celebrate, UCLA threw a symposium-ish bash. You can read more about that here. Our intrepid left coast correspondent, Cyrus Farivar, happened to be down in Los Angeles for the festivities. He sent us interviews with Kleinrock and Charles Kline (who typed that fateful “L-O” message). He also sent along an extended interview with Chinese blogger and Internet activist Isaac Mao. All in all, the three interviews provide a fascinating glimpse into what the Net was, what it is, and what it could be someday. And speaking of where the Net is headed. Word came today from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is to allow scripts besides the Latin script in domain names. These so-called Internationalized Domain Names will now be allowed to include Arabic, Chinese, Russian and many other scripts. As always, explaining the domain name set-up is a bit tricky, so here’s a video to help you:

I know many of you will be asking for some of the source material for the opening audio montage. So, below, please find two incredibly enlightening videos. This stuff is gold, people, pure gold. We’re on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.