โ Scribed by I.S. Reed
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This paper is based on a talk the author gave at the symposium in honor of Solomon Golomb's 60 th birthday. It describes the history in which the author was a participant in some of the early developments of error-correcting codes and computers. Also details are given about the origins of both the Reed-Muller and Reed-Solomon codes. (~) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. I don't know where to begin. I suppose that the history of anything on coding would have to start with something I know best and that would be me. I guess I could start back at Caltech, but I won't for now. Actually, the first people that I knew in coding other than myself were David Muller and David Huffman. David Muller and I were classmates at Caltech. David Huffman and I met while on the same ship in the U.S. Navy. During the early 1940s none of us knew anything about error-correcting codes; they had not yet been discovered.
David Huffman was my officer and I was his petty officer aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer. Except possibly for past President George Bush, Ensign Huffman well may have been the youngest officer in the U.S. Navy although President Bush was quite young as well. I was trained to be a U.S. Navy radio technician as also, somewhat later, was coding expert Professor Lloyd Welch also at USC. Lloyd and I went to the same Navy technician school for radio and radar. That is how we both came to understand electronics.
My first knowledge of error-correcting codes was after finishing graduate school at Caltech in mathematics. I had gone to work for the Northrop Aircraft Corporation. As a graduating Ph.D. student in mathematics I had received offers to teach mathematics at such universities as Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Minnesota, etc. The former would not have been too bad. I had grown up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Minnesota just seemed too cold for me to go there. However, I decided to stay in Los Angeles because Northrop was the organization that paid me the most money. Economics became the deciding factor in my decision.
At that time Northrop Aircraft had an excellent procedure for obtaining technical journals. They would either buy or borrow journals from libraries such as UCLA, Caltech, etc. I believe their standard place to obtain circulating journal articles was from the UCLA Library. Journals would come across my desk quite often.
One might imagine that in those days engineers worked in nice offices with walls, windows, etc. Actually, we worked in a very large area in a "sea" of drafting tables and desks. The noise level was at least 20 to 30dB higher than anything a person would work in today.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
The maximum achievable rate of an error-correcting runlength-limited code is consid-ered. Runlength-limited codes find wide appIications in magnetic and optical recording, baseband. pulse transmission, and fiber optic communications. When a runlength-limited code is used on a noisy channel, error-co