Perl history

wonko_el_sano

Re:Who Uses Perl Anymore?

Tell me, what major sites have been build using Ruby?

I can list several [wired.com] very [yahoo.com] high [ticketmaster.com] volume [slashdot.com] sites/applications [valueclick.com] that [adobe.com] use [imdb.com] Perl [citysearch.com].

Lost+Found

Re:Who Uses Perl Anymore?  ( 844289 ), December 12, 2005 @03:06PM #14240946)

You seem to have forgotten Amazon.com, which uses HTML::Mason (a Perl/mod_perl templating system) to serve every customer-facing page.

 Some  new features (for example given-when construct) can be emulated in version 5.8.8 using for loop. Something like (Perl Idioms )

for ($animal)
{
    /camel/     && do Humps(2), last;
    /dromedary/ && do Humps(1), last;
}

Perl evolution: major versions of Perl 5

Perl is not a static language. Like all programming languages it evolves with time. Some initial design decisions proved to be deeply wrong were later partially corrected (use of strict in modern Perl is one example). For some, programmers learned to compensate deficiencies of the language with tools (for example prettyprinter can be used for very efficient finding of unclosed '{' in C-style languages). Runaway string constants (unclosed ' or ") now are detected pretty well as a part of syntax highlighting in editors (and you should not use the editor that does not have this feature ;-)

Similarly, reversing comparison with constant ( if ( 2==$stage) which looks strange, but the trick still makes sense ;-) can help to eliminate some errors connected with unfortunate used of = for assignment and == for comparison, a blunder inherited from C, which is a source of many bugs. In addition to this blunder, Perl introduced another one borrowed from Bourne shell -- different symbols for comparison of strings and numbers ( if ( $line eq 'EOF' but if ( $found == -1 ) ). Here only God can help you although if one part of the comparison is constant Perl interpreter now produces warnings.

Generally a typical programming language gets to a new version in 10 to 12 years. Perl reached mainstream status with Perl 4 released in 1991. Perl is now in version 5 that was initially released in late 1994 (actually way to quick from the point of view of language evolution). But for the 20 years since 1994 Perl changed very little as resources for its development became minimal after O'Reilly withdraw its support around 2002.

The last major changes were introduced in Perl 5.10 which has been released on 18th December 2007, on the 20th birthday of Perl . This version is now standard de-factor for Perl 5 and used in major Unix and Linux distributions. The level of dominance is such that scripts written for older version can be viewed as legacy scripts.

Unfortunately Perl does not have an influential corporate sponsor like Python have found in Google and Microsoft. It also suffered from OO fanatics attempt to mold the language into their preferred taste and ill conceived and then botched attempt to develop Perl 6: after Larry Wall withdrawal from development their was no a person with comparable architectural vision and talent to take over. So the best strategy in such circumstances is conservative strategy, but people with just two cents of talent often have huge amount of energy and such people represent serious danger as for hijacking and the destroying open source project which lost its principle developer. Still despite lack of funds the development progresses and language is evolving.

Despite slow page of changes Perl as we used to know in say 1996 is somewhat different from a typical versions of Perl deployed in 2012. Deployed version are usually in the range of 5.8 to 5.16. Most important innovations are already present in version 5.8 ("our" keyword is probably the most important addition to the language that simplifies use of strict).

Some features such as string constants written as identifies without single or double quotes (as in $dictionary{weather} ) became obsolete. Although the idea that weather is a contact and $weather is variable has its value, as $ can be considered as dereferencing mechanism. Perl is installed by default on all major versions of Unix. The most popular are two versions: 5.8.8 and 5.10.1. With 5.8 still representing lion share of older Linux installations.

Among important versions still widely deployed on Unix (see Perl - Wikipedia):

• Perl 5.6 Released on March 22, 2000. It introduced several important changes and refinements of the language. Major changes included 64-bit support, Unicode string representation, large file support (i.e. files over 2 GB) and the "our" keyword. Now this version is by-and-large obsolete. Among notable new language features in this version we can mention the following:
  • "our" variable declarations An "our" declaration introduces the ability to create an alias to the global variable (and creates corresponding variable if it does not exist) within a package namespace. In example below our creates an alias to a global for namespace Myspace variable Myspace::buffer

    package Myspace;
        our $bugger;       # this is alias to the global variable Myspace::buffer for rest of lexical scope
        $bar = 20;

    package Other_namespace;
        print "$bar\n"; # prints 20, as it refers to $Myspace::buffer, not to $::buffer

    By default a package declaration changes which symbol table you are referring to when you use unqualified variables. But you still can access variables declared with "our" attribute unqualified like in example above print "$bar\n" after the package declaration (which effectively changed the default symbol table and without our attribute $bar should mean $Bar::bar). See "our" in perlfunc.
    

  • the new $^V magic variable (which contains the Perl version as a string). Also, sprintf and printf support the Perl-specific format flag %v to print ordinals of characters in arbitrary strings.
    
  • If open() is passed three arguments instead of two, the second argument is used as the mode and the third argument is taken to be the file name.
    
  • In addition to BEGIN, INIT, END, DESTROY and AUTOLOAD, subroutines named CHECK are now special. These are queued up during compilation and behave similar to END blocks, except they are called at the end of compilation rather than at the end of execution. They cannot be called directly.
    
  • The qw// operator is now evaluated at compile time into a true list
  • Binary numbers are now supported as literals, in s? printf formats, and oct()
  • Subroutines can now return modifiable lvalues. See "Lvalue subroutines" in perlsub.
  • Perl now allows the arrow to be omitted in many constructs involving subroutine calls through references.
    • For example, $foo[10]->('foo') may now be written $foo[10]('foo'). This is rather similar to how the arrow may be omitted from $foo[10]->{'foo'}. Note however, that the arrow is still required for foo(10)->('bar').
  • The exists() built-in now works on subroutine names. A subroutine is considered to exist if it has been declared (even if implicitly). See "exists" in perlfunc for examples.
  • The bit operators (& | ^ ~ << >>) now operate on the full native integer width (the exact size of which is available in $Config{ivsize}).
  • @- and @+ provide starting/ending offsets of regex matches. The new magic variables @- and @+ provide the starting and ending offsets, respectively, of $&, $1, $2, etc. See perlvar for details.
• Perl 5.8. Released July 18, 2002. It did not anything substantial to the language but features introduced in 5.6 now are better debugged. This is the current "minimal" version of Perl to write scripts for as it is available on all flavors of Unix. For example RHEL 5.8 still comes with Perl 5.8.8 installed and you needs manually upgrade to Active State Perl 5.10 for Linux to use version 5.10 (both 32 bit and 64 bit binaries are free). Version 5.8.8 is also still standard on AIX 5.3 and HP-US 11.31. For earlier versions of HP-UX like 10.xx version 5.8 is available as HP-provided binary package. The changes to the language in this version were minimal:
  • 5.8.3 A SCALAR method is now available for tied hashes.
  • 5.8.4 Perl format were enhanced
  • 5.8.8 chdir, chmod and chown can now work on filehandles as well as filenames, if the system supports respectively fchdir, fchmod and fchown.
• Perl 5.10. Released Dec 18, 2007. This was the major upgrade of version 5.8 that introduced one important language feature: state variables (see Perl state variables for details). Currently is installed by default on Suse 11, RHEL 6. Cygwin has Perl 5.26 by default, not 5.10. This is the version we will cover as versions 5.12-5.14 are essentially better debugged variants of this version . There are very few Perl books that cover this version. Among good, that I can recommend are
  • The second edition of Effective Perl Programming that covers version 5.10.
  • Programming Perl, forth edition (covers version 5.14).

  While currently it does not run on all Unix flavors just a matter of time. Linux installations that do not have this version installed by default can be upgrade using binary package from ActiveState.

  This version improves Perl by introducing some important fixes to old problems and some interesting new features like:

  • state variables. This is an alternative to "my" variables and this type of variables keeps the value between invocations. This is probably the most important addition as it rectify serious deficiency of previous version in subroutines local variables implementation.
  • Several useful extensions to regex including
    • The ability to assign names to variables that contain matching elements of regular expressions (traditionally $1, $2,...).
    • Find the last occurrence of the substring in regex without backtracking (?+, *+, ++); For example

    • DB<1> $a='aabbaaaabbaa'; # will return the last aa not the middle aaaa as "greedy" operation would
      DB<2> p $a=~/(a++)/;
      aa
      DB<3>

    • Can be used as "between" operation.
    • Metasymbol \D{N} with the ability to catch the last matched capture buffer with \g{-1}, previous \g{-2} and so on.
    • New metasymbol \h -- horizontal White space, Similarly metasymbol \v for vertical white space. Also \H and \V
  • Case statement (switch statement). Syntax is "given-when" It introduces four new keywords ("given, "when", "default" and "continue").
  • Ability to specify minimal version of Perl for which the script is written (use Perl 5.10).
  • New keyword say is identical to existing keyword print but provides newline at the end. You are saving four symbols so how wise is this addition is difficult to say ;-). It definitely useful for debugging statements and allow to distinguish them from "production" statements.
  • Lexical $_
  • Smart match operator ("~~"); there are two unrelated ideas mixed dea here.
    • If left side is a scalar and right side is an array it will perform search for a variable in the array -- a very common operation.
    • The second and much more ambitious idea is to get rid of the necessity to use eq for string comparison and == for numerical (which is one of the common sources or errors in Perl and can be viewed as a design flaw; the idea was borrowed from Unix shell). If one of operators is a numeric constant, or clearly numeric (for example prefixed with unary +) interpreter will chose numeric comparison, otherwise string comparison. In other words, smart match will check if the two values are string-equal using "eq", unless it finds some other way to match them.... See Smart Matching in Perl 5.10

    • so all the following will be true:
      1. $a='Foo'
      2. $b=42;
      3. "$a ~~ "Foo"
      4. $b ~~ 42
      5. $b ~~ 42.0
      6. $b ~~ "42.0"

      and all these will be false

      1. $a ~~ "Bar"
      2. $b ~~ "42x"

      When turning a string to a number Perl looks at the left side of the string and uses as many characters as it can understand as being a number and warns if there are more - non-number - characters in the string. On the other hand ~~ fits the comparison method to the values on the two sides. In a smart way.

      This means that these are all true:

      1. 42 == 42
      2. 42 == 42.0
      3. 42 == "42.0"
      4. 42 == "42\n"
      5. 42 == "42x" # true albeit with a warning... if you used use warnings...
      6. "Foo" == "Bar" # this a Perl gotcha because both part of this example are converted to zero.

      But this is false:

      1. 42 eq "42.0" # left oprand is converted to string and the compared: length does not match to it is false.
      2. 42 eq "42\n" # same thing but programmers who use shell should beware of this behavious as it is different from bash and other shells.

      This behavior while consistent is a bit hard to understand.

  • Feature pragma
    • use feature 'say'
    • use feature 'switch'
    • use feature 'state'
    • use feature ':5.10'
  • Defined-or operator. Similar to (condition) ? if-true : if_false conditional expression. If variable is not defined then it is assigned the default value provided in statement after "//". For example

    $var = $val // $default_value;

    You can also use "compact" version (C-style shortcut)

    $var //= $default_value

  • Stacked file tests
  • Command line option -E turns on extensions like new keyword say in oneliners
• Perl 5.10.1
  • The handling of complex expressions by the given/when switch statement has been enhanced. There are two new cases where when now interprets its argument as a Boolean, instead of an expression to be used in a smart match:
    • flip-flop operators

      The .. and ... flip-flop operators are now evaluated in Boolean context, following their usual semantics; see Range Operators in perlop.

      Note that, as in perl 5.10.0, when (1..10) will not work to test whether a given value is an integer between 1 and 10; you should use when ([1..10]) instead (note the array reference).

      However, contrary to 5.10.0, evaluating the flip-flop operators in Boolean context ensures it can now be useful in a when(), notably for implementing bistable conditions, like in:

               when (/^=begin/ .. /^=end/) { 
                   # do something 
                  } 
      

    • $scalar ~~ @array now always distributes the smart match across the elements of the array. It's true if one element in @array verifies $scalar ~~ $element . This is a generalization of the old behaviour that tested whether the array contained the scalar.
    • A bugfix related to the handling of the /m modifier and qr resulted in a change of behaviour between 5.8.x and 5.10.0:

      # matches in 5.8.x, doesn't match in 5.10.0
      $re = qr/^bar/; "foo\nbar" =~ /$re/m; 
      

• Perl 5.12. Released April 12, 2010. Looks like better debugged version 5.10. This version is superseded by version 5.14 release with interval of just one year...
  • use 5.12.0 automatically enable strict.
  • You can now use the keys, values, each built-in functions on arrays (previously you could only use them on hashes). See perlfunc for details.
• Perl 5.14. Released May 14, 2011. Looks like better debugged version 5.10. The forth edition of Programming Perl (2012) uses Perl 5.14 as the base version.
  • Non-destructive substitution

    The substitution (s///) and transliteration (y///) operators now support an /r option that copies the input variable, carries out the substitution on the copy, and returns the result. The original remains unmodified.

    1. my $old = "cat";
    2. my $new = $old =~ s/cat/dog/r;
    3. # $old is "cat" and $new is "dog"

    This is particularly useful with map. See perlop for more examples.

Perl6

Perl6 remains in prototype stage. More or less stable prototype exist for Windows. For Linux see Perl 6 for Linux

• Perl 6 at a Glance Andrew Shitov 9789082156836 Amazon.com Books This book is the first one based on the standard 6.c of the language, 150 pages
• Andrew Shitov. Migrating to Perl 6. An Easy Transition from Perl 5. ISBN 978-90-821568-5-0. Expected in 2018

Early history

See excellent Perl Timeline for more information. Also see pages on this site devoted to Larry Wall

NSA Blacker project

Perl is an acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language." The first version of Perl was developed by Larry Wall around 1987. Like in the case with many other important algorithmic languages the development was partially financed by military.

In the paper Linux Magazine October 1999 FEATURES Uncultured Perl Larry Wall wrote:

Like the typical human, Perl was conceived in secret, and existed for roughly nine months before anyone in the world ever saw it. Its womb was a secret project for the National Security Agency known as the "Blacker" project, which has long since closed down. The goal of that sexy project was not to produce Perl. However, Perl may well have been the most useful thing to come from Blacker. Sex can fool you that way.

"Blacker" project needed some C/AWK/SED superset and an attempt was made to add AWK and SED features to the C-shell framework. The idea was to create a language more convenient and more suitable for processing logs and generating reports for large quantities of data than combination of shell, AWK and C-shell. Design contained some elegant solutions and the language got some traction. Here how Larry Wall explains his decision:

At this point, I'm talking about Perl, version 0. Only a few people in my office ever used it. In fact, the early history of Perl recorded in O'Reilly's Camel Book (Programming Perl) was written by my officemate of the time, Daniel Faigin.

He, along with my brother in law, Mark Biggar, were most influential in the early design of Perl. They were also the only users at the time. Mark talked me out of using bc as a backend expression processor, and into using normal, built in floating point operations, since they were just being standardized by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Relying on that standard was one of the better decisions I ever made. Earlier scripting languages such as REXX didn't have that option, and as a result they tend to run slower.

The very first version already contained a lot strong points and first of all the principle idea that the language should provide for special constructs optimizing the usage of common, most frequent idioms (although, the example Larry Wall sites was a very costly blunder by Dennis Richie; introduction of ++, -- and of += is much better case to support this argument):

I made one major, incompatible change to Perl just before it was born. From the start, one of my overriding design principles was to "optimize for the common case." I didn't coin this phase, of course. I learned it from people like Dennis Ritchie, who realized that computers tend to assign more values than they compare. This is why Dennis made = represent assignment and == represent comparison in his C programming language.

I'd made many such tradeoffs in designing Perl, but I realized that I'd violated the principle in Perl's regular expression syntax. It used grep's notion of backslashing ordinary characters to produce metacharacters, rather than egrep's notion of backslashing metacharacters to produce ordinary characters.

It turns out that you use the metacharacters much more frequently than you do the literal characters, so it made sense to change Perl so that /(.*)/ defined a substring that could be referenced later, while /\(.*\)/ matched a sequence inside literal parentheses.

Perl 2.0 was release in June 1988 (coincidentally simultaneously with SPARCstation 1 which along with SunOS became the machine of choice for Perl enthusiasts, who can afford it).

Release as open source

Perl 3.0 was released in 1989 was distributed under GNU public license -- one of the first major open source project distributed under GNU license and probably the first outside FSF. This is the version that first appeared on PC.

The decision to release it as free open sourced software was also a brilliant and in 1989. And not an easy one:

I knew that I didn't dare ask the company lawyers for permission, because they'd have thought about it for something like six months, and then told me "no." This is despite the fact that they wouldn't be interested in peddling it themselves. In the old days, a lot of free software was released under the principle that it's much easier to ask forgiveness than to seek permission. I'm glad things have changed -- at least to the extent that the counterculture is acknowledged these days, even if it's not quite accepted. Yet.

Perl 4

In January 1991 the first edition of Programming Perl, a.k.a. The Pink Camel, by Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz is published by O'Reilly and Associates. It described a new, 4.0 version of Perl. Simultaneously Perl 4.0 was released (in March of the same year).

. Larry Wall is awarded the Dr. Dobbs Journal Excellence in Programming Award. (March). This was very well debugged version and was used as interpreter in many software system such as "classic" Tivoli.

Final version of Perl 4 was released in 1993, was very stable, and remained in widespread use for a decade of more. Please note that development lasted only for three years as Perl 5 was released in 1994.

Perl 5 period

Perl 5.000 was released on October 17, 1994. It was almost complete rewrite of the interpreter and introduction of substantial changes to the language. Among new constructs added were references, namespaces, new type of local variables (my) variables, and modules. New functions include: abs(), chr(), uc(), ucfirst(), lc(), lcfirst(), chomp(), glob(). There is now an English module that provides human readable translations for cryptic variable names. Modules can be loaded via the new keywords use. Pattern matches may now be followed by additional modifiers including "multiline match" semantics. An s modifier makes . match newline.

To solve this problem Perl 5 provides two mechanisms for protecting code from having its variables stomped on by other code: lexically scoped variables created with my or state and global variables, which are exposed via the vars pragma, or the our keyword. Any global variable belong to some namespace (the default namespace is called main and can be accessed via a "fully qualified form" like $main::myvar.

Lexically scoped variable is considered to be part of that lexical-scope, and does not have a "fully qualified form".

In Perl namespaces are called "packages" and the package declaration tells the compiler with which namespace to prefix to our variables and unqualified dynamic names. This both protects against accidental stomping and provides an interface for deliberately clobbering global dynamic variables declared and used in other scopes or packages, when that is what you want to do.

Riding dot com bubble

This release happened "just in time" for the World Wide Web revolution. WWW has dramatically raised the visibility of Perl 5 around 1996 -- to certain extent at the expense of TCL and other Unix-based scripting languages, although WEB also produced several Perl competitors like JavaScript and PHP. Due to the Web Perl has become one of major programming languages for Internet and for some period dominated Web scripting practically like VB dominates Windows scripting arena. Later it was displaced in this role by PHP -- a Perl derivative that is vastly inferiors language in comparison to Perl, but that adhere more strictly to C syntax. As it was well integrated with Apache and you can write PHP code directly in HTML files it became new "duct tape of the Web" instead of Perl.

Initially version 5 coexisted with Perl 4. It became the primary version of Perl in early 1995 (just before Java). This was huge effort of the part of Larry Wall. As he remarked later:

For Perl, the meltdown happened because I decided to follow the rule: "Plan to throw away your prototype, because you will anyway." Perl 5 was nearly a total reorganization. I have in times past claimed that it was a total rewrite, but that's a bit of a stretch, since I did, in fact, evolve Perl 4's runtime system into Perl 5's. (Though if you compared them, you'd see almost nothing in common.) The compiler, though, was a total rewrite.

Although Perl implementation is an open source implementation, commercial companies actively participated in its development. The major commercial beneficiary of Perl success was O'Reilly & Associates that published first books on the language (Programming Perl and Learning Perl in 1993). At the peak of Perl popularity it sold millions of dollars worth of Perl books each year. They also tried to distribute extended Perl distribution called Perl Resource Kit.

For some time they provided financial support for the Perl movement. From 1995 to 2002 they employ Larry Wall. O'Reilly also hosted Perl web site and sponsored a Perl conference.

Loss of O'Reilly patronage and failure to keep its status of primary Web development language

PHP -- an ugly and primitive language had chosen the right area of specialization -- web pages and soon (by and large due to its primitivism in style of Basic) get substantial following as it was the easiest language for those who developed some pages in HTML top start to add elements of programming to their Web site.

This was unfair development but life is often unfair. Also around 2000-2001 with the burst of dot-com bubble the computer book publishing bubble was also burst and as a result O'Reilly lost large chunk of its revenue. Like Perl it never recovered.

Due to the fact that Perl books became much less profitable, around 2002 O'Reilly lost interest in Perl. The same year Larry Wall left O'Reilly. Here is pretty a telling quote by Bill O'Reilly himself from Is Perl Still Relevant - O'Reilly Media (July 2005 )

In terms of the competitive landscape among programming languages, in addition to PHP, Python has long been gaining on Perl. From about 1/6 the size of the Perl market when I first began tracking it, it's now about 2/3 the size of the Perl book market. The other scripting language (in addition to Perl, Python, and PHP) that we're paying a lot more attention to these days is Ruby. The Ruby On Rails framework is taking the world by storm, and has gone one up on PHP in terms of making database backed application programming a piece of cake.

With O'Reilly divesting from Perl lost its only corporate sponsor. It never acquired another. Development needed to be moved to by-and-large volunteer basis (although Active State did develop Microsoft Windows version of Perl as a commercial organization).

May be due to this after 2002 (when version 5.8 was released) Perl development dramatically slowed down and the next version (5.10) was released only in 2007. After that Perl development reacquired some of its former dynamic and we saw versions 5.12, 5.14 and 5.16 released in three consecutive years.

Serous sickness of Larry Wall and the end of active development of the language

In 2004 Larry Wall undergone the operation that removed a tumor from his stomach. See Portraits of Open Source Pioneers for additional information. That was an end of Larry Wall role of the primary developer of the language and serious difficulties with the path of the language followed.

That created a crisis in Perl development leadership, the crisis typical for a large open source project who lost its original leader in much more dangerous for complex languages (and complex programming systems in general ) than for simpler one. In such cases people ten to stick to what is available, as nobody has the statute to propose more radical changes (like depreciating dangerous features like "forced conversions" based on the type of the operation not operator) as well as introduction of typing of variables, which would allow notation if ($x==$y) for strings inread of error prone borrowed from Unix shell solution if ($x eq $y), one of the most harmful Perl design blunders.

Perl is not the first and not the last with those problems. Eventually viable projects get back on track albeit in more modest way. I hope than this is happening with Perl.

The party of Perl complexity junkies

Perl remains included by default in all major Linux distributions. Languages popularity metrics like TIOBE does not reflect usage Perl is system administration were it still is pretty prominent due to it synergy with bash programming and Unix in general. The versions used are rather old (Perl 5.16.3 in RHEL 7). So more recent version like version 5.32 will not see the mainstream deployment for a decade or so. And rightly so. As resources to develop Perl 5 are very scares the quality of recent releases is insufficient for heavy production use and that's probably explains such a delay.

Fiasco with Perl 6 which was launched despite the fact that there are no available resources for its development suggests that here are serious problem in Perl development community. One such problem is the rise of Perl complexity junkies which advocate making Perl fully object oriented language despite the fact that this approach inflicts heavy computational costs and is not optimal for the major area of use of Perl -- sysadmin scripts. The key part of this party are people connected with book publishing. In this sense, some Perl authors book represent vanguard of the this part of Perl complexity junkies.

Ambitious Perl 6 project was launched in 2000 with no resources and no real new leader of Larry Wall caliber. Perl 6 has harmed Perl 5 acceptance, and distract many Perl programmers as it introduced element of FUD in the whole Perl ecosystem.

Also the party of Perl complexity junkies became more prominent in Perl development community than it should be. It did not produce much of value, but it scared a lot of people who otherwise would use Perl.

And it continued to the false impression that Perl is excessively complex language, that better should be avoided. To me those people produce impression of people with a deep inferiority complex, who understands the limitation of their abilities but try to hide them with kind of "language bravado". Randal L. Schwartz is a typical example here. His books are very weak, especially Learning Perl. Beginning Perl by Simon Cozens is a much better book. Still he enjoys the reputation of a guru.

The party of Perl complexity junkies developed in two main stages

• Initially Perl complexity junkies were preoccupied with Perl idioms. They greatly contributed to the impression that Perl in incompressible language, wild gibberish of obscure digrams with special meaning, which nobody understands.
• Later generation of Perl complexity junkies probably can be called "OO challenged" individuals who want to "objectify" anything in sight, just to make a scratch, so to speak. They do not understand that the fact that Perl was on sideline of OO-revolution is a strength, not weakness. And there now multiple "junk" Perl books that advocate this approach.

I especially hate their misplaced OO fanaticism and its result in mangling of many Perl standard modules which now are somewhat dangerous to use because of bugs introduced due to OO conversion (I do not consider developers who wave OO banner to be honest -- most of this type of people who I know personally are corrupt; that does not mean that all of then are dumb. Like corrupt bankers some of the them are pretty bright and still do their evil things for the sake of personal advancement at the expense of society at large ;-).

Stress on enhancing Perl OO capabilities prevented the introduction of much more needed and simpler to implement changes. If you look at the language changes from 2002 it is clear that the only important language feature introduced was state variables in version 5.10. No attention was paid for rampant for all C-style languages problem with misuse of = instead of ==, instruction of "soft semicolon" at the end of the line, named labels for { and { bracket with the possibility of PL/1 style "multiple closure (numeric local label in Pascal style would be OK) and other features that diminish that chances of making errors for mere mortals. Of course, high priests of the cult will deny that such problems exists ;-)

Only misguided dichotomy of == vs eq operators was (partially) addressed by ~~ operator (which probably was a wrong fix and its implementation turned into fiasco in any case.)

I think that introduction of explicit typing would be simpler and probably better approach (it is actually available in Perl 6/Raku ) -- variables with explicit type should not be able automatically to be converted "down" (from string to numeric value, only up (from numeric value to string). Somebody need to have courage to admit that arbitrary forced conversion mechanisms in Perl went a little bit too far and are a features and can creates difficult to detect bugs. It is probably high time to do the necessary legwork.

Still, if you look at perldelta for releases starting from 5.10 you would be amazed at the amount of useful work done by maintainers for free.

Some Resurgence of Perl in Bioinformatics

Around 2002 Perl became popular in a new field -- bioinformatics. That period lasted probably till 2015 when it was started gradually replaced by Python and later R.

The importance of programming in biology stretches back to at least late 90 with the genome decoding efforts. And it certainly has a significant future now that it is a recognized part of research into many areas of medicine and basic biological research. This may not be news to biologists. But Perl programmers were surprised that their favorite language has become one of the most - if not the most popular - of programming languages used in bioinformatics. See RFC Bioinformatics Tutorial and L. Stein. How Perl saved the Human Genome Project. The Perl Journal.

As of 2017 Perl is losing its position in bioinformatics in favor of R and Python.

Perl heritage

Perl remains not only the primary language for senior Unix sysadmin, but also one of the most influence scripting language in existence. Being more then 30 years old (version 1.0 was release in December 18, 1987) it is also a historically important scripting language. That does not mean that it is already dead like PL/1. I would not try to write a book if this was true. On the contrary, Perl 5 archived status of a mature language that is included by default with all flavors of Unix.

But 30 years of development permit to view the historical importance of the language and its place among similar live and already dead programming languages.

From the historical point of view Perl is a sibling of C-shell and AWK. The repertoire of built-in function reminds AWK. While syntax resembles C with some important borrowing from shell (interpolated strings, casing of operand via operation (== vs eq), sigils like $@%).

That means that those who know shell programming feel that they can adapt to Perl without major problems. And use it as just more modern version of shell. That's why many UNIX sysadmin find Perl (deceptively) easy to learn.

In reality Perl is a complex language with a complex, sometime even convoluted semantic. The slogan of Perl...."There's always more than one way to do it." is essentially the same idea that inspire the designers on PL/1 and it would definitely find home in hearts of designers of MS Office ;-). Different Perl programmers may use different approaches even for simple problem.

In this sense Perl can be considered a very important development: anti-Unix (countercultural) development within the Unix culture ;-). And Larry Wall agree with this:

But Perl was actually much more countercultural than you might think. It was intended to subvert the Unix philosophy. More specifically, it was intended to subvert that part of Unix philosophy that said that every tool should do only one thing and do that one thing well.

The problem with that philosophy is that many of the tools available under Unix did not, in fact, do things very well. They had arbitrary limits. They were slow. They were non-portable. They were difficult to integrate via the shell because they had different ideas of data formats. They worked okay as long as you did what was expected, but if you wanted to do something slightly different, you had to write your own tool from scratch.

So that's what I did. Perl is just another tool in the Unix toolbox. Perl does one thing, and it does it well: it gets out of your face.

But it is very interesting to note that Perl has one very unlikely precursor (I do not know whether Larry Wall ever worked on mainframes). When I first encountered Perl I was surprised how many of underling ideas of Perl are close to PL/1 -- the language that served as one of the inspirations for the C and despite being a mainframe language historically related to the Unix culture via its Multics roots.

PL/1 was very innovative language that was too far ahead of its time to survive. It was the first language that contained good string handling, exception handling, rudimentary multitasking. It was and probably still is one of the most interesting algorithmic languages in existence, although it's popularity (similar to popularity of many other interesting IBM products with VM/CMS and OS/2 and examples) that suffered blows from IBM itself and in 70th from religious fanatics in the days of structured programming and verification. What is most interesting that despite its age PL/1 has probably the best optimizing and debugging compilers for any language of similar complexity in existence. IBM optimizing and debugging compilers for PL/1 on system 360/370 remain an unsurpassed masterpiece of software engineering. They will always be remembered along with FORTRAN H and PL/C compilers.

Probably the major killing factor was that compiler for PL/1 was too complex for many organizations to re-implement (it is probably close to similar to C++ compilers in complexity). No free compiler existed although Cornell University managed to implemented PL/C -- a pretty full teaching subset of PL/1 and successfully use it for a number of years. Even later simplified version called PL/M was not able to withstand the competition with free C compilers. I wonder what would happen to PL/1 if IBM released the compiler under some king of open source license. BTW currently the quality of Perl interpreter is much less that PL/1 debugging compiler.

Paradoxically, PL/1 compilers were used as open source free products in Eastern Europe and the USSR. And it is interesting to note that it really dominated mainframe programming in the USSR, far outpacing Cobol and Fortran that still dominated the mainframe arena at this time in the USA and other Western countries. So here analogy with Perl hold perfectly. Moreover PL/1 dominated despite the fact the Soviet IBM 360/370 clones (called EC -- Russian abbreviation of "Uniform System of Computers") were less powerful (and less reliable) that Western counterparts.

I would like to stress that PL/1 (as a system programming language for Multics) has large influence on C -- one of the most widely used compiled programming languages and many of it's ideas directly or indirectly found its way into other programming languages (I have no information about Larry Wall possible exposure to PL/1) can be found in Perl. IMHO understanding if not PL/1 programming, but PL/1 philosophy -- or its close relative Perl philosophy can benefit programming community much more that playing with languages based on some kind of religious doctrine like pure strongly type languages or OO languages ;-).

There were several versions of Perl but that most important are version 4 and version 5 (released in 1995). The latter is still the current version of the language. Version 4 was widely available before WEB explosion in 1994.

Another thing that helped legitimize Perl was the addition of the Artistic License to stand beside the GPL. Perl 3 used only the GPL, but I found that this didn't do quite what I wanted. I wanted Perl to be used, and the GPL was preventing people from using Perl. Not that I dislike the GPL myself -- it provides a set of assurances that many hackers find comforting. But business people needed a different set of assurances, and so I wrote the Artistic License to reassure them.

The really brilliant part was that I didn't require people to state which license they were distributing under, so nobody had to publicly commit to one or the other. In sociological terms, nobody had to lose face, or cause anyone else to lose face. Most everyone chose to read whichever license they preferred, and to ignore the other. That's how Perl used psychology to subvert the license wars which, as you may or may not be aware, are still going on. Ho hum.

Yet another thing that helped legitimize Perl was that there was a long period of stability for Perl 4, patch level 36. The primary cause of this was that I abandoned Perl 4 to work on Perl 5.

Another little know innovation of Perl is high quality debugger. This is a real masterpiece of programming. before I started using Perl, I never saw anything even close to the convenience and power of Perl debugger. AWK did not have a debugger. Shell has had some debuggers, but they did not ship with the language. Of course, now there several imitations (and Python debugger after version 2.6 is OK, but only OK), But still Perl 5 debugger is the original masterpeace.

It is very sad that few Perl programmers understand this gem and even fewer use full capabilities. There is no good books on debugger but basics can be learned in a couple of hours from Youtube video.

• Using the built-in debugger of Perl by Gabor Szabo Youtube video, 9 min.
• Using the built-in debugger of Perl as REPL by Gabor Szabo Youtube video, Mainly explain how to use x command in Perl debugger.
• Perl Debugger - YouTube

In any case this important historical artifact.

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20210528 : Spencer Silver, an Inventor of Post-it Notes, Is Dead at 80 ( May 26, 2021 , news.slashdot.org )
• 20210511 : How Bill Gates' mom helped Microsoft get a deal with IBM in 1980 ( May 11, 2021 , www.zerohedge.com )
• 20210104 : 13 tech luminaries we lost in 2020 ( Jan 04, 2021 , www.computerworld.com )
• 20200927 : Who innovated and who did not ( Sep 27, 2020 , angrybearblog.com )
• 20200927 : History and Technology - Fire Control Systems in WWII - NavWeaps by Tony DiGiulian ( Apr 17, 2001 , www.navweaps.com )
• 20200808 : William English, Who Helped Build the Computer Mouse, Dies at 91 by Cade Metz ( Jul 31, 2020 , www.nytimes.com )
• 20200518 : ALGOL 60 at 60- The greatest computer language you ve never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree The Register ( May 18, 2020 , theregister.co.uk )
• 20200125 : The evolution of a Linux sysadmin Enable Sysadmin by Nathan Lager ( Jan 23, 2020 , www.redhat.com )
• 20191203 : The America of the moon-landing is not the America of today. Graduates of business schools have taken over once great engineering companies ( Dec 03, 2019 , www.zerohedge.com )
• 20191202 : Perhaps it's time to remember Yuri Gagarin's role in creating the USA hardware and software engineering boom from 1960 to 2000 ( Dec 02, 2019 , www.asiatimes.com )
• 20191201* Academic Conformism is the road to 1984. - Sic Semper Tyrannis ( Dec 01, 2019 , turcopolier.typepad.com ) [Recommended]
• 20191108 : The monumental impact of C Opensource.com ( Nov 08, 2019 , opensource.com )
• 20191023 : Internet Archive Releases 2,500 MS-DOS Games ( Oct 23, 2019 , games.slashdot.org )
• 20191022 : Wired Remembers the Glory Days of Flash ( Oct 22, 2019 , tech.slashdot.org )
• 20191013 : https://www.quora.com/If-Donald-Knuth-were-25-years-old-today-which-programming-language-would-he-choose ( Oct 13, 2019 , www.quora.com )
• 20191001 : Soviet Computing in the 1980s A Survey of the Software and Its Applications - ScienceDirect ( Oct 01, 2019 , www.sciencedirect.com )
• 20191001 : What Were Soviet Computers Like? ( Feb 01, 2002 , ask.slashdot.org )
• 20190921 : Larry Wall - Present Continuous, Future Perfect - OSDCIsrael Wiki ( Feb 26, 2006 , perl.org.il )
• 20190921 : Dr. Dobb's Journal February 1998 A Conversation with Larry Wall ( Feb 28, 1998 , www.ddj.com )
• 20190921 : Half my life with Perl by Randal L. Schwartz ( Sep 21, 2019 , www.socallinuxexpo.org )
• 20190921 : The list of programming languages by dates ( Sep 21, 2019 , www.scriptol.com )
• 20190907 : Knuth: Early on in the TeX project I also had to do programming of a completely different type on Zilog CPU which was at the heart of lazer printer that I used ( Sep 07, 2019 , archive.computerhistory.org )
• 20190907 : As soon as you stop writing code on a regular basis you stop being a programmer. You lose you qualification very quickly. That's a typical tragedy of talented programmers who became mediocre managers or, worse, theoretical computer scientists ( Sep 07, 2019 , archive.computerhistory.org )
• 20190907 : Knuth about computer science and money: At that point I made the decision in my life that I wasn't going to optimize my income; ( Sep 07, 2019 , archive.computerhistory.org )
• 20190907 : Knuth: maybe 1 in 50 people have the "computer scientist's" type of intellect ( Sep 07, 2019 , conservancy.umn.edu )
• 20190907 : conservancy.umn.edu ( Sep 07, 2019 , conservancy.umn.edu )
• 20190907 : Knuth: I can be a writer, who tries to organize other people's ideas into some kind of a more coherent structure so that it is easier to put things together ( Sep 07, 2019 , conservancy.umn.edu )
• 20190906 : Knuth: Programming and architecture are interrelated and it is impossible to create good architecure wthout actually programming at least of a prototype ( Sep 06, 2019 , archive.computerhistory.org )
• 20190906 : Oral histories ( Sep 06, 2019 , www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu )
• 20190906 : Knuth: No, I stopped going to conferences. It was too discouraging. Computer programming keeps getting harder because more stuff is discovered ( Sep 06, 2019 , conservancy.umn.edu )
• 20190906 : How TAOCP was hatched ( Sep 06, 2019 , archive.computerhistory.org )
• 20190730 : FreeDOS turns 25 years old by Jim Hall ( Jul 28, 2019 , opensource.com )
• 20190416 : European contributions to computing and the internet ( Apr 16, 2019 , www.unz.com )
• 20181030 : The Watson family held integrity, equality, and knowledge share as a formidable synthesis of company ethics. With them gone old IBM was gone... ( Oct 30, 2018 , features.propublica.org )
• 20181015 : Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen dead at 65 by Jacob Kastrenakes and Rachel Becker ( Oct 15, 2018 , www.theverge.com )
• 20181015 : Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Dies of Cancer At Age 65 - Slashdot ( Oct 15, 2018 , science.slashdot.org )
• 20180907 : This is the Story of the 1970s Great Calculator Race ( Sep 07, 2018 , science.slashdot.org )
• 20180327 : The Quest To Find the Longest-Serving Programmer ( Mar 27, 2018 , developers.slashdot.org )
• 20080102 : First Look Perl 5.10 by Scott Gilbertson ( Jan 02, 2008 , Wired.com )

Old News ;-)

[May 28, 2021] Spencer Silver, an Inventor of Post-it Notes, Is Dead at 80

May 26, 2021 | news.slashdot.org

(nytimes.com) 39 died on Saturday at his home in St. Paul, Minn. He was 80. From a report: His wife, Linda, said that he died after an episode of ventricular tachycardia, in which the heart beats faster than normal. Mr. Silver had a heart transplant 27 years ago.

Since their introduction in 1980, Post-it Notes have become a ubiquitous office product, first in the form of little canary-yellow pads -- billions of which are sold annually -- and later also in different hues and sizes, some with much stickier adhesives. There are currently more than 3,000 Post-it Brand products globally. Dr. Silver worked in 3M's central research laboratory developing adhesives. In 1968, he was trying to create one that was so strong it could be used in aircraft construction.

He failed in that goal. But during his experimentation, he invented something entirely different: an adhesive that stuck to surfaces, but that could be easily peeled off and was reusable. It was a solution to a problem that did not appear to exist, but Dr. Silver was certain it was a breakthrough. "I felt my adhesive was so obviously unique that I began to give seminars throughout 3M in the hope I would spark an idea among its product developers," he told Financial Times in 2010. Dr. Silver promoted his adhesive for several years within 3M, a company known for its innovative workplace, so assiduously that he became known as "Mr. Persistent."

[May 11, 2021] How Bill Gates' mom helped Microsoft get a deal with IBM in 1980

May 11, 2021 | www.zerohedge.com

19 play_arrow

uno 3 hours ago remove link

his mother was on the board of IBM when he was given the OS work - he never earned anything

How Bill Gates' mom helped Microsoft get a deal with IBM in 1980 – and it propelled the company's huge success

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influenced-the-success-of-microsoft.html

[Jan 04, 2021] 13 tech luminaries we lost in 2020

Jan 04, 2021 | www.computerworld.com

Randy Suess: Board Man

Randy Suess, having worked at IBM and Zenith, was bored. "I was looking for something more to do -- and then this damn thing called a [personal] computer came along," he
said in the 2005 film BBS: The Documentary.

In 1975, he joined the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange, or CACHE, where he met Ward Christensen. The two lived far enough apart that they had to invent ways
to collaborate remotely: Christensen wrote the MODEM.ASM program and XMODEM file transfer protocol so they could send each other files.

When a blizzard struck Chicago in 1978, CACHE meetings were canceled, prompting Suess and Christensen to develop an online alternative that all members could
participate in. With Suess's hardware and Christensen's software, they created the first dial-up bulletin board, naming it the Computerized Bulletin Board System.

The impact of CBBS was felt far beyond Chicagoland: by 1994, there were 60,000 BBSes across the United States. Their online communities, message boards, file libraries, and multiplayer games were a precursor to everything from Reddit to YouTube and World of Warcraft.

Suess died at 74. When CBBS went offline in the 1980s, it had received over a half-million calls. A version of CBBS is still available via telnet.

Editor's note: Suess died in December 2019, too late to be included in last year's "Tech luminaries we lost" slideshow.

William English: Of Mice and Men

Douglas Engelbart is credited with inventing the computer mouse, but it was Bill English's design and implementation that made the mouse a reality.

After serving in the United States Navy, English joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the early 1960s. There, he partnered with Engelbart on an experimental computer dubbed the oNLine System (NLS).

As part of that collaboration, Engelbart shared his sketches for a mechanical device that could move a digital pointer on a screen with English. English proceeded to develop a prototype, housing it in a pinewood case. He was the author of the first article to refer to a computer mouse, published in July 1965, three years before Engelbart demonstrated it in the "Mother of All Demos," which English directed.

After leaving SRI in 1971, English joined Xerox PARC, where he adapted his NLS concepts into the Alto computer, which inspired Steve Jobs and the Apple Macintosh.

Frances Allen: An Optimized Career

Former high-school teacher Frances Allen was pursuing a master's degree in mathematics when she had her first encounter with computers, learning how to program an IBM 650. Upon earning her master's in 1957, she switched careers and joined IBM Research, where she stayed for 45 years. Her educational background was
immediately put to good use, teaching IBM programmers how to use the two-month-old FORTRAN language.

Her next project was with the IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, IBM's first transistorized supercomputer and the world's fastest computer from 1961 to 1963. Allen's team developed a compiler for Stretch that supported three different programming languages; it would be used by the National Security Agency, where Allen spent a year overseeing the computer's installation and testing.

A pioneer in compiler optimization, Allen published several landmark papers on program optimization, control flow analysis, and parallelizing compilers that paved the way for modern, efficient programming. She was the first woman to be named an IBM Fellow in 1989, and the first woman to win the Turing Award in 2006.

Allen was also committed to helping future generations of female programmers, speaking at conferences around the world and urging women to consider STEM careers. In 2000, IBM established the Frances E. Allen Women in Technology Mentoring Award in her honor.

"She was a brilliant thinker and innovator and a kind-hearted individual who had an unabashed commitment to others," said IBM in a tribute video.

[Sep 27, 2020] Who innovated and who did not

Sep 27, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

1. Likbez , September 25, 2020 11:05 am

   That's pretty naive take on the subject.

   For example Microsoft success was by the large part determined its alliance with IBM in the creation of PC and then exploiting IBM ineptness to ride this via shred marketing and alliances and "natural monopoly" tendencies in IT. MS DOS was a clone of CP/M that was bought, extended and skillfully marketed. Zero innovation here.

   Both Microsoft and Apple rely of research labs in other companies to produce innovation which they then then produced and marketed. Even Steve Jobs smartphone was not an innovation per se: it was just a slick form factor that was the most successful in the market. All functionality existed in other products.

   Facebook was prelude to, has given the world a glimpse into, the future.

   From pure technical POV Facebook is mostly junk. It is a tremendous database of user information which user supply themselves due to cultivated exhibitionism. Kind of private intelligence company. The mere fact that software was written in PHP tells you something about real Zuckerberg level.

   Amazon created a usable interface for shopping via internet (creating comments infrastructure and a usable user account database ) but this is not innovation in any sense of the word. It prospered by stealing large part of Wall Mart logistic software (and people) and using Wall Mart tricks with suppliers. So Bezos model was Wall Mart clone on the Internet.

   Unless something is done, Bezos will soon be the most powerful man in the world.

   People like Bezos, Google founders, Zuckerberg to a certain extent are part of intelligence agencies infrastructure. Remember Prism. So implicitly we can assume that they all report to the head of CIA.

   Artificial Intelligence, AI, is another consequence of this era of innovation that demands our immediate attention.

   There is very little intelligence in artificial intelligence :-). Intelligent behavior of robots in mostly an illusion created by First Clark law:

   "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

   Most of amazing things that we see are the net result of tremendous raise of computing power of Neumann architecture machines.

   At some point quantity turns into quality.

[Except for the CIA part then gotta go with Likbez. Being an antique computer geek myself then I got stuff to add.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_data_computer

The gun data computer was a series of artillery computers used by the U.S. Army for coastal artillery, field artillery and anti-aircraft artillery applications. In antiaircraft applications they were used in conjunction with a director.

Variations

M1: This was used by seacoast artillery for major-caliber seacoast guns. It computed continuous firing data for a battery of two guns that were separated by not more than 1,000 feet (300 m). It utilised the same type of input data furnished by a range section with the then-current (1940) types of position-finding and fire-control equipment

M18: FADAC (Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer),[1][2] an all-transistorized general-purpose digital computer[3] manufactured by Amelco (Teledyne Systems, Inc.,)[4] and North American -- Autonetics.[5] FADAC was first fielded in 1960,[6][7] and was the first semiconductor-based digital electronics field-artillery computer

******************************************************

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004

The Intel 4004 is a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU) released by Intel Corporation in 1971. It was the first commercially produced microprocessor,[2] and the first in a long line of Intel CPUs.

The chip design, implemented with the MOS silicon gate technology, started in April 1970, and was created by Federico Faggin who led the project from beginning to completion in 1971. Marcian Hoff formulated and led the architectural proposal in 1969, and Masatoshi Shima contributed to the architecture and later to the logic design. The first delivery of a fully operational 4004 occurred in March 1971 to Busicom Corp. of Japan for its 141-PF printing calculator engineering prototype (now displayed in the Computer History Museum – Mountain View, Ca) [1]. This calculator for which the 4004 was originally designed and built as a custom chip [3] was first commercially available in July 1971.

*************************************************

[Note the distinction between military and commercial application.]
The 4004 was the first random logic circuit integrated in one chip using the MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) silicon gate technology (SGT). It was the most advanced integrated circuit (IC) design undertaken up until then

[Sep 27, 2020] History and Technology - Fire Control Systems in WWII - NavWeaps by Tony DiGiulian

Apr 17, 2001 | www.navweaps.com

Fire Control Systems in WWII

Let me start by suggesting a revisit to our friends at the "Baddest" website, specifically in the subject of Fire Control:

Fire Control Page

The above is a good capsule summary of the FCS of the major battleships of each nation and I'm going to refer to it in this post. For purposes of simplicity, I am only going to discuss the British, German, Japanese and US ships. Since you are only interested in optical FC, I'm also not going to discuss radar FC except to state, once again, that radar FC beats optical in almost any situation and so there's little point in comparing the two.

Now, three points to note:

1. The British battleships lacked RPC almost entirely until late in the war. The Japanese never implemented it in any meaningful way. The Germans had it only for elevation (more on that later) while the USN had it for both elevation and bearing. To me, RPC is one of the single most important advancements in the development of accurate gunnery. No longer did the director operator shout down a voice tube "target bearing 230 degrees at 20,500 yards" to which another sailor dialed into the rangekeeper (analog computer) which was then transmitted to a set of dials in the gun mounts which then the gun captain had his trainers and elevators match by slewing/elevating the guns to match the dials, with at every point a potential for operator errors. Instead, the director operator now controlled the laying of the guns almost directly. Plus, in the US system, there was a feedback system where the rangekeeper moved the director sights to where it thought the ship should be shooting. If it wasn't correct, the director operator adjusted the sights back on target, thus setting up a closed-loop system (for a living, I design process control computers that do this digitally. So, please trust me on this, I'm amazed at what was achieved in closed-loop systems using 1930s analog computers). The German system had RPC only for the elevation, but this is not as bad as it may seem. Since, in the German system of "bracket salvos," the first half salvo is really to determine bearing, they did not feel that the extra complication was necessary. Judging from the results at River Plate and Denmark Strait, it's hard to argue, but, my personal opinion is that it would have been worth the investment. The Japanese, as in much of their naval technology, used the same methodology as their British mentors and used a "follow the pointer" system for both elevation and training.

2. The main director baselength on the Japanese, German and US ships was roughly about as long as on the main turrets and was relatively large. By contrast, the British had a relatively short baselength both as compared to the turret rangefinders and as compared to those of other nation's ships. In fact, the main director on British ships was almost an afterthought, intended to be used more for fire direction than for fire control. The real FC rangefinders in the British ships were the ones on the main turrets. Again, I was surprised when I discovered this a couple of years ago, as the British pioneered centralized FC and the Nelson class with their high-mounted directors greatly influenced subsequent designs. The British reliance on turret RF's is really a holdover from pre- and early-dreadnought days, where each individual turret layed the guns for themselves.

   This reliance on turret RF was shown flawed at the Denmark Strait: Since Adm. Holland chose to push his ships directly towards the Germans and thus into the wind; sea spray coated the optics on all four forward turrets and forced the British to use the less accurate main directors. I think that the results speak for themselves: The British fired long-spaced ladder salvos and didn't land a hit until after the POW turned broadside to the Germans (i.e., the turrets no longer faced into the sea spray) at a relatively short range of about 16,000 yards. As a result of this engagement, the British belatedly realized their design/concept flaw and installed a larger (but still relatively short) baselength director on the last three KGV ships. However, only the forward director was modified, the aft director was unchanged.

3. The use of stable vertical elements in the US systems. I call your attention to the paragraph at the bottom of the above "Baddest" link, describing the performance of the USS North Carolina (the oldest of the new battleships) during a series of maneuvers where she still maintained target lock. Since you own "British Battleships," I won't repeat the problems and successes that the British had with their systems. I have only limited information on what other nation's ships were capable of, but it appears that the German's systems were at least equivalent to those of the British (I assume this from descriptions in Whitley's and Campbell's books plus Baron Mullenheim-Rechburg's comments in "Survivor").

Bottom line: The Japanese and the Germans had better optical RF's than any other nation. In a fight where only optical systems are used, they had a clear advantage as shown at Denmark Strait, the River Platte and First Savo (I assume that you've seen my previous posts regarding the POW's radar and won't revisit the subject). However, the US had the best FC as a system (FCS). What this meant is that, when 10cm fire-control radar became available, the US was able to easily integrate it into their FCS, thus creating the best overall FCS as compared to the FCS used by any other nation. My (strictly amateur) conclusion is that the US FCS with radar was the most advanced of any nation in the 1942-1945 timeframe.

One other item, per your last post: I do not take the Bismarck's performance at her last battle as being truly indicative of her performance. The crew was exhausted by their night-long skirmishing with Capt. Vian's destroyers and the Bismarck's motion was subject to random direction changes. By contrast, the British battleships had rested crews firing from stable platforms. As always, I dislike to speculate upon "what-ifs," especially this one, as, in my opinion, an undamaged Bismarck with Adm. Lutjens in command wouldn't have fought against the KGV and Rodney, she would have beat feet in the opposite direction as fast as possible. So, I'll leave any thought as to what the outcome of an engagement between healthy ships to others.

History and Technology - NavWeaps

[Aug 08, 2020] William English, Who Helped Build the Computer Mouse, Dies at 91 by Cade Metz

Notable quotes:

"... Among other things, Mr. Engelbart, who died in 2013 at 88 , envisioned a mechanical device that could move a cursor across a screen and perform discrete tasks by selecting particular symbols or images. Mr. English made this a reality, building the first computer mouse and, through a series of tests, showing that it could navigate a screen faster than any other device developed at S.R.I. ..."

"... As Mr. Engelbart demonstrated the machine onstage at the Civic Auditorium, a live video appeared on the wall behind him showing the seamless interaction between his mouse and the computer screen. Mr. English directed this elaborate production from the back of the auditorium, relying on cameras and microphones both there and at the lab that housed the computer in Menlo Park, Calif., more than 30 miles away. ..."

"... After Mr. Engelbart had envisaged the computer mouse and drawn a rough sketch of it on a notepad, Mr. English built it in the mid-1960s. Housed inside a small pinewood case, the device consisted of two electrical mechanisms, called potentiometers, that tracked the movement of two small wheels as they moved across a desktop. They called it a mouse because of the way the computer's on-screen cursor, called a CAT, seemed to chase the device's path. ..."

"... As they were developing the system, both Mr. English and Mr. Engelbart were part of the government-funded L.S.D. tests conducted by a nearby lab called the International Foundation of Advanced Study. Both took the psychedelic as part of a sweeping effort to determine whether it could "open the mind" and foster creativity. ..."

"... Three years after the demonstration, Mr. English left S.R.I. and joined a new Xerox lab called the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC . There he helped adapt many of the NLS ideas for a new machine called the Alto, which became a template for the Apple Macintosh, the first Microsoft Windows personal computers and other internet-connected devices. ..."

Jul 31, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

He was one of the computing pioneers who "showed what a computer interface could -- and should -- look like," a colleague said.

William English, the engineer and researcher who helped build the first computer mouse and, in 1968, orchestrated an elaborate demonstration of the technology that foretold the computers, tablets and smartphones of today, died on July 26 in San Rafael, Calif. He was 91.

His death, at a medical facility, was confirmed by his wife, Roberta English, who said the cause was respiratory failure.

In the late 1950s, after leaving a career in the Navy, Mr. English joined a Northern California research lab called the Stanford Research Institute, or S.R.I. (now known as SRI International ). There he met Douglas Engelbart, a fellow engineer who hoped to build a new kind of computer.

At a time when only specialists used computers, entering and retrieving information through punched cards, typewriters and printouts, Mr. Engelbart envisioned a machine that anyone could use simply by manipulating images on a screen. It was a concept that would come to define the information age, but by his own admission Mr. Engelbart had struggled to explain his vision to others.

Image

Mr. English, known to everyone as Bill, was one of the few who understood these ideas and who had the engineering talent, patience and social skills needed to realize them. "He was the guy who made everything happen," said Bill Duvall, who worked alongside Mr. English during those years. "If you told him something needed to be done, he figured out how to do it."

Among other things, Mr. Engelbart, who died in 2013 at 88 , envisioned a mechanical device that could move a cursor across a screen and perform discrete tasks by selecting particular symbols or images. Mr. English made this a reality, building the first computer mouse and, through a series of tests, showing that it could navigate a screen faster than any other device developed at S.R.I.

Their multifaceted experimental computer was called oNLine System, or NLS, and on Dec. 9, 1968, they unveiled it at an event in San Francisco that became known as "The Mother of All Demos."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/B6rKUf9DWRI

As Mr. Engelbart demonstrated the machine onstage at the Civic Auditorium, a live video appeared on the wall behind him showing the seamless interaction between his mouse and the computer screen. Mr. English directed this elaborate production from the back of the auditorium, relying on cameras and microphones both there and at the lab that housed the computer in Menlo Park, Calif., more than 30 miles away.

This Mother of All Demos -- showing early forms of online text editing, video conferencing and "hypertext," the links now used to navigate web pages on the internet -- presaged not only the desktop and laptop computers that rose to the fore in the 1980s and '90s, but also the smartphones and tablets that would come to suffuse everyday life.

"It showed what a computer interface could -- and should -- look like," said Doug Fairbairn, a director of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. He worked alongside Mr. English and many other computing pioneers in the 1970s.

Image

William Kirk English was born on Jan. 27, 1929, in Lexington, Ky., the only son of Harry and Caroline (Gray) English. His father was an electrical engineer who managed coal mines in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia; his mother was a homemaker. His father had two other sons, John and Robert, from a previous marriage.

In the early 1940s, after the outbreak of the Second World War, Mr. English left for Arizona to attend a boarding school -- what was called a "ranch school," where he learned to ride horses as well -- near Tucson. After returning home, he studied electrical engineering at the University of Kentucky.

His time in the Navy included postings in Northern California and Japan. He then took his research position at the Stanford Research Institute, at first working on a new kind of computer memory -- a rotating metal drum the size of a desk that could store as many as three pages of text -- before embracing the project that became NLS.

After Mr. Engelbart had envisaged the computer mouse and drawn a rough sketch of it on a notepad, Mr. English built it in the mid-1960s. Housed inside a small pinewood case, the device consisted of two electrical mechanisms, called potentiometers, that tracked the movement of two small wheels as they moved across a desktop. They called it a mouse because of the way the computer's on-screen cursor, called a CAT, seemed to chase the device's path.

As they were developing the system, both Mr. English and Mr. Engelbart were part of the government-funded L.S.D. tests conducted by a nearby lab called the International Foundation of Advanced Study. Both took the psychedelic as part of a sweeping effort to determine whether it could "open the mind" and foster creativity.

Though Mr. Engelbart oversaw the NLS project, the 1968 demonstration in San Francisco was led by Mr. English, who brought both engineering and theater skills to the task. In the mid-1950s he had volunteered as a stage manager for a Bay Area theater troupe called The Actor's Workshop.

For the San Francisco event, he used a video projector the size of a Volkswagen Beetle (borrowed it from a nearby NASA lab) to arrange and project the live images behind Mr. Engelbart as he demonstrated NLS from the stage. He had been able to set up the wireless link that sent video between the Menlo Park computer lab and the auditorium after befriending a telephone company technician.

Image

Three years after the demonstration, Mr. English left S.R.I. and joined a new Xerox lab called the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC . There he helped adapt many of the NLS ideas for a new machine called the Alto, which became a template for the Apple Macintosh, the first Microsoft Windows personal computers and other internet-connected devices.

"The whole aim was to implement the ideas behind NLS" across a network of personal computers, said Alan Kay, a key researcher behind the Alto.

Mr. English's first marriage, to Patricia Dickson, ended in divorce. He had met his future second wife, Roberta Mercer, while they were both working at S.R.I. In addition to her, he is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Aaron and John; a stepdaughter, Patricia; and a granddaughter.

This week, when asked if he remembered that Mr. English had arranged the wireless video feed for the Mother of All Demos through a chance meeting with a telephone technician in Silicon Valley, Mr. Kay said he did not.

"But it doesn't surprise me," he added. "That sounds like Bill."

Cade Metz is a technology correspondent, covering artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality, and other emerging areas. He previously wrote for Wired magazine. @ cademetz

[May 18, 2020] ALGOL 60 at 60- The greatest computer language you ve never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree The Register

May 18, 2020 | theregister.co.uk

ALGOL 60 at 60: The greatest computer language you've never used and grandaddy of the programming family tree Back to the time when tape was king By Richard Speed 15 May 2020 at 09:47 149 SHARE ▼ An Elliott 803 at Loughborough Grammar School in 1976 (pic: Loughborough Schools Foundation / Peter Onion)

2020 marks 60 years since ALGOL 60 laid the groundwork for a multitude of computer languages.

The Register spoke to The National Museum of Computing's Peter Onion and Andrew Herbert to learn a bit more about the good old days of punch tapes.

ALGOL 60 was the successor to ALGOL 58, which debuted in 1958. ALGOL 58 had introduced the concept of code blocks (replete with begin and end delimiting pairs), but ALGOL 60 took these starting points of structured programming and ran with them, giving rise to familiar faces such as Pascal and C, as well as the likes of B and Simula.

"In the 1950s most code was originally written in machine code or assembly code," said Herbert, former director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, with every computer having its own particular twist on things. A first generation of languages, called "Autocode", existed for coding problems like equations which could then be translated into machine code, but lacked the bells and whistles of today. Worse, some had features that others lacked, making hopping between systems tricky.

"There was an Autocode for the [Elliott] 803," said Onion, "but it only supported expressions like A + B = C, so if you've got a complex equation, you have to break it down into individual single binary operations. So there was still a lot of hard work to be done by the programmer."

"Fortran," said Herbert, "emerged as the first real programming language for scientific and numeric work. That convinced people that having higher-level languages (as they called them then – they were pretty primitive by modern standards) made programmers more productive."

The overhead of compiling, and inefficiencies in the compilers themselves, meant that machine code remained king of the performance hill, but for those doing science work, the ability to churn out some code to solve a problem and then simply move on to the next was appealing.

"Fortran," Herbert continued, "was more like an autocode," before laughing, "It still is in some ways!

"And a bunch of people thought you could do better."

Enter the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), which Herbert recalled "had a whole bunch of committees who looked at standards and problems in computing".

One group started on the design of what was then called an "Algorithmic Language": a language for writing algorithms. The output, in 1958, described the language "ALGOL 58". However, as engineers began to create compilers for the new system, they found "all kinds of things hadn't really been thought about or worked through properly," recalled Herbert.

And so there were revisions and changes. A periodical called " The ALGOL Bulletin " detailed the travails of those involved as the problems and the weaknesses in the language were dealt with (or at least attempted).

The process was not unlike an open-source mailing list today, but in paper form.

Eventually, Herbert told us, "they published the ALGOL 60 report, which is the baseline that everyone then worked to."

The committees were under pressure and also suffered a little from differing international approaches. The American side had a lot of experience in Fortran and were seeking something that could quickly be made to work on their computers, while the Europeans were a little more cerebral and had, Herbert laughed, "terrible notions like beauty and elegance in mind for the language".

"People were sorting out some of the things that we now take for granted like ideas in structured programming, data structures, data types," he added.

Seeking solutions to the problem of portability of programmers between systems and code between hardware generations as well as avoiding the pain of having to rewrite programs every time a new iteration of computer arrived, vendors embraced the language with variants cropping up over many manufacturers.

ALGOL 60 on tape (pic: Peter Onion)

Alas, those seeking a handy-dandy "HELLO WORLD" example will be disappointed. The Achilles' heel of the language that would go on to inspire so many others was that it lacked standard input/output capabilities.

"The defining committee couldn't agree on how to do input/output," said Herbert. "They decided that would be left to a library, and that library would be user dependent."

"In this case," added Onion, "the user being the compiler writer."

Oh dear. The omission pretty much did for vendor independence as manufacturers naturally went their own way, leaving large chunks of code incompatible between systems. There were also elements of ALGOL 60 that were open to interpretation, leaving it a little compromised from the start.

While ALGOL ploughed its furrow, Fortran continued to be developed in parallel. "People in the Fortran world," explained Herbert, "saw ideas in ALGOL they quite liked and brought them across." As the decades passed, Fortran remained the centre of gravity for scientific computing while ALGOL became more of an academic language, used for teaching computer science ideas.

"It was quite heavily used in the scientific community," Herbert said. "Most mainframe manufacturers supported it."

Some of the team behind ALGOL 60 stayed with the project and went on to come up with ALGOL 68, which, as far as Herbert is concerned, "nailed all the things that ALGOL 60 had left a bit vague".

Indeed, it was hard to avoid in the 1970s for those taking computer science courses. This hack has fond memories of the successor language, while the grandfather of Reg sub-editor Richard Currie had a hand in the development of ALGOL 68-R and RS.

"It had the world's most exotic input output system," Herbert laughed.

It was also, sadly for its enthusiasts, a bit of a dead end. Despite ALGOL 68-R becoming widely used in (particularly British) military applications for a time, it would take until the 1970s for a full implementation of ALGOL 68 to become available.

The last edition of The ALGOL Bulletin was published in 1988, with its editor noting: "ALGOL 68 as a language is very stable. It is used and loved by those who understand its benefits, and ignored (or misquoted) by the rest."

The story of ALGOL 60 is not so much of the language's eventual fate, but also of those that it inspired. ALGOL W, based on a proposal for ALGOL X, by Niklaus Wirth and QuickSort creator Tony Hoare would go on to inspire Wirth's Pascal and Modula-2. Pascal's influence continues to be felt today.

ALGOL 60 also heavily influenced the Combined Programming Language (CPL), developed in the 1960s but not implemented until the following decade. CPL in turn led to Basic CPL (BCPL), from which B descended. The B language was further developed to become C.

Tony Hoare was responsible for the implementation of ALGOL 60 on the Elliott 803 computer , an example of which remains operational at The National Museum of Computing, although compiling and running a program on that hardware is a little different to the development environments to which coders are now accustomed.

First, the compiler must be loaded from paper tape. The ALGOL program itself is then fed into the tape reader and "it sort of chunters away," remarked Onion, "for anything between 30 seconds to perhaps 15 or 20 minutes during the compilation."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/AIxZ1i8pvZI

Once compiled, a program would be free to use the space originally occupied by the compiler. Doing so would, however, not win the programmer any popularity awards since the next user would have to reload the compiler again. Leaving it in memory meant that multiple programs could be run.

"That made it very popular for teaching," said Herbert, "because you can have a line of students, each with their paper tape with their programme in their hand and you basically march up to the machine, the machine's got the ALGOL system loaded, you run your programme, it produces gibberish, you go away and think about it and the next student runs their programme."

With paper tape being king, Onion observed that the experience of programming taught a bit of focus: "When your edit, compile, edit, compile cycle starts to get above about 10 minutes, you start to pay an awful lot of attention to your source code "

The National Museum of Computing has two Elliott machines in its collection , a 1962 803B (which was donated after spending 15 years lurking in a barn following its decommissioning) and a 903. Both are fully operational and can be seen running once the museum is able to open its doors once again.

The 803B, which is maintained by Onion, also features a Calcomp drum plotter as well as some additional input/output features.

The Lorenz attractor plotted by an ALGOL program (pic: Peter Onion)

As for taking the ALGOL 60 itself out for a spin today, there are a few options for those not fortunate enough to have an Elliott 803 or 903 to hand. MARST will translate ALGOL 60 to C or one can get a feel for the whole 803 experience via a simulator .

Although as ALGOL 60 turns 60, you could just fire up a modern programming language. Lurking within will likely be the ideas of ALGOL's designers. ® John Thorn

---

Simon Harris , 4 days

Re: .. never used .. ?

When I was studying Electronic Engineering in the early 1980s, ALGOL was the first language we were formally taught - I remember the ALGOL-68R language guide was a Ministry of Defence book.

Simon Harris , 4 days

Re: .. never used .. ?

Algol 60 on an ICL 1902 around 1980 here; How many freaking errors did you get because of missing semicolons?;

As for PL/1, IBM also had its own extended versions (confidential for some reason), used for internal mainframe code development, called PL/AS and PL/DS.

p.s. ADA anyone?

Reply , 0 Archtech , 3 days

Re: Algol 68 is not ALGOL 60

"The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques that put them into practice, the more is my amazement at and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors".

- C.A.R. Hoare, "Hints on Programming Language Design", 1973

Archtech , 3 days Archtech , 3 days Doctor Syntax , 3 days

"When your edit, compile, edit, compile cycle starts to get above about 10 minutes, you start to pay an awful lot of attention to your source code "

10 minutes? Luxury. Punched card jobs run in batches. 2 hours turn-round, max 3 runs a day with the compiler losing track after the first error and rejecting every subsequent line. Then you really paid attention to your source code.

Doctor Syntax , 3 days Anonymous Coward , 3 days

The mainframe operators soon learned that when a System 4 (IBM 360) Assembler run produced thousands of errors after the first few statements it just needed a statement adding and rerunning. IIRC something like a USE or BALR 3,0 establishing the addressing base register.

The punched card data-prep gir women also became quite competent at spotting common mistakes. Hence one compiler test source compiled cleanly - when it was supposed to test those error messages.

On an official training course to learn the System 4 Assembler there was a desk of us who had already had some hands-on practice. The lecturer in Hut K was kept on his toes by our questions. When the set program task was returned from the computer run - he gleefully gave us our failed run listings. We looked at them - then pointed out he had forgotten to include the macro expansion pass. Oops! He then remembered that he always left it out on the first submission to save the expense on his machine time budget. He didn't expect clean compilations from the students.

Primus Secundus Tertius , 3 days

The "bad for science" machine was the IBM 360, where the floating point exponent represented 16**n rather than 2**n. As a result the floating point mantissa sometimes lost three bits. The result was that the single precision floating point was good to only about six decimal digits. Hence the proliferation of double precision floating point on IBM. It was not needed on ICL 190x nor Elliott 803.

IBM were mainly interested in commercial arithmetic from COBOL compilers. This used binary coded decimal (BCD) arithmetic, which could handle billions of dollars to the nearest cent. COBOL type computational defaulted to BCD, I believe. I was once trying to explain floating point data to a database salesman. I finally got through to him with the phrase computational-type-3.

Primus Secundus Tertius , 3 days

"Who remembers Backus-Naur ?"

I do! Back in the early-1980s, working at the in-house consultancy arm of a multinational, I was on-site doing some tedious task when I was joined by a colleague from our Dutch office. He had even less patience than me, so less than 30 minutes in, he resorted to giving me a formal lecture on Backus-Naur notation for the rest of the morning (and returned to Rotterdam in the afternoon). (When the main Board closed us down the following year, he returned to the University of Leiden. Thank you, Joss - I'll never forget BNF.)

Fustbariclation , 17 hrs

BNF

Isn't BNF still useful for representing languages?

Fustbariclation , 17 hrs RobThBay , 3 days

The edit/compile/run cycle

"When your edit, compile, edit, compile cycle starts to get above about 10 minutes, you start to pay an awful lot of attention to your source code..."

I remember those days, except I was using punch cards instead of paper tape. Those long turn-arounds forced you to desk check your code and spend time debugging it properly.

[Jan 25, 2020] The evolution of a Linux sysadmin Enable Sysadmin by Nathan Lager

Jan 23, 2020 | www.redhat.com

A tale of how a sysadmin went from hobbyist and Level 1 tech to the big time at Red Hat.

We've all got a story, right? I don't know if anyone would read mine, but, to the right audience, it might sound familiar, or at least relatable. My life is sort of fractured between two things I'm passionate about. One is the off-road industry, and the other is open source software. Some time ago, I was involved in a YouTube "challenge" where a bunch of us off-road enthusiasts were asked to share our story, and I told the tale of how I got involved in "Jeeping" and why we do what we do in that space. Here, I am about to tell the other side of my story, where I'm a computer guy with a bunch of nerd cred. So hang on while I tell you the story of a broke high-school kid who stumbled into a career. Career Advice

• Take a sysadmin skills assessment
• Explore training and certification options
• Read a guide to human communication for sysadmins

I was a kid in the '80s; before computers were everywhere you looked. My dad, though, he was his generation's version of a geek -- a telephone guy, son of a handyman who worked his way through the Depression, making whatever he could out of whatever he had. As a kid, my dad involved me in all sorts of projects involving building things or wiring, and we even built an electrified wooden toy helicopter together. I learned from him that you could build your own happiness. I always joke with people that I learned my alphabet on a Texas Instruments computer connected to our living room TV. My first game system was an Atari computer with a 5.25" floppy drive.

In the early '90s, my dad brought home a state-of-the-art 486 desktop computer. Our first modern computer! He gave me his old Atari to put in my bedroom and tinker on, and that's what I did. The 486, though, that thing had a modern operating system on it, and I was nothing short of enthralled. A friend introduced me to some local dial-up bulletin board systems.

That, I'd have to say, is what started it all. I learned so much from this community of like-minded folks; all dialed into this little BBS. Eventually, I became very curious about how the BBS itself worked and started tinkering with BBS software. I found the space to be expensive, though; you needed hardware I couldn't afford.

Then came the Internet. As I mentioned, my dad was a telephone guy. He was, at the time, an engineer at a local telephone company. One of the partner companies under the same umbrella as his telco was starting up an internet service provider! He was able to get in early, and I was one of the first kids in my grade to get access to the Internet.

The Internet was a very different place at the time. You'd dial in, so it was much slower, and, because of the speed and the technologies involved, it was very much a text world. It was certainly not the entertainment source it is today, but to me, it was still just amazing!

I had a friend who was just as intrigued by technology as I was. He and I were both interested in the world outside of the end-user experience of these neat little computer things. We read everything we could get our hands-on. We read about websites and servers and how all of these things worked together. We read about some of the darker sides of technology, the Hackers Handbook, and how phone phreaking worked. I even learned a bit about how to pick locks! Lucky for me, and my parents, I've always been guided by a pretty fierce sense of morality, or my life could have turned out much differently.

Our reading and learning eventually led us to Linux. The word "free" associated with Linux caught our attention. I didn't have a job, I was in high school, so free was good. Little did I know that picking up that first Linux distro (Red Hat 5.0, I still have the CDs) would steer me into the career I've worked at for my entire adult life. My friend, by the way, he runs the Engineering team at that ISP I mentioned now. I guess our curiosity worked out pretty well for him too!

During the summer between my sophomore and junior years in High School, I picked up and started tinkering with those Red Hat 5.0 install discs. I installed, and reinstalled, and reinstalled, and reinstalled that OS on my little 486 until I finally got it right. I even got dual-booting working, so I could keep my Windows environment and play with Linux. After I graduated, my parents bought me a new PC to use for my school work in college, so I was able to turn my little 486 into a dedicated Linux machine. By now, we'd moved from dial-up internet service to dedicated cable. 500mbps baby! I ran a website off of my little 486. I lost track of the number of times I had to wipe and reinstall that system because some malicious actor broke into my poor little machine and flattened it on me, but I persisted, learning something else each time.

While I was in college, I worked in level 1 tech support for the ISP I mentioned above. I didn't love it. I had no control over the services I was supporting, and let's face it, level 1 tech support is a frustrating IT job. I spent five years doing that, trying and failing to get into the system administration group at the ISP. Eventually, I moved up into a network support role, which was much better than level 1, but not where I wanted to be. I was OK at networking, and I certainly could have made a career out of it, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to run servers. I wanted to run Linux.

So, after seven years at the ISP, I left and started a job as a network administrator at a small web host. We were a team of about ten people, though that varied during the time I was there. "Network administrator" was a very loose title there. I was responsible for everything that had a CPU in it. I even had to replace the filter in the building's AC unit. I was responsible for network gear, some WAN links, Cisco routers, switches, and of course, Windows, Linux, and BSD servers. This was much more in line with what I wanted to do. However, I didn't love how they were doing it, not just from a technology aspect, but from a business perspective. They did some things that I thought were questionable. Still, though, I was gaining experience, in so many ways. I implemented more and more Linux systems to replace windows and BSD systems there, architected improvements, and generally did the best job I knew how to do.

After about three and a half years there, I left that web host for what I thought would be my last move. I started as a system administrator at a small liberal arts college near home. By this point, I'm married, and my wife and I are planning on a family. Higher education has some benefits that many people might not know about. It's a great atmosphere, and they put a lot of emphasis on bettering yourself, not just putting in your hours. The only real downside is that the pay is lower than in the private sector. Still, this was an increase over what I was making, and I didn't know it at the time, but I was walking into a team that helped set me up for the future in ways I couldn't have imagined.

See, I believe that IT is made up of two types of people: folks who see IT as a lucrative career, and folks who are passionate about IT and get paid to do it. This place was about 50% passionate people. I had never worked so closely with people so excited to do what they do. I felt like I was at home, I was learning new things every day, and talking with some of the most brilliant IT people I'd ever met. What's more, they all wanted to share what they knew.

Well, over time, that slowly changed. Those brilliant people took other jobs, some changes in management forced some others out, and eventually, I found that I was one of the few left who was still passionate about what had been so important to the mission at the college. More cloud adoption meant less need for a do-it-yourselfer like me. My "I'm going to retire here" plans started to crumble. I eventually moved into a new role they created for high-performance computing, which had promise. We started deploying the college's first HPC cluster. Then I got a message one Sunday afternoon from a contact I'd made within Red Hat.

I'd met Marc (Unclemarc to those who know him) through the Red Hat Accelerators, a customer advocacy group that Red Hat runs, and of which I'd become a member in late 2018. We hung out at Summit in Boston in early 2019, and apparently, he liked what he saw in me. He let me know that the team he's on would likely have an opening soon, and he thought I'd make a great addition. Now, for me, the prospect of a job at Red Hat sounded almost too good to be true. I'd been a fan of Red Hat since well, remember when I said I bought that first Linux distro install disc in 1997 or so? It was Red Hat Linux. I'd based a career on a Linux distro I'd bought out of an interest in a better way of doing something, when I was a kid in high school, looking for a cheaper alternative. Now here I am, a few months into Technical Account Management at Red Hat. I guess you could say I'm pleased with where this path has taken me.

Wondering where your sysadmin career could take you? Take a skills assessment to find the next step on the path for you. Topics: Sysadmin culture Career Nathan Lager Nate is a Technical Account Manager with Red Hat and an experienced sysadmin with 20 years in the industry. He first encountered Linux (Red Hat 5.0) as a teenager, after deciding that software licensing was too expensive for a kid with no income, in the late 90's. Since then he's run More about me

Related Content

• Building a home lab: Sysadmin after dark Want to set up your own home sysadmin lab? Let's start by looking at the big-picture decisions regarding hardware and software. Posted: January 21, 2020 Author: James Brigman (Red Hat Accelerator)
• How to prepare for an Red Hat Certified Professional (RHCP) exam Thinking of taking a certification exam? Here are some tips to help you prepare. Posted: January 24, 2020 Author: Susan Lauber
• How to learn a new technology The "See one, do one, teach one" approach can help sysadmins master new tech with ease.

Posted: January 14, 2020

Author: Susan Lauber

[Dec 03, 2019] The America of the moon-landing is not the America of today. Graduates of business schools have taken over once great engineering companies

Dec 03, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

absalom_hicks , 30 minutes ago link

The America of the moon-landing is not the America of today. Graduates of business schools have taken over once great engineering companies. The business students are of a lower intellect and baser motivation -- the worst possible combination.

The desire for science and engineering has weakened in America but greed for money and wealth is greatly increased. The business types produce mostly intellectual garbage and compensate for it with volume. No competent intellect can read it (or wants to do so) and so it remains unchecked, inflates even more and clogs everything.

You can live for a long time on the great inheritance your fathers have bequeathed you but you cannot live on it forever. Yet this is what we are trying to in more ways than one.

schroedingersrat , 6 minutes ago link

The business students are of a lower intellect and baser motivation

Most of them are losers that simply inherited their wealth & power. America is now run by rich dimwits that would flip burgers in a meritocracy.

[Dec 02, 2019] Perhaps it's time to remember Yuri Gagarin's role in creating the USA hardware and software engineering boom from 1960 to 2000

Dec 02, 2019 | www.asiatimes.com

The shock in the US was that the Russians were not only competitive, but had embarrassed US science and engineering by being first. In 1958, President Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, and this enabled talented students to flow into science and engineering. The shock waves were felt throughout the entire educational system, from top to bottom. Mathematics was more important than football.

[Dec 01, 2019] Academic Conformism is the road to 1984. - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Highly recommended!

Dec 01, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Academic Conformism is the road to "1984."

The world is filled with conformism and groupthink. Most people do not wish to think for themselves. Thinking for oneself is dangerous, requires effort and often leads to rejection by the herd of one's peers.

The profession of arms, the intelligence business, the civil service bureaucracy, the wondrous world of groups like the League of Women Voters, Rotary Club as well as the empire of the thinktanks are all rotten with this sickness, an illness which leads inevitably to stereotyped and unrealistic thinking, thinking that does not reflect reality.

The worst locus of this mentally crippling phenomenon is the world of the academics. I have served on a number of boards that awarded Ph.D and post doctoral grants. I was on the Fulbright Fellowship federal board. I was on the HF Guggenheim program and executive boards for a long time. Those are two examples of my exposure to the individual and collective academic minds.

As a class of people I find them unimpressive. The credentialing exercise in acquiring a doctorate is basically a nepotistic process of sucking up to elders and a crutch for ego support as well as an entrance ticket for various hierarchies, among them the world of the academy. The process of degree acquisition itself requires sponsorship by esteemed academics who recommend candidates who do not stray very far from the corpus of known work in whichever narrow field is involved. The endorsements from RESPECTED academics are often decisive in the award of grants.

This process is continued throughout a career in academic research. PEER REVIEW is the sine qua non for acceptance of a "paper," invitation to career making conferences, or to the Holy of Holies, TENURE.

This life experience forms and creates CONFORMISTS, people who instinctively boot-lick their fellows in a search for the "Good Doggy" moments that make up their lives. These people are for sale. Their price may not be money, but they are still for sale. They want to be accepted as members of their group. Dissent leads to expulsion or effective rejection from the group.

This mentality renders doubtful any assertion that a large group of academics supports any stated conclusion. As a species academics will say or do anything to be included in their caste.

This makes them inherently dangerous. They will support any party or parties, of any political inclination if that group has the money, and the potential or actual power to maintain the academics as a tribe. pl

---

doug , 01 December 2019 at 01:01 PM

Sir,

That is the nature of tribes and humans are very tribal. At least most of them. Fortunately, there are outliers. I was recently reading "Political Tribes" which was written by a couple who are both law professors that examines this.

Take global warming (aka the rebranded climate change). Good luck getting grants to do any skeptical research. This highly complex subject which posits human impact is a perfect example of tribal bias.

My success in the private sector comes from consistent questioning what I wanted to be true to prevent suboptimal design decisions.

I also instinctively dislike groups that have some idealized view of "What is to be done?"

As Groucho said: "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member"

J , 01 December 2019 at 01:22 PM

Reminds one of the Borg, doesn't it?

The 'isms' had it, be it Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Totalitarianism, Elitism all demand conformity and adherence to group think. If one does not co-tow to whichever 'ism' is at play, those outside their group think are persecuted, ostracized, jailed, and executed all because they defy their conformity demands, and defy allegiance to them.

One world, one religion, one government, one Borg. all lead down the same road to -- Orwell's 1984.

Factotum , 01 December 2019 at 03:18 PM

David Halberstam: The Best and the Brightest. (Reminder how the heck we got into Vietnam, when the best and the brightest were serving as presidential advisors.)

Also good Halberstam re-read: The Powers that Be - when the conservative media controlled the levers of power; not the uber-liberal one we experience today.

[Nov 08, 2019] The monumental impact of C Opensource.com

Nov 08, 2019 | opensource.com

The monumental impact of C The season finale of Command Line Heroes offers a lesson in how a small community of open source enthusiasts can change the world. 01 Oct 2019 Matthew Broberg (Red Hat) Feed 29 up 3 comments x Subscribe now

Get the highlights in your inbox every week.

https://opensource.com/eloqua-embedded-email-capture-block.html?offer_id=70160000000QzXNAA0 Command Line Heroes podcast explores C's origin story in a way that showcases the longevity and power of its design. It's a perfect synthesis of all the languages discussed throughout the podcast's third season and this series of articles . original_c_programming_book.jpg

C is such a fundamental language that many of us forget how much it has changed. Technically a "high-level language," in the sense that it requires a compiler to be runnable, it's as close to assembly language as people like to get these days (outside of specialized, low-memory environments). It's also considered to be the language that made nearly all languages that came after it possible.

The path to C began with failure

While the myth persists that all great inventions come from highly competitive garage dwellers, C's story is more fit for the Renaissance period.

In the 1960s, Bell Labs in suburban New Jersey was one of the most innovative places of its time. Jon Gertner, author of The idea factory , describes the culture of the time marked by optimism and the excitement to solve tough problems. Instead of monetization pressures with tight timelines, Bell Labs offered seemingly endless funding for wild ideas. It had a research and development ethos that aligns well with today's open leadership principles . The results were significant and prove that brilliance can come without the promise of VC funding or an IPO.

Programming and development

• Programming cheat sheets
• New Python content
• Our latest JavaScript articles
• Recent Perl posts
• Red Hat Developers Blog

The challenge back then was terminal sharing: finding a way for lots of people to access the (very limited number of) available computers. Before there was a scalable answer for that, and long before we had a shell like Bash , there was the Multics project. It was a hypothetical operating system where hundreds or even thousands of developers could share time on the same system. This was a dream of John McCarty, creator of Lisp and the term artificial intelligence (AI), as I recently explored .

Joy Lisi Ranken, author of A people's history of computing in the United States , describes what happened next. There was a lot of public interest in driving forward with Multics' vision of more universally available timesharing. Academics, scientists, educators, and some in the broader public were looking forward to this computer-powered future. Many advocated for computing as a public utility, akin to electricity, and the push toward timesharing was a global movement.

Up to that point, high-end mainframes topped out at 40-50 terminals per system. The change of scale was ambitious and eventually failed, as Warren Toomey writes in IEEE Spectrum :

"Over five years, AT&T invested millions in the Multics project, purchasing a GE-645 mainframe computer and dedicating to the effort many of the top researchers at the company's renowned Bell Telephone Laboratories -- including Thompson and Ritchie, Joseph F. Ossanna, Stuart Feldman, M. Douglas McIlroy, and the late Robert Morris. But the new system was too ambitious, and it fell troublingly behind schedule. In the end, AT&T's corporate leaders decided to pull the plug."

Bell Labs pulled out of the Multics program in 1969. Multics wasn't going to happen.

The fellowship of the C

Funding wrapped up, and the powerful GE645 mainframe was assigned to other tasks inside Bell Labs. But that didn't discourage everyone.

Among the last holdouts from the Multics project were four men who felt passionately tied to the project: Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and J.F. Ossanna. These four diehards continued to muse and scribble ideas on paper. Thompson and Ritchie developed a game called Space Travel for the PDP-7 minicomputer. While they were working on that, Thompson started implementing all those crazy hand-written ideas about filesystems they'd developed among the wreckage of Multics.

pdp7-minicomputer-oslo-2005.jpeg A PDP-7 minicomputer was not top of line technology at the time, but the team implemented foundational technologies that change the future of programming languages and operating systems alike.

That's worth emphasizing: Some of the original filesystem specifications were written by hand and then programmed on what was effectively a toy compared to the systems they were using to build Multics. Wikipedia's Ken Thompson page dives deeper into what came next:

"While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language. He also created a video game called Space Travel . Later, Bell Labs withdrew from the MULTICS project. In order to go on playing the game, Thompson found an old PDP-7 machine and rewrote Space Travel on it. Eventually, the tools developed by Thompson became the Unix operating system : Working on a PDP-7, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, and including Rudd Canaday, developed a hierarchical file system , the concepts of computer processes and device files , a command-line interpreter , pipes for easy inter-process communication, and some small utility programs. In 1970, Brian Kernighan suggested the name 'Unix,' in a pun on the name 'Multics.' After initial work on Unix, Thompson decided that Unix needed a system programming language and created B , a precursor to Ritchie's C ."

As Walter Toomey documented in the IEEE Spectrum article mentioned above, Unix showed promise in a way the Multics project never materialized. After winning over the team and doing a lot more programming, the pathway to Unix was paved.

Getting from B to C in Unix

Thompson quickly created a Unix language he called B. B inherited much from its predecessor BCPL, but it wasn't enough of a breakaway from older languages. B didn't know data types, for starters. It's considered a typeless language, which meant its "Hello World" program looked like this:

main( ) {
extrn a, b, c;
putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}

a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';

Even if you're not a programmer, it's clear that carving up strings four characters at a time would be limiting. It's also worth noting that this text is considered the original "Hello World" from Brian Kernighan's 1972 book, A tutorial introduction to the language B (although that claim is not definitive).

640px-unix_history-simple.svg_.png

Typelessness aside, B's assembly-language counterparts were still yielding programs faster than was possible using the B compiler's threaded-code technique. So, from 1971 to 1973, Ritchie modified B. He added a "character type" and built a new compiler so that it didn't have to use threaded code anymore. After two years of work, B had become C.

The right abstraction at the right time

C's use of types and ease of compiling down to efficient assembly code made it the perfect language for the rise of minicomputers, which speak in bytecode. B was eventually overtaken by C. Once C became the language of Unix, it became the de facto standard across the budding computer industry. Unix was the sharing platform of the pre-internet days. The more people wrote C, the better it got, and the more it was adopted. It eventually became an open standard itself. According to the Brief history of C programming language :

"For many years, the de facto standard for C was the version supplied with the Unix operating system. In the summer of 1983 a committee was established to create an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard that would define the C language. The standardization process took six years (much longer than anyone reasonably expected)."

How influential is C today? A quick review reveals:

• Parts of all major operating systems are written in C, including macOS, Windows, Linux, and Android.
• The world's most prolific databases, including DB2, MySQL, MS SQL, and PostgreSQL, are written in C.
• Many programming-language specifics begun in C, including Python, Go, Perl's core interpreter, and the R statistical language.

Decades after they started as scrappy outsiders, Thompson and Ritchie are praised as titans of the programming world. They shared 1983's Turing Award, and in 1998, received the National Medal of Science for their work on the C language and Unix.

c-programming-language-national-medal.jpeg

But Doug McIlroy and J.F. Ossanna deserve their share of praise, too. All four of them are true Command Line Heroes.

Wrapping up the season

Command Line Heroes has completed an entire season of insights into the programming languages that affect how we code today. It's been a joy to learn about these languages and share them with you. I hope you've enjoyed it as well!

[Oct 23, 2019] Internet Archive Releases 2,500 MS-DOS Games

Oct 23, 2019 | games.slashdot.org

(cnet.com) 58 BeauHD on Monday October 14, 2019 @10:10PM from the nostalgia-blast dept. The latest update from Internet Archive brings thousands of MS-DOS games from the '90s like 3D Bomber, Zool and Alien Rampage. CNET reports: On Sunday, Internet Archive released 2,500 MS-DOS games that includes action, strategy and adventure titles. Some of the games are Vor Terra, Spooky Kooky Monster Maker, Princess Maker 2 and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. "This will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago," Internet Archive software curator Jason Scott wrote on the site's blog .

One game that might trigger a few memories is the 1992 action-adventure horror game Alone in the Dark , published by Infogrames. In the game, you can play private investigator Edward Carnby or family member Emily Hartwood, who's investigating the suspicious death of Jeremy Hartwood in his Louisiana mansion called Derceto, which is now supposedly haunted. Fighting against rats, zombies and giant worms, you have to solve a number of puzzles to escape. Another retro game included by Internet Archive is a 1994 title played on PCs and Amiga computers called Mr. Blobby (a remake of the SNES game Super Troll Islands). Players can choose from three different characters -- Mr. Blobby, Mrs. Blobby and Baby Blobby. The goal of the game is to color in the computer screen by walking over it. Levels include climbing ladders, avoiding spikes and bouncing on springs.

[Oct 22, 2019] Wired Remembers the Glory Days of Flash

Oct 22, 2019 | tech.slashdot.org

(wired.co.uk) 95

They write that its early popularity in the mid-1990s came in part because "Microsoft needed software capable of showing video on their website, MSN.com, then the default homepage of every Internet Explorer user." But Flash allowed anyone to become an animator. (One Disney artist tells them that Flash could do in three days what would take a professional animator 7 months -- and cost $10,000.)

Their article opens in 2008, a golden age when Flash was installed on 98% of desktops -- then looks back on its impact: The online world Flash entered was largely static. Blinking GIFs delivered the majority of online movement. Constructed in early HTML and CSS, websites lifted clumsily from the metaphors of magazine design: boxy and grid-like, they sported borders and sidebars and little clickable numbers to flick through their pages (the horror).

Flash changed all that. It transformed the look of the web ...

Some of these websites were, to put it succinctly, absolute trash. Flash was applied enthusiastically and inappropriately. The gratuitous animation of restaurant websites was particularly grievous -- kitsch abominations, these could feature thumping bass music and teleporting ingredients . Ishkur's 'guide to electronic music' is a notable example from the era you can still view -- a chaos of pop arty lines and bubbles and audio samples, it looks like the mind map of a naughty child...

In contrast to the web's modern, business-like aesthetic, there is something bizarre, almost sentimental, about billion-dollar multinationals producing websites in line with Flash's worst excess: long loading times, gaudy cartoonish graphics, intrusive sound and incomprehensible purpose... "Back in 2007, you could be making Flash games and actually be making a living," remembers Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp, when asked about Flash's golden age. "That was a really fun time, because that's kind of what everyone's dream is: to make the games you want and be able to make a living off it."
Wired summarizes Steve Jobs' "brutally candid" diatribe against Flash in 2010. "Flash drained batteries. It ran slow. It was a security nightmare. He asserted that an era had come to an end... '[T]he mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards -- all areas where Flash falls short.'" Wired also argues that "It was economically viable for him to rubbish Flash -- he wanted to encourage people to create native games for iOS."

But they also write that today, "The post-Flash internet looks different. The software's downfall precipitated the rise of a new aesthetic...one moulded by the specifications of the smartphone and the growth of social media," favoring hits of information rather than striving for more immersive, movie-emulating thrills.

And they add that though Newgrounds long-ago moved away from Flash, the site's founder is now working on a Flash emulator to keep all that early classic content playable in a browser.

[Oct 13, 2019] https://www.quora.com/If-Donald-Knuth-were-25-years-old-today-which-programming-language-would-he-choose

Notable quotes:

"... He mostly writes in C today. ..."

Oct 13, 2019 | www.quora.com

---

Eugene Miya , A friend/colleague. Sometimes driver. Other shared experiences. Updated Mar 22 2017 · Author has 11.2k answers and 7.9m answer views

He mostly writes in C today.

I can assure you he at least knows about Python. Guido's office at Dropbox is 1 -- 2 blocks by a backdoor gate from Don's house.

I would tend to doubt that he would use R (I've used S before as one of my stat packages). Don would probably write something for himself.

Don is not big on functional languages, so I would doubt either Haskell (sorry Paul) or LISP (but McCarthy lived just around the corner from Don; I used to drive him to meetings; actually, I've driven all 3 of us to meetings, and he got his wife an electric version of my car based on riding in my car (score one for friend's choices)). He does use emacs and he does write MLISP macros, but he believes in being closer to the hardware which is why he sticks with MMIX (and MIX) in his books.

Don't discount him learning the machine language of a given architecture.

I'm having dinner with Don and Jill and a dozen other mutual friends in 3 weeks or so (our quarterly dinner). I can ask him then, if I remember (either a calendar entry or at job). I try not to bother him with things like this. Don is well connected to the hacker community

Don's name was brought up at an undergrad architecture seminar today, but Don was not in the audience (an amazing audience; I took a photo for the collection of architects and other computer scientists in the audience (Hennessey and Patterson were talking)). I came close to biking by his house on my way back home.

We do have a mutual friend (actually, I introduced Don to my biology friend at Don's request) who arrives next week, and Don is my wine drinking proxy. So there is a chance I may see him sooner.

Steven de Rooij , Theoretical computer scientist Answered Mar 9, 2017 · Author has 4.6k answers and 7.7m answer views

Nice question :-)

Don Knuth would want to use something that’s low level, because details matter . So no Haskell; LISP is borderline. Perhaps if the Lisp machine ever had become a thing.

He’d want something with well-defined and simple semantics, so definitely no R. Python also contains quite a few strange ad hoc rules, especially in its OO and lambda features. Yes Python is easy to learn and it looks pretty, but Don doesn’t care about superficialities like that. He’d want a language whose version number is converging to a mathematical constant, which is also not in favor of R or Python.

What remains is C. Out of the five languages listed, my guess is Don would pick that one. But actually, his own old choice of Pascal suits him even better. I don’t think any languages have been invented since T E X was written that score higher on the Knuthometer than Knuth’s own original pick.

And yes, I feel that this is actually a conclusion that bears some thinking about. 24.1k views ·

Dan Allen , I've been programming for 34 years now. Still not finished. Answered Mar 9, 2017 · Author has 4.5k answers and 1.8m answer views

In The Art of Computer Programming I think he'd do exactly what he did. He'd invent his own architecture and implement programs in an assembly language targeting that theoretical machine.

He did that for a reason because he wanted to reveal the detail of algorithms at the lowest level of detail which is machine level.

He didn't use any available languages at the time and I don't see why that would suit his purpose now. All the languages above are too high-level for his purposes.

[Oct 01, 2019] Soviet Computing in the 1980s A Survey of the Software and Its Applications - ScienceDirect

Oct 01, 2019 | www.sciencedirect.com

Advances in Computers Volume 30 , 1990, Pages 223-306

The chapter surveys some aspects of the Soviet computer software world and examines how computers applied in several fields enjoy a high level of official support. The chapter examines seven major areas of computer applications in the USSR. Various automated systems of management and control (ASU) are discussed. The state of computing in Soviet research and development organizations, which found themselves low on the priority list when it came to allocating computer and communications technology until the mid 1980s is also described. Computer networking is also developing very slowly in the USSR. The Ministry of Telecommunications is hostile to data communications and places various impediments in the way of organizations desiring to use the switched network for this purpose. The chapter reviews Soviet educational computing. Computer courses with a curriculum stressing the development of programming skills and "algorithmic thinking" were introduced into Soviet schools. Computer Aided Design (CAD) is the latest applications area of highest priority. The chapter emphasizes that without radical change, the Soviet software industry will be unable to satisfy domestic demand for high-quality software. The consequence is that Western software will be in great and growing demand, which raises a policy question for the United States and its software industry.

[Oct 01, 2019] What Were Soviet Computers Like?

Feb 01, 2002 | ask.slashdot.org

80 kwertii asks: "Does anyone have any information on computing in the former Soviet Union? A Google search turned up this virtual museum , which has some good historical background on the development of early Soviet computer technology (a lot only in Russian, unfortunately) but not much on later systems. What sorts of architectures did Soviet computers use? Were there any radically different computing concepts in use, like a standard 9-bit byte or something? What kind of operating systems were common? How has the end of the Cold War and the large scale introduction of Western computer technology affected the course of Russian computer development?"

https://ask.slashdot.org/story/02/02/18/0415223/what-were-soviet-computers-like

---

Bob_Robertson ( 454888 ) , Monday February 18, 2002 @09:21PM ( #3029642 ) Homepage

Like IBM's. ( Score: 4 , Interesting)

The reality is that the KGB was stealing American computer designs from the beginning. As Glastnost was coming into being, and the "west" was getting a look into how things worked inside the Soviet system, they discovered that they were running clones of the IBM 360's.

I've seen an interview recently with an ex-KGB big-wig who said he realized how bankrupt the Soviet system was as he learned how little they developed "in house" rather than copied from the west. The Soviets were always one or two generations of technology behind simply because they weren't inventing it.

Bob

Xunker ( 6905 ) , Monday February 18, 2002 @09:26PM ( #3029665 ) Homepage Journal

Another.. ( Score: 5 , Interesting)

An an slightly different node, I found this link a while ago that discusses, in great depth, Sinclair Clones [nvg.ntnu.no] from the late 1970's to the early 1990's.

Another thing I remember reading a long while ago was an article in "A+/Incider" magazine (and Apple II magazine) where the cover story was the giant headline "Red Apples"; in it they talked about a close of the Apple IIe that looked like a negative of the Apple IIe we know (black case, white keys), but otherwise was more or less the same -- compatible logic, just made somewhere else. I may even throw that coppy in my flatbed if there is enoguh interest.

If I had to guess, all but either very high-end or very early machine will be of the same designs as western counterparts, probably for engineering reasons because an engineer doesn't want to reinvent the wheel (or bitwise logic in this case) just to make machine to do word processing.

morcheeba ( 260908 ) writes:

Re:Another.. ( Score: 3 , Informative)

Here's some info on the Agat [old-computers.com] - a clone of an Apple II.

If you want to buy an old Russian computer, try here (has many pictures!) [seller2001.euro.ru]. I don't know if this guy's stock is representative of 1980's Russian computing, but it contains a lot (31) of Sinclair clones [seller2001.euro.ru], and information on other computers, including IBM PC-compatibles [seller2001.euro.ru]. If nothing, the names listed should help searches.

deicide ( 195 ) writes:

Re:Another.. ( Score: 2 , Informative)

Sinclair clones are VERY representative of personal computer market of that time. There were literally dozens of variants, with various extensions and addons, custom operating systems, modified OS, etc. They were self-made (I've had one of those, total cost: $20), with mass-produced pc boards and cases, and even factory-made (even with OS translated to Russian.

Most of them connected to a TV and used tape recorders for storage. Eventually, I had a dot-matrix printer and could've gotten a 5" floppy drive if I really wanted. I've seen mice, modems and light pens. I've seen cable and broadcast tv system's audio channel used to broadcast binary data when station wasn't broadcasting regular programming (would that be predecessor to cable modems?) We would record audio to tapes and then load them back into computer.

There were clones of 286 PC's as well (Poisk), although that was just about when I moved to this side of the ocean..

There were also completely original computers with BASIC or FORTRAN interpreter as "operating system".

Tipsy McStagger ( 312800 ) writes:

Re:Another.. ( Score: 1 )

heh he.. sinclair modems.

I remember trying to set up a system with a friend across town where the spectrums were wired up to mangled phones and we'd send messages by saving a program across the phone that the other end would load and then repeat... each message also included the basic app required to send the next one - or something - I forget now

Anonymous Coward writes:

Re:Another.. ( Score: 2 , Interesting)

I live in the USSR. Most of what I saw where:

- Z80 machines running CP/M or custom operating systems like the DIOS

- Sinclair clones

When the opening to the west happened, there was a huge leap in technology because 286 and 386SX PCs were brought.

I was fortunate enough to have one, and it seemed to me, at that time, that they had gigantic CPU power and a huge memory.

I was running benchmarks all the time to compare my 386sx with my Sinclair.

My 386sx was about 10-15 times faster, and had 15 times more memory!

How was that for a leap?

Now in Eastern Europe we have very good programmers. Why?

Because, when the outside world is not that interesting and funny, more and more people have fun (I mean, programming is lots of fun) with their computers!

Thank you for your time reading this, and sorry for posting as AC. I don't have a ./ account and I find logging it each time in order to read ./ is pretty hard.

cwebster ( 100824 ) writes:

Re:Another.. ( Score: 1 )

>Thank you for your time reading this, and sorry for posting as AC. I don't have a ./ account and I find logging it each time in order to read ./ is pretty hard.

you know, you can cookie your logon and only have to actually log on once a year, when your cookie expires.

Ratface ( 21117 ) writes:

Re:Another.. ( Score: 2 )

They have (had?) one of the Russian Sinclair clones in a display case by the stairs at the staff entrance of the National Science Museum in London when I was there (~5 years ago).

First time I had ever seen one. I've often thought how much fun it must have been trying to deal with the strange 5 functions / key system that the Spectrum had PLUS having everything in Cyrrilic(sp?)!

I'd love to pick up one of those babies!

eufaula ( 163352 ) writes:

Re:Another.. -- Pravetz ( Score: 3 , Interesting)

I have a good friend who is from Bulgaria, and there they mass-produced an apple IIe knockoff called the Pravetz. they reverse engineered the apple and started making their own version. He said that they ended up being more powerful than any of the apple II line.

People like the Dark Avenger (ever had a real computer virus? he probably wrote it) grew up hacking these things. anyway, they are mentioned in a really good wired article [wired.com] about the Dark Avenger and the Soviet Bloc's more recent computing history, and Woz even has a picture of one [woz.org] on his website.

Anonymous Coward , Monday February 18, 2002 @10:15PM ( #3029732 )

link ( Score: 5 , Informative)

http://rickman.com/brett/russian_computing/ -- also has bibliography to printed materials

RGRistroph ( 86936 ) writes:

Re:link ( Score: 2 )

Mod parent up -- it's one of the only two informative posts so far (and no, that guy ranting about how you have to go to the library to do research is not insightful)

Link for the lazy:

http://rickman.com/brett/russian_computing/ [rickman.com]

clem.dickey ( 102292 ) , Tuesday February 19, 2002 @12:14AM ( #3030100 )

Ryad line ( Score: 4 , Informative)

In the late 70s or early 80s ACM's "Computing Surveys" ran an article on Soviet computing. Here's what I remember:

The Soviets said that military computers were generally original designs.

Most of the commercial computers were either IBM 360/370 models diverted through 3rd countries (direct exports were prohibited) or the Soviet "Ryad" line. Ryads were 360/370 copies. Not having to worry about copyright andd patent issues, the East copied IBM mainframes directly. IBM engineers recognized an I/O problem with one Soviet model, since the IBM original had the same problem. Just as the 360 model development was split among groups in Poughkeepsie and Endicott, different Soviet Bloc countries were assigned development/manufacturiing responsibility for the copies.

Software was, of course, pirated OS/360. (Back in those days, software came with source.)

RGRistroph ( 86936 ) writes: < [email protected] > on Tuesday February 19, 2002 @12:54AM ( #3030261 ) Homepage

Re:Ryad line ( Score: 5 , Informative)

I found the acm.org's site search to be unusable on linux/mozilla, which is ironic -- however, a Google search on "soviet site:acm.org" [google.com] turned up some interesting papers available as pdf (special tribute to Russian Dmitry Sklyarov ?):

• The Soviet Bloc's Unified System of Computers [acm.org] by N.C. Davis and S.E. Goodman -- this talks about the "Ryad" s/360 clones.
• Computing in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe [acm.org] -- more an overview, but has a biography.

There are more, but the google search page is probably the place to go, rather than me cutting-and-pasting it here.

By the way, that guy S.E. Goodman seems to have also written an article about Red China's internet infrastructure.

AndyElf ( 23331 ) writes:

Re:link ( Score: 1 )

Also this [bashedu.ru] page has interesting info. History, timeline, pics.

fm6 ( 162816 ) , Monday February 18, 2002 @11:01PM ( #3029782 ) Homepage Journal

The Old-Fashioned Way ( Score: 2 , Insightful)

Let's see, so far we've got one offtopic post, one bigoted and ignorant post from the Tom Clancy crowd, and the usual noise. I don't think you'll get much help here. Sometimes all you can find online is opinion and rumor.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love the Web in general and Slashdot in particular. Both are invaluable resources for obscure little questions like the one you're asking. I know I used to write technical documentation without having the net as a reference source -- but I'm damned if I remember how.

Still, information you can get through this kind of informal research is limited in scope. There's a lot of stuff online -- but a lot more that's not. A lot of texts exist only in proprietary databases, not on the web. Not to mention the the much larger document base that simply doesn't exist in eletronic form.

You need to find a good library, probably one at a university or in a major city. They all have web sites (librarians love the web) and usually have their catalogs online. But searching a library catalog is not as simple as typing a few content words into Google. You probably need to interface with one of those old-fashioned access nodes that are only available onsite -- the ones with comprehensive heuristic and associative search features. I refer, of course, to reference librarians.

duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) writes:

Re:The Old-Fashioned Way ( Score: 3 , Insightful)

That's very politically correct of you. You show a tendency common to most PC types -- Don't let the facts get in the way of feel-good politics.

The Soviet Union didn't do very much independent computer design after the early 1960's. Various Soviet agencies and front organizations obtained IBM, Burroughs and Sperry-Univac mainframes and setup factories to manufacture spares and even a few backward-engineered copies.

The Soviet Union did not embrace information technology. It was a society that was essentially living in the 1930's. Heavy industry was the priority of the USSR, not semiconductors.

If you looked on the desks of Soviet desk jockeys in the late 80's, you'd find most offices to be non-computerized (like many western offices). The ones with computers had green screens, IBM or Apple clones. Engineers had Intergraph or Apolla stuff.

The truth isn't bigoted or ignorant.

fm6 ( 162816 ) writes:

I'm so PC! ( Score: 2 )

I love the term "Politically Correct". It allows you to dismiss any difference of opinion as a kneejerk reaction. Which is itself, of course, a kneejerk reaction.

(I once heard Night of the Living Dead condemned as "Politically Correct" because the main character was black. Too typical.)

Look, I never said the Soviets never ripped off American technology. The US leads the planet in this area. People imitate us. Well, duh. Go to the Sony web site sometime and read that company's history. Their early attempts to reverse-engineer and manufacture magnetic recording devices are quite amusing.

I'm no expert on the history of Soviet technology. But I do know enough to know that saying "They never did anything with computers except rip off American designs" is simplistic and stupid.

In point of fact, Soviet engineers in all areas were not able to imitate Western technology as much as they would have liked. There were many reasons for this, some obvious, some not. If you're really interested in the subject, go do some actual reading. In any case, spare us the Clancy cliches.

duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) writes:

Re:I'm so PC! ( Score: 2 )

The term "Politically Correct" in this context means that you are more concerned with your notion of "fairness" towards the former Soviet Union than the facts.

You have further reinforced my assessment of your original post with your reply. You suggest that i visit the Sony web site to learn about their early reverse-engineering efforts, then admit that you know virtually nothing about Soviet technology. You then assert (while posting in "Ask Slashdot") that we would all be better served by reading printed books (that Tom Clancy didn't write) on the subject rather than asking people on the web.

Maybe you should have taken a second to read my post. In that post I stated clearly that Soviets did have their own computer innovations until sometime in the 1960's. At that point it was cheaper and easier for them to appropriate and/or copy Western equipment. Technology as it applied to semiconductors just was not a priority.

Spare this forum your offtopic pseudo-intellectual rants and go away.

fm6 ( 162816 ) writes:

Grunt. Mumble. ( Score: 2 )

It's so paradoxical being PC. On the one hand, people assume you're so thoroughly brainwashed that you can't think for yourself. On the other hand, they continue to lecture you as if you were actually capable of rational thought!

Well, I can't sneer. Here I am arguing with a guy who enters the discussion with the premise that nothing I say can make sense. Pretty futile, no?

But I love the way you put "fair" in quotes. In this context "fair" simply means admitting that you don't know what you don't know. It means being skeptical about your own prejudices and assumptions.

It might help if you separate out the issue of whether the Soviet system was morally bankrupt and profoundly inefficient. Actually, that's not even an issue any more -- almost everybody agrees that it was. But it doesn't follow from this fact that Soviet technology consisted entirely of pathetic American rip offs. However screwed up the state was, it had some brilliant citizens, and only a bigot would dismiss their accomplishments out of hand.

fm6 ( 162816 ) writes:

Disagreement is not Bigotry ( Score: 2 )

You think I want the whole world to agree with me? What am I doing on Slashdot then?

It's not the opinion that makes you a bigot. Bigotry can happen to anybody, of any stripe. God knows I've caught myself in that mode often enough.

The difference between disagreement and bigotry is the same as the difference between having an honest difference of opinion and being prejudiced. If you disagree with me because you find my arguments uncompelling, then you're just someone with a different POV. That's fair enough. It's even useful -- even if neither of us can admit he's wrong, at least we can keep each other honest.

But if you start out assuming that whole groups of people are incapable of saying or doing anything worth your notice, and sneer at anybody who suggests otherwise, then you're a bigot.

Peter H.S. ( 38077 ) , Tuesday February 19, 2002 @07:57PM ( #3035283 ) Homepage

Re:The Old-Fashioned Way ( Score: 4 , Insightful)

The Soviet Union did not embrace information technology. It was a society that was essentially living in the 1930's. Heavy industry was the priority of the USSR, not semiconductors.

If you looked on the desks of Soviet desk jockeys in the late 80's, you'd find most offices to be non-computerized (like many western offices). The ones with computers had green screens, IBM or Apple clones. Engineers had Intergraph or Apolla stuff.

The USSR was indeed behind behind the west regarding advanced semiconductor technologi, but your anectdotical evidence can be misleading, since the USSR soviet economy was sharply devided into a civilian part (who got almost nothing) and a military who had first priority.
So even though the standard USSR office was pen-and-paper, the military complex would have access much more advanced technology.
IMHO, soviet military equipment since WWII to until the eighties, was often on par, if not better, than US equipment (especially missilies, tanks, infantery weapons, airplanes, though perhaps not avionics).
OTOH, civilian USSR equipment was always decades behind, what could be found in the west.

The truth isn't bigoted or ignorant.
I believe that a famous USSR newspaper was called "Pravda", meaning "The Truth" ;-).

WetCat ( 558132 ) writes:

Re:Gotta say it....... ( Score: 1 )

In 1991, I actually have been using one BESM-6 computer, which was completely original (no IBM copying at all). It was 48-bit machine. I was faster than IBM PS2 12Mhz...

andaru ( 535590 ) writes: < [email protected] > on Monday February 18, 2002 @11:38PM ( #3029931 ) Homepage

Bug free code ( Score: 5 , Interesting)

I remember a book called Writing Bug Free Code (yes, you all scoff, but this is for real) written by a Russian computer scientist.

The basic premise was that he was using punch cards, and the actual computer on which he was compiling and testing his programs was in a relatively distant city.

He would punch up a set of cards and mail them to where the computer was, which would take a week or two. When they got around to it, they would compile his program and print out a test run using input he gave them. This would take another week. The week or two return trip made the average round trip take a month.

Now if you had to wait one month to find out that you had missed a semicolon, wouldn't you be more careful?

Usquebaugh ( 230216 ) writes:

Re:Bug free code ( Score: 2 , Funny)

Depends wether it was fixed price or time and materials :-)

boopus ( 100890 ) writes:

Re:Bug free code ( Score: 2 )

I think you've hit upon the reason many of us capitalists don't beleive in comunism...

fm6 ( 162816 ) writes:

Card Carrying Programmers ( Score: 2 )

Now if you had to wait one month to find out that you had missed a semicolon, wouldn't you be more careful?

Actually, that POV is not restricted to the former Proletarian Dictatorship. Most of my early programming was done by punching FORTRAN and PL/1 code onto punched cards. I used to stay up all night so I could submit my jobs when the turnaround was down to 15 minutes.

I had a FORTRAN textbook that said this was Very Bad, and not just because of lost sleep. It urged students to think through their code before trying it. Do hand simulation. Read it through with a friend. Later on I read books by people who insisted all software should be "provably correct."

Now I work with Delphi and Kylix, which thoroughly encourages the cut-and-try approach. Oh well.

marcus ( 1916 ) writes:

Brings back memories ( Score: 1 )

Including functional front panels, paper tape and thoughts like "Wow, that 1200bps cassette tape is fast!"

Used to do punch cards in PL/1 at school at least until I discovered the lab with vt-100s in it, and made friends with an operator who showed me how to make the machine punch the cards based on the source file that I had entered at the terminal. ;-) Hello David, are you still out there?

fm6 ( 162816 ) writes:

Re:Brings back memories ( Score: 2 )

Yeah, IBM really resisted interactive computing for a long time. Actually a good thing, since it helped give companies like DEC and DG their shot. One way to do without keypunches in IBM shops was to write a card-reader emulator!

Are we in nostalgia mode? Elsewhere on /., somebody is asking for help porting his RPG code to Linux. I seem to recall that RPG was little more than a software emulator for an IBM accounting machine, which used plugboard programming to process data on punched cards. Perhaps I misremember. Silly to invent a language for something like that!

Satai ( 111172 ) writes:

In... ( Score: 1 , Troll)

...the words of Yakkof Smirnof (or some spelling variation thereof,) in Communist Russia, Computer crash you!

Evil Attraction ( 150413 ) , Tuesday February 19, 2002 @12:57AM ( #3030274 )

Found lots of information ( Score: 3 , Informative)

I found some related (and maybe some not so related) information on this by using Google [google.com] and searching for "soviet union computers technology". Here's a handful of links for ya; "Computing in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe" [acm.org] "Where did Soviet scientists go?" [cnn.com] "Creator of the first stored program computer in continental Europe" [icfcst.kiev.ua] Not much, but you might find more for yourself by refining your search a little.

--
Evil Attraction

Detritus ( 11846 ) , Tuesday February 19, 2002 @01:02AM ( #3030291 ) Homepage

Ukraine ( Score: 4 , Informative)

See this [icfcst.kiev.ua] for a Ukrainian perspective on Soviet computer history.

You also may want to do a google search on the comp.arch newsgroup. I think the topic has been discussed there.

The Soviets reverse engineered a number of American designs (IBM 360, PDP-11). They also did some original designs for special applications.

Some of the work was farmed out to other Warsaw Pact countries, such as the GDR.

Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) writes:

Principally Copies of Successful US Designs. ( Score: 2 , Redundant)

The PDP-11 series were extensively copied in the USSR, as were the IBM 360 mainframes [csd.uwo.ca]

fooguy ( 237418 ) , Tuesday February 19, 2002 @01:57AM ( #3030457 ) Homepage

VAX - When you Care Enough to Steal the Very Best ( Score: 5 , Funny)

This quote is from page 15 of the OpenVMS at 20 publication that Digital Published in 1997. The PDF [compaq.com] is available from Compaq.

During the cold war, VAX systems could not be sold behind the Iron Curtain. Recognizing superior technology, technical people cloned VAX systems in Russia, Hungary, and China. After learning that VAX systems were being cloned, DIGITAL had the following words etched on the CVAX chip, "VAX...when you care enough to steal the very best."

morcheeba ( 260908 ) , Tuesday February 19, 2002 @02:23PM ( #3032956 ) Journal

Re:VAX - When you Care Enough to Steal the Very Be ( Score: 4 , Informative)

Those words were in Cyrillic (of course)... see them on the chip here! [fsu.edu]

dylan_- ( 1661 ) writes:

Re:VAX - When you Care Enough to Steal the Very Be ( Score: 2 )

...and then explore the rest of this incredibly cool site.

Thanks for the link, morcheeba.

morcheeba ( 260908 ) writes:

Re:VAX - When you Care Enough to Steal the Very Be ( Score: 1 )

Oh yeah, it's a great site... maybe I should have mentioned it :) I've been lucky to work at two places with good optical equipment ... mainly for PCB inspection/rework, so not quite the magnification at that site. When I mysteriously blew up a FET in a hybrid package, I got to remove the top (a welded-on metal top; none of the dice were potted inside) and see if it was over voltage or over current that killed the part. At another facility, we an X-ray machine and a scanning electron microscope, neither of which I got to use :(

$pacemold ( 248347 ) writes:

Re:VAX - When you Care Enough to Steal the Very Be ( Score: 1 )

Those words were in Cyrillic (of course)...

...But not in Russian. At least not in understandable Russian.

ader ( 1402 ) , Tuesday February 19, 2002 @06:39AM ( #3030967 ) Homepage

Please to announce computorial system is new ( Score: 2 , Funny)

[Adopt cod Russian accent:]

Glorious new Soviet People's Dual Potato 3000! With advanced UVR (Ultra Root Vegetable(tm)) technology and many obedient clock cycles working for common good. Running Mikkelzoft Window KGB. Own the means of production and experience many kilohertz of glorious revolution in the People's progress today, comrade!

Adski_
/

NB. Before you complain, I must point out that as a Linux user myself, I am of course a fervent communist.

Jonmann ( 559611 ) writes:

Ternary computers ( Score: 2 , Funny)

I believe that the coolest invention the Russians ever made (concerning computers) was the ternary computer. More appropriately, the balanced ternary computer.
It was a bit like our binary computers, but it had real potential with the trigits having the values of up, down and neutral. The computer was called SETUN, although it was experimental and never truly realized since the 60's.
If anyone has a link concerning SETUN, I'd be interested, so far my only source has been the meager note on 'An introdunction to cryptography', Mollin.

NaturePhotog ( 317732 ) writes:

Re:Ternary computers ( Score: 3 , Interesting)

A search on Google [google.com] gives a number of interesting links, including: photo [icfcst.kiev.ua] at the European Museum on CS and Technology article [computer-museum.ru] (including bibliography) at the Virtual Computer Museum discussion of ternary computing [sigmaxi.org] at American Scientist One of those indicated it was circa 1958.

Anonymous Coward , Tuesday February 19, 2002 @07:50AM ( #3031081 )

Elbrus Supercomputers ( Score: 5 , Interesting)

There is an article [xbitlabs.com] on X-bit labs about Soviet supercomputers Elbrus-1 , Elbrus-2 and Elbrus-3 , and their successor, Elbrus-2000 :

The history of the world computer science is connected with the name of Elbrus. This company was founded in Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computing Equipment, which team had been developing supercomputers for the Soviet Union's defense establishments for over 40 years. E2K processor embodies the developing ideas of the Russian supercomputer Elbrus-3 built in 1991. Today Elbrus-3 architecture is referred to EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing).

According to Boris A. Babaian, chief architect of Elbrus supercomputers, superscalar architecture was invented in Russia. To quote him as saying: "In 1978 we developed the world's first superscalar computer, Elbrus-1. At present all Western superscalar processors have just the same architecture. First Western superscalar processor appeared in 1992 while ours - in 1978. Moreover, our variant of superscalar is analogous to Pentium Pro introduced by Intel in 1995".

The historical priority of Elbrus is confirmed in the States as well. According to the same article in Microprocessor Report by Keith Diefendorff, the developer of Motorola 88110 - one of the first western superscalar processors: "In 1978 almost 15 years ahead of Western superscalar processors, Elbrus implemented a two-issue out-of-order processor with register renaming and speculative execution".

ameoba ( 173803 ) writes:

Maybe somebody can fill this in... ( Score: 2 )

I seem to remember that the only computer system ever built on trinary (base-3) logic was produced in the Soviet Union. The name escapes me, but I think something like that is enought to dispell the idea of them not doing any original research (good research, OTOH...).

sql*kitten ( 1359 ) writes:

Re:Maybe somebody can fill this in... ( Score: 2 )

I seem to remember that the only computer system ever built on trinary (base-3) logic was produced in the Soviet Union.

See this earlier thread [slashdot.org].

fm6 ( 162816 ) writes:

A bit on bytes ( Score: 2 )

I just noticed that kwertii lists 9-bit bytes as a "radically different concept", an example of what Soviet computer architects might have considered. Worth mentioning that the 8-bit byte was not always something you could take for granted. I can't think of any production machines, but I seem to recall that Knuth's specification of his famous MIX [dannyreviews.com] machine (an imaginary computer he invented for teaching purposes) doesn't require that bytes be implemented as 8-bit values. In fact, a programmer is not even supposed to assume that a byte is a string of bits!

Before IBM introduced the byte concept back in the 60s, all computers used "word-level" addressing. That meant that data path width and the addressable unit of data had to be the same thing. Made it hard to write portable software. By divorcing the addressing scheme from the data path width, IBM was able to design computers where differences in word size were a matter of efficiency, not compatibility.

There was nothing to force manufacturers to use 8-bit bytes. (Unless, of course, they were trying to rip off IBMs instruction set. A few did, but competing head-to-head with Big Blue that way usually didn't work out.) On the one hand, the standard data terminal of the time used a 7-bit character set. On the other hand, you can make a case for a 12-bit byte [colorado.edu]. But IBM used an 8-bit byte, and in those days, what IBM did tended to become a standard.

Knight of the Sad Co ( 22131 ) writes:

Re:A bit on bytes ( Score: 1 )

Bull-Honeywell's GCOS machines still use 9-bit bytes. C was designed to run on these machines (Kernighan's Programming in C [lysator.liu.se] begins ``C is a computer language available on the GCOS and UNIX operating systems...''). The size of various types is intentionally left flexible to allow for these machines.

A 36-bit word on a machine with limited address space allows pointers to individual bits.

Those who do not know their own history are doomed to assume that it was lived only by `backward' peoples?

fm6 ( 162816 ) writes:

Re:A bit on bytes ( Score: 2 )

And /etc/passwd still has a GECOS Field [nodevice.com]. Thanks for the example.

fm6 ( 162816 ) writes:

Re:A bit on bytes ( Score: 2 )

I don't know a lot about these boxes, but information on the web seems to indicate that "character oriented" means a very small word size. That would make sense -- the 1401 was a popular business machine with only 16K of RAM. I presume it had a correspondingly small word size -- like 8 bits?

But an 8-bit word and an 8-bit byte are not the same thing. With an 8-bit word you can easily manipulate individual characters, but your ability to do numerical work is extremely limited. If you need to do scientific computing, you have to go find a system with a bigger word size -- and lose the ability to deal with character-size data easily.

Byte architecture eliminates this problem by divorcing data path width ("word size") from addressible data unit("byte size").

zap42hod ( 303419 ) writes:

western tech. ( Score: 1 )

I've heard we used to read the architecture of western silicon chips slice by slice.
Also there were many IBM and other boxes bought in. Many of which were copied since there wasn't enough money to by them for all the needs.

zap42hod ( 303419 ) writes:

Re:western tech. ( Score: 1 )

s/\bby\b/buy/;
And of course I'm not saying we didn't do any original research. The engineers were really good, probably because eduaction had really high standards. That's changed unfortunately, at least here in Estonia with the adoption of international degrees.

o2b-rich ( 455759 ) writes:

Other former Warsaw Pact nations ( Score: 1 )

Not sure if anyone can expand on this, but I thought that Bulgaria was the east-European silicon valley? As mentioned already, the GDR also made some kit. I've read some material describing Russians buying fairly advanced homegrown systems from Bulgaria; it's no secret that they have a few virus authors there... so they certainly have some latent expertise. It's long-suspected that Russian coding techniques were superior to those in the West, motivated by the presence of less-powerful CPUs. Or was this a myth too?

spaceyhackerlady ( 462530 ) writes:

From a reliable source ( Score: 1 )

A colleague of mine is of Slovak descent, and tells me one of the wildest dodges in the Bad Old Days was CPUs with weird numbers of bits, like 28 bit words. It seems that it was illegal to export 32 bit CPUs to the Eastern Bloc. But anything smaller was OK.

In Wireless World in the late 1980s there was a very good series of articles on Eastern Bloc computing, including all the PDP-11 and S/360 clones that have been mentioned. Sorry, I don't have the exact citation. Check your library.

...laura

Webmoth ( 75878 ) writes:

How it is today ( Score: 2 )

Well, I don't know anything about the history of Russian/Soviet computing. However, I was over there last summer, and found a computer store which had state-of-the-art peripherals for sale, right alongside a bootleg copy of Windows 2000. In a bookstore, I found (and bought) a Russian translation of Olaf Kirch's Linux Network Administrator's Guide (aka, The NAG [oreilly.com]). The text was Russian but the examples were all in the default language of Linux, English.

The products in the computer store were selling for about the same as in America given the exchange rate at the time (except for the Win2K which was ~USD13). When you consider that the average Russian salary is USD2000-3000/yr, you aren't going to find many Russians online, at least not at home. Businesses seem to be fairly up-to-date as far as technology goes, aside from the mom-and-pop shops. Broadband internet access seems to be more myth than reality there.

Some of posts here said that they were a couple generations behind because they were just copying American technology. Appears they're catching up.

Animats ( 122034 ) writes:

Robotron ( Score: 2 )

Check out the Robotron [google.com] site, created in memory of the East German line of computers. Pictures, manuals, and screenshots. (A PacMan clone!) Z80 clones, 8086 clones, CP/M clones, etc.

raju1kabir ( 251972 ) writes:

Norsk Data in Latvia ( Score: 1 )

Not that helpful, but...

Just after the Baltics broke away, I was visiting the University of Latvia. I asked to see the computer facilities and was led to a room full of Norsk Data text-based terminals with cyrillic keyboards. The displays were able to show both cyrillic and roman characters. I do not, sadly, remember any specifics of the computer they were connected to other than that it had a lot of wires hanging everywhere.

d2ksla ( 89385 ) writes:

Re:Norsk Data in Latvia - 28 bit computers! ( Score: 1 )

Norsk Data ("Norwegian Computers") designed fairly advanced 32-bit systems in the middle of the 80's. I remember using them at my local university in Sweden. (Obviously the VAX 11/785 we had too was more exciting since it could run Hack under VMS Eunice).

Back then there was an export embargo on advanced computers to the Soviet union, which basically meant that 32-bit computers couldn't be sold there. So they cut off 4 bits and voila! had an exportable 28-bit computer (ND-505).

Maybe technically not a soviet machine, but still...

morn ( 136835 ) writes:

ICL ( Score: 1 )

I seem to remember hearing something about the ICL almost managing to become the computer supplier to the Soviet government, but this being blocked in the final stages by the British government. I can't find anything to support this anywhere, however - does anyone out there remember more of this than me?

Alex Belits ( 437 ) , Wednesday February 20, 2002 @06:28PM ( #3040511 ) Homepage

The lines were: ( Score: 3 , Informative)

"BESM"/"Elbrus" line -- originally developed. "ES" Line -- clone of IBM 360 line "Elektronika"/"SM" line -- clone of PDP-11 line, often with some creative changes (high-density floppies, graphics controlers on a second PDP-11 CPU), then some VAXen "DWK"/"UKNC" line -- same as "SM", but made as a desktop. "DWK" models 3 and 4 were built as a single unit with terminal (keyboard was separate), "UKNC" was a very nice flat box with builtin keyboard and extension connectors at the top, connected to a separate monitor. "BK-0010" -- can be described as a PDP-11 squeezed into Sinclair's case, everything was in the keyboard, with TV output, tape recorder connector, and on some models a serial port. "Elektronika-85" -- Dec Pro/350 clone. Was hated just as much as its prototype. "ES-1840","Iskra-1030" lines -- IBM PC clones, usually with some changes. Appeared in early 90's and soon were replaced by conventional PC clones. "Radio-86RK","Specialist" -- hobbyist 8080-based boxes, never were mass-produced but popular among various computer enthusiasts. "Sinclair" clones

There were some others, however I have mentioned the most popular ones.

leob ( 154345 ) writes:

BESM-6 description in English ( Score: 1 )

Is at BESM-6 Nostalgia page [mailcom.com].

hummer357 ( 545850 ) writes:

the latest... ( Score: 1 )

What about this:

[Sep 21, 2019] Larry Wall - Present Continuous, Future Perfect - OSDCIsrael Wiki

You can see that Larry Wall bought OO paradigm "hook, line and sinker" , and that was very bad, IMHO disastrous decision. There were several areas were Perl 5 could be more profitably be extended such as exceptions, coroutines and, especially, introducing types of variables. He also did not realize that Javascript prototypes based OO model has much better implementation of OO then Simula-67 model. And that Perl 5 modules do 80% of what is useful in classes (namely provide a separate namespace and the ability to share variables in this namespace between several subroutines)

Notable quotes:

"... Perl 5 had this problem with "do" loops because they weren't real loops - they were a "do" block followed by a statement modifier, and people kept wanting to use loop control it them. Well, we can fix that. "loop" now is a real loop. And it allows a modifier on it but still behaves as a real loop. And so, do goes off to have other duties, and you can write a loop that tests at the end and it is a real loop. And this is just one of many many many things that confused new Perl 5 programmers. ..."

"... We have properties which you can put on variables and onto values. These are generalizations of things that were special code in Perl 5, but now we have general mechanisms to do the same things, they're actually done using a mix-in mechanism like Ruby. ..."

"... Smart match operators is, like Damian say, equal-tilda ("=~") on steroids. Instead of just allowing a regular expression on the right side it allows basically anything, and it figures out that this wants to do a numeric comparison, this wants to do a string comparison, this wants to compare two arrays, this wants to do a lookup in the hash; this wants to call the closure on the right passing in the left argument, and it will tell if you if $x can quack. Now that looks a little strange because you can just say "$x.can('quack')". Why would you do it this way? Well, you'll see. ..."

Feb 26, 2006 | perl.org.il

Irrationalities in Other Languages (5:54)

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

"We've got to start over from scratch" - Well, that's almost any academic language you find.

"English phrases" - We'll that's Cobol. You know, cargo cult English. ( laughter )

"Text processing doesn't matter much" - Fortran.

"Simple languages produce simple solutions" - C.

"If I wanted it fast, I'd write it in C" - That's almost a direct quote from the original awk page.

"I thought of a way to do it so it must be right" - That's obviously PHP. ( laughter and applause )

"You can build anything with NAND gates" - Any language designed by an electrical engineer. ( laughter )

"This is a very high level language, who cares about bits?" - The entire scope of fourth generation languages fell into this... problem.

"Users care about elegance" - A lot of languages from Europe tend to fall into this. You know, Eiffel.

"The specification is good enough" - Ada.

"Abstraction equals usability" - Scheme. Things like that.

"The common kernel should be as small as possible" - Forth.

"Let's make this easy for the computer" - Lisp. ( laughter )

"Most programs are designed top-down" - Pascal. ( laughter )

"Everything is a vector" - APL.

"Everything is an object" - Smalltalk and its children. (whispered:) Ruby. ( laughter )

"Everything is a hypothesis" - Prolog. ( laughter )

"Everything is a function" - Haskell. ( laughter )

"Programmers should never have been given free will" - Obviously, Python. ( laughter )

So my psychological conjecture is that normal people, if they perceive that a computer language is forcing them to learn theory, they won't like it. In other words, hide the fancy stuff. It can be there, just hide it. Fan Mail (14:42)

Q: "Dear Larry, I love Perl. It has saved my company, my crew, my sanity and my marriage. After Perl I can't imagine going back to any other language. I dream in Perl, I tell everyone else about Perl. How can you improve on perfection? Signed, Happy in Haifa."

A: "Dear Happy,

You need to recognize that Perl can be good in some dimensions and not so good in other dimensions. You also need to recognize that there will be some pain in climbing over or tunneling through the barrier to the true minimum."

Now Perl 5 has a few false minima. Syntax, semantics, pragmatics, ( laughter ), discourse structure, implementation, documentation, culture... Other than that Perl 5 is not too bad.

Q: "Dear Larry,

You have often talked about the waterbed theory of linguistic complexity, and beauty times brains equals a constant. Isn't it true that improving Perl in some areas will automatically make it worse in other areas? Signed, Terrified in Tel-Aviv."

A: "Dear Terrified,

...

No." ( laughter )

You see, you can make some things so they aren't any worse. For instance, we changed all the sigils to be more consistent, and they're just the same length, they're just different. And you can make some things much better. Instead of having to write all this gobbledygook to dereference references in Perl 5 you can just do it straight left to right in Perl 6. Or there's even more shortcuts, so multidimensional arrays and constant hash subscripts get their own notation, so it's even clearer, at least once you've learned it. Again, we're optimizing for expressiveness, not necessarily learnability.

Q: "Dear Larry,

I've heard a disturbing rumor that Perl 6 is turning into Java, or Python, or (whispered:) Ruby, or something. What's the point of using Perl if it's just another object-oriented language? Why are we changing the arrow operator to the dot operator? Signed, Nervous in Netanya."

A: "Dear Nervous,

First of all, we can do object orientation better without making other things worse. As I said. Now, we're changing from arrow to dot, because ... because ... Well, just 'cuz I said so!"

You know, actually, we do have some good reasons - it's shorter, it's the industry standard, I wanted the arrow for something else, and I wanted the dot as a secondary sigil. Now we can have it for attributes that have accessors. I also wanted the unary dot for topical type calls, with an assumed object on the left and finally, because I said so. Darn it.

... ... ...

No arbitrary limits round two : Perl started off with the idea that strings should grow infinitely, if you have memory. Just let's get rid of those arbitrary limits that plagued Unix utilities in the early years. Perl 6 is taking this in a number of different dimensions than just how long your strings are. No arbitrary limits - you ought to be able to program very abstractly, you ought to be able to program very concretely - that's just one dimension.

... .. ...

Perl 5 is just all full of these strange gobbledygooky variables which we all know and love - and hate. So the error variables are now unified into a single error variable. These variables have been deprecated forever, they're gone! These weird things that just drive syntax highlighters nuts ( laughter ) now actually have more regular names. The star there, $*GID, that's what we call a secondary sigil, what that just says is this is in the global namespace. So we know that that's a global variable for the entire process. Similarly for uids.

... ... ...

Perl 5 had this problem with "do" loops because they weren't real loops - they were a "do" block followed by a statement modifier, and people kept wanting to use loop control it them. Well, we can fix that. "loop" now is a real loop. And it allows a modifier on it but still behaves as a real loop. And so, do goes off to have other duties, and you can write a loop that tests at the end and it is a real loop. And this is just one of many many many things that confused new Perl 5 programmers.

... ... ...

Perl 5, another place where it was too orthogonal - we defined parameter passing to just come in as an array. You know arrays, subroutines - they're just orthogonal. You just happen to have one called @_, which your parameters come in, and it was wonderfully orthogonal, and people built all sorts of stuff on top of it, and it's another place where we are changing.

... .. ...

Likewise, if you turn them inside out - the french quotes - you can use the regular angle brackets, and yes, we did change here-docs so it does not conflict, then that's the equivalent of "qw". This qw interpolates, with single-angles it does not interpolate - that is the exact "qw".

We have properties which you can put on variables and onto values. These are generalizations of things that were special code in Perl 5, but now we have general mechanisms to do the same things, they're actually done using a mix-in mechanism like Ruby.

Smart match operators is, like Damian say, equal-tilda ("=~") on steroids. Instead of just allowing a regular expression on the right side it allows basically anything, and it figures out that this wants to do a numeric comparison, this wants to do a string comparison, this wants to compare two arrays, this wants to do a lookup in the hash; this wants to call the closure on the right passing in the left argument, and it will tell if you if $x can quack. Now that looks a little strange because you can just say "$x.can('quack')". Why would you do it this way? Well, you'll see.

... ... ..

There's a lot of cruft that we inherited from the UNIX culture and we added more cruft, and we're cleaning it up. So in Perl 5 we made the mistake of interpreting regular expressions as strings, which means we had to do weird things like back-references are \1 on the left, but they're $1 on the right, even though it means the same thing. In Perl 6, because it's just a language, (an embedded language) $1 is the back-reference. It does not automatically interpolate this $1 from what it was before. You can also get it translated to Euros I guess.

[Sep 21, 2019] Dr. Dobb's Journal February 1998 A Conversation with Larry Wall

Perl is unique complex non-orthogonal language and due to this it has unique level of expressiveness.

Also the complexity of Perl to a large extent reflect the complexity of Perl environment (which is Unix environment at the beginning, but now also Windows environment with its quirks)

Notable quotes:

"... On a syntactic level, in the particular case of Perl, I placed variable names in a separate namespace from reserved words. That's one of the reasons there are funny characters on the front of variable names -- dollar signs and so forth. That allowed me to add new reserved words without breaking old programs. ..."

"... A script is something that is easy to tweak, and a program is something that is locked in. There are all sorts of metaphorical tie-ins that tend to make programs static and scripts dynamic, but of course, it's a continuum. You can write Perl programs, and you can write C scripts. People do talk more about Perl programs than C scripts. Maybe that just means Perl is more versatile. ..."

"... A good language actually gives you a range, a wide dynamic range, of your level of discipline. We're starting to move in that direction with Perl. The initial Perl was lackadaisical about requiring things to be defined or declared or what have you. Perl 5 has some declarations that you can use if you want to increase your level of discipline. But it's optional. So you can say "use strict," or you can turn on warnings, or you can do various sorts of declarations. ..."

"... But Perl was an experiment in trying to come up with not a large language -- not as large as English -- but a medium-sized language, and to try to see if, by adding certain kinds of complexity from natural language, the expressiveness of the language grew faster than the pain of using it. And, by and large, I think that experiment has been successful. ..."

"... If you used the regular expression in a list context, it will pass back a list of the various subexpressions that it matched. A different computer language may add regular expressions, even have a module that's called Perl 5 regular expressions, but it won't be integrated into the language. You'll have to jump through an extra hoop, take that right angle turn, in order to say, "Okay, well here, now apply the regular expression, now let's pull the things out of the regular expression," rather than being able to use the thing in a particular context and have it do something meaningful. ..."

"... A language is not a set of syntax rules. It is not just a set of semantics. It's the entire culture surrounding the language itself. So part of the cultural context in which you analyze a language includes all the personalities and people involved -- how everybody sees the language, how they propagate the language to other people, how it gets taught, the attitudes of people who are helping each other learn the language -- all of this goes into the pot of context. ..."

"... In the beginning, I just tried to help everybody. Particularly being on USENET. You know, there are even some sneaky things in there -- like looking for people's Perl questions in many different newsgroups. For a long time, I resisted creating a newsgroup for Perl, specifically because I did not want it to be ghettoized. You know, if someone can say, "Oh, this is a discussion about Perl, take it over to the Perl newsgroup," then they shut off the discussion in the shell newsgroup. If there are only the shell newsgroups, and someone says, "Oh, by the way, in Perl, you can solve it like this," that's free advertising. So, it's fuzzy. We had proposed Perl as a newsgroup probably a year or two before we actually created it. It eventually came to the point where the time was right for it, and we did that. ..."

"... For most web applications, Perl is severely underutilized. Your typical CGI script says print, print, print, print, print, print, print. But in a sense, it's the dynamic range of Perl that allows for that. You don't have to say a whole lot to write a simple Perl script, whereas your minimal Java program is, you know, eight or ten lines long anyway. Many of the features that made it competitive in the UNIX space will make it competitive in other spaces. ..."

"... Over the years, much of the work of making Perl work for people has been in designing ways for people to come to Perl. I actually delayed the first version of Perl for a couple of months until I had a sed-to-Perl and an awk-to-Perl translator. One of the benefits of borrowing features from various other languages is that those subsets of Perl that use those features are familiar to people coming from that other culture. What would be best, in my book, is if someone had a way of saying, "Well, I've got this thing in Visual Basic. Now, can I just rewrite some of these things in Perl?" ..."

Feb 28, 1998 | www.ddj.com

... ... ...

The creator of Perl talks about language design and Perl. By Eugene Eric Kim

DDJ : Is Perl 5.005 what you envisioned Perl to be when you set out to do it?

LW: That assumes that I'm smart enough to envision something as complicated as Perl. I knew that Perl would be good at some things, and would be good at more things as time went on. So, in a sense, I'm sort of blessed with natural stupidity -- as opposed to artificial intelligence -- in the sense that I know what my intellectual limits are.

I'm not one of these people who can sit down and design an entire system from scratch and figure out how everything relates to everything else, so I knew from the start that I had to take the bear-of-very-little-brain approach, and design the thing to evolve. But that fit in with my background in linguistics, because natural languages evolve over time.

You can apply biological metaphors to languages. They move into niches, and as new needs arise, languages change over time. It's actually a practical way to design a computer language. Not all computer programs can be designed that way, but I think more can be designed that way than have been. A lot of the majestic failures that have occurred in computer science have been because people thought they could design the whole thing in advance.

DDJ : How do you design a language to evolve?

LW: There are several aspects to that, depending on whether you are talking about syntax or semantics. On a syntactic level, in the particular case of Perl, I placed variable names in a separate namespace from reserved words. That's one of the reasons there are funny characters on the front of variable names -- dollar signs and so forth. That allowed me to add new reserved words without breaking old programs.

DDJ : What is a scripting language? Does Perl fall into the category of a scripting language?

LW: Well, being a linguist, I tend to go back to the etymological meanings of "script" and "program," though, of course, that's fallacious in terms of what they mean nowadays. A script is what you hand to the actors, and a program is what you hand to the audience. Now hopefully, the program is already locked in by the time you hand that out, whereas the script is something you can tinker with. I think of phrases like "following the script," or "breaking from the script." The notion that you can evolve your script ties into the notion of rapid prototyping.

A script is something that is easy to tweak, and a program is something that is locked in. There are all sorts of metaphorical tie-ins that tend to make programs static and scripts dynamic, but of course, it's a continuum. You can write Perl programs, and you can write C scripts. People do talk more about Perl programs than C scripts. Maybe that just means Perl is more versatile.

... ... ...

DDJ : Would that be a better distinction than interpreted versus compiled -- run-time versus compile-time binding?

LW: It's a more useful distinction in many ways because, with late-binding languages like Perl or Java, you cannot make up your mind about what the real meaning of it is until the last moment. But there are different definitions of what the last moment is. Computer scientists would say there are really different "latenesses" of binding.

A good language actually gives you a range, a wide dynamic range, of your level of discipline. We're starting to move in that direction with Perl. The initial Perl was lackadaisical about requiring things to be defined or declared or what have you. Perl 5 has some declarations that you can use if you want to increase your level of discipline. But it's optional. So you can say "use strict," or you can turn on warnings, or you can do various sorts of declarations.

DDJ : Would it be accurate to say that Perl doesn't enforce good design?

LW: No, it does not. It tries to give you some tools to help if you want to do that, but I'm a firm believer that a language -- whether it's a natural language or a computer language -- ought to be an amoral artistic medium.

You can write pretty poems or you can write ugly poems, but that doesn't say whether English is pretty or ugly. So, while I kind of like to see beautiful computer programs, I don't think the chief virtue of a language is beauty. That's like asking an artist whether they use beautiful paints and a beautiful canvas and a beautiful palette. A language should be a medium of expression, which does not restrict your feeling unless you ask it to.

DDJ : Where does the beauty of a program lie? In the underlying algorithms, in the syntax of the description?

LW: Well, there are many different definitions of artistic beauty. It can be argued that it's symmetry, which in a computer language might be considered orthogonality. It's also been argued that broken symmetry is what is considered most beautiful and most artistic and diverse. Symmetry breaking is the root of our whole universe according to physicists, so if God is an artist, then maybe that's his definition of what beauty is.

This actually ties back in with the built-to-evolve concept on the semantic level. A lot of computer languages were defined to be naturally orthogonal, or at least the computer scientists who designed them were giving lip service to orthogonality. And that's all very well if you're trying to define a position in a space. But that's not how people think. It's not how natural languages work. Natural languages are not orthogonal, they're diagonal. They give you hypotenuses.

Suppose you're flying from California to Quebec. You don't fly due east, and take a left turn over Nashville, and then go due north. You fly straight, more or less, from here to there. And it's a network. And it's actually sort of a fractal network, where your big link is straight, and you have little "fractally" things at the end for your taxi and bicycle and whatever the mode of transport you use. Languages work the same way. And they're designed to get you most of the way here, and then have ways of refining the additional shades of meaning.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine campus, they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and built the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is that kind of a language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass. Those trails that were there before were the previous computer languages that Perl has borrowed ideas from. And Perl has unashamedly borrowed ideas from many, many different languages. Those paths can go diagonally. We want shortcuts. Sometimes we want to be able to do the orthogonal thing, so Perl generally allows the orthogonal approach also. But it also allows a certain number of shortcuts, and being able to insert those shortcuts is part of that evolutionary thing.

I don't want to claim that this is the only way to design a computer language, or that everyone is going to actually enjoy a computer language that is designed in this way. Obviously, some people speak other languages. But Perl was an experiment in trying to come up with not a large language -- not as large as English -- but a medium-sized language, and to try to see if, by adding certain kinds of complexity from natural language, the expressiveness of the language grew faster than the pain of using it. And, by and large, I think that experiment has been successful.

DDJ : Give an example of one of the things you think is expressive about Perl that you wouldn't find in other languages.

LW: The fact that regular-expression parsing and the use of regular expressions is built right into the language. If you used the regular expression in a list context, it will pass back a list of the various subexpressions that it matched. A different computer language may add regular expressions, even have a module that's called Perl 5 regular expressions, but it won't be integrated into the language. You'll have to jump through an extra hoop, take that right angle turn, in order to say, "Okay, well here, now apply the regular expression, now let's pull the things out of the regular expression," rather than being able to use the thing in a particular context and have it do something meaningful.

The school of linguistics I happened to come up through is called tagmemics, and it makes a big deal about context. In a real language -- this is a tagmemic idea -- you can distinguish between what the conventional meaning of the "thing" is and how it's being used. You think of "dog" primarily as a noun, but you can use it as a verb. That's the prototypical example, but the "thing" applies at many different levels. You think of a sentence as a sentence. Transformational grammar was built on the notion of analyzing a sentence. And they had all their cute rules, and they eventually ended up throwing most of them back out again.

But in the tagmemic view, you can take a sentence as a unit and use it differently. You can say a sentence like, "I don't like your I-can-use-anything-like-a-sentence attitude." There, I've used the sentence as an adjective. The sentence isn't an adjective if you analyze it, any way you want to analyze it. But this is the way people think. If there's a way to make sense of something in a particular context, they'll do so. And Perl is just trying to make those things make sense. There's the basic distinction in Perl between singular and plural context -- call it list context and scalar context, if you will. But you can use a particular construct in a singular context that has one meaning that sort of makes sense using the list context, and it may have a different meaning that makes sense in the plural context.

That is where the expressiveness comes from. In English, you read essays by people who say, "Well, how does this metaphor thing work?" Owen Barfield talks about this. You say one thing and mean another. That's how metaphors arise. Or you take two things and jam them together. I think it was Owen Barfield, or maybe it was C.S. Lewis, who talked about "a piercing sweetness." And we know what "piercing" is, and we know what "sweetness" is, but you put those two together, and you've created a new meaning. And that's how languages ought to work.

DDJ : Is a more expressive language more difficult to learn?

LW: Yes. It was a conscious tradeoff at the beginning of Perl that it would be more difficult to master the whole language. However, taking another clue from a natural language, we do not require 5-year olds to speak with the same diction as 50-year olds. It is okay for you to use the subset of a language that you are comfortable with, and to learn as you go. This is not true of so many computer-science languages. If you program C++ in a subset that corresponds to C, you get laughed out of the office.

There's a whole subject that we haven't touched here. A language is not a set of syntax rules. It is not just a set of semantics. It's the entire culture surrounding the language itself. So part of the cultural context in which you analyze a language includes all the personalities and people involved -- how everybody sees the language, how they propagate the language to other people, how it gets taught, the attitudes of people who are helping each other learn the language -- all of this goes into the pot of context.

Because I had already put out other freeware projects (rn and patch), I realized before I ever wrote Perl that a great deal of the value of those things was from collaboration. Many of the really good ideas in rn and Perl came from other people.

I think that Perl is in its adolescence right now. There are places where it is grown up, and places where it's still throwing tantrums. I have a couple of teenagers, and the thing you notice about teenagers is that they're always plus or minus ten years from their real age. So if you've got a 15-year old, they're either acting 25 or they're acting 5. Sometimes simultaneously! And Perl is a little that way, but that's okay.

DDJ : What part of Perl isn't quite grown up?

LW: Well, I think that the part of Perl, which has not been realistic up until now has been on the order of how you enable people in certain business situations to actually use it properly. There are a lot of people who cannot use freeware because it is, you know, schlocky. Their bosses won't let them, their government won't let them, or they think their government won't let them. There are a lot of people who, unknown to their bosses or their government, are using Perl.

DDJ : So these aren't technical issues.

LW: I suppose it depends on how you define technology. Some of it is perceptions, some of it is business models, and things like that. I'm trying to generate a new symbiosis between the commercial and the freeware interests. I think there's an artificial dividing line between those groups and that they could be more collaborative.

As a linguist, the generation of a linguistic culture is a technical issue. So, these adjustments we might make in people's attitudes toward commercial operations or in how Perl is being supported, distributed, advertised, and marketed -- not in terms of trying to make bucks, but just how we propagate the culture -- these are technical ideas in the psychological and the linguistic sense. They are, of course, not technical in the computer-science sense. But I think that's where Perl has really excelled -- its growth has not been driven solely by technical merits.

DDJ : What are the things that you do when you set out to create a culture around the software that you write?

LW: In the beginning, I just tried to help everybody. Particularly being on USENET. You know, there are even some sneaky things in there -- like looking for people's Perl questions in many different newsgroups. For a long time, I resisted creating a newsgroup for Perl, specifically because I did not want it to be ghettoized. You know, if someone can say, "Oh, this is a discussion about Perl, take it over to the Perl newsgroup," then they shut off the discussion in the shell newsgroup. If there are only the shell newsgroups, and someone says, "Oh, by the way, in Perl, you can solve it like this," that's free advertising. So, it's fuzzy. We had proposed Perl as a newsgroup probably a year or two before we actually created it. It eventually came to the point where the time was right for it, and we did that.

DDJ : Perl has really been pigeonholed as a language of the Web. One result is that people mistakenly try to compare Perl to Java. Why do you think people make the comparison in the first place? Is there anything to compare?

LW: Well, people always compare everything.

DDJ : Do you agree that Perl has been pigeonholed?

LW: Yes, but I'm not sure that it bothers me. Before it was pigeonholed as a web language, it was pigeonholed as a system-administration language, and I think that -- this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about marketing Perl -- if the abilities are there to do a particular job, there will be somebody there to apply it, generally speaking. So I'm not too worried about Perl moving into new ecological niches, as long as it has the capability of surviving in there.

Perl is actually a scrappy language for surviving in a particular ecological niche. (Can you tell I like biological metaphors?) You've got to understand that it first went up against C and against shell, both of which were much loved in the UNIX community, and it succeeded against them. So that early competition actually makes it quite a fit competitor in many other realms, too.

For most web applications, Perl is severely underutilized. Your typical CGI script says print, print, print, print, print, print, print. But in a sense, it's the dynamic range of Perl that allows for that. You don't have to say a whole lot to write a simple Perl script, whereas your minimal Java program is, you know, eight or ten lines long anyway. Many of the features that made it competitive in the UNIX space will make it competitive in other spaces.

Now, there are things that Perl can't do. One of the things that you can't do with Perl right now is compile it down to Java bytecode. And if that, in the long run, becomes a large ecological niche (and this is not yet a sure thing), then that is a capability I want to be certain that Perl has.

DDJ : There's been a movement to merge the two development paths between the ActiveWare Perl for Windows and the main distribution of Perl. You were talking about ecological niches earlier, and how Perl started off as a text-processing language. The scripting languages that are dominant on the Microsoft platforms -- like VB -- tend to be more visual than textual. Given Perl's UNIX origins -- awk, sed, and C, for that matter -- do you think that Perl, as it currently stands, has the tools to fit into a Windows niche?

LW: Yes and no. It depends on your problem domain and who's trying to solve the problem. There are problems that only need a textual solution or don't need a visual solution. Automation things of certain sorts don't need to interact with the desktop, so for those sorts of things -- and for the programmers who aren't really all that interested in visual programming -- it's already good for that. And people are already using it for that. Certainly, there is a group of people who would be enabled to use Perl if it had more of a visual interface, and one of the things we're talking about doing for the O'Reilly NT Perl Resource Kit is some sort of a visual interface.

A lot of what Windows is designed to do is to get mere mortals from 0 to 60, and there are some people who want to get from 60 to 100. We are not really interested in being in Microsoft's crosshairs. We're not actually interested in competing head-to-head with Visual Basic, and to the extent that we do compete with them, it's going to be kind of subtle. There has to be some way to get people from the slow lane to the fast lane. It's one thing to give them a way to get from 60 to 100, but if they have to spin out to get from the slow lane to the fast lane, then that's not going to work either.

Over the years, much of the work of making Perl work for people has been in designing ways for people to come to Perl. I actually delayed the first version of Perl for a couple of months until I had a sed-to-Perl and an awk-to-Perl translator. One of the benefits of borrowing features from various other languages is that those subsets of Perl that use those features are familiar to people coming from that other culture. What would be best, in my book, is if someone had a way of saying, "Well, I've got this thing in Visual Basic. Now, can I just rewrite some of these things in Perl?"

We're already doing this with Java. On our UNIX Perl Resource Kit, I've got a hybrid language called "jpl" -- that's partly a pun on my old alma mater, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and partly for Java, Perl...Lingo, there we go! That's good. "Java Perl Lingo." You've heard it first here! jpl lets you take a Java program and magically turn one of the methods into a chunk of Perl right there inline. It turns Perl code into a native method, and automates the linkage so that when you pull in the Java code, it also pulls in the Perl code, and the interpreter, and everything else. It's actually calling out from Java's Virtual Machine into Perl's virtual machine. And we can call in the other direction, too. You can embed Java in Perl, except that there's a bug in JDK having to do with threads that prevents us from doing any I/O. But that's Java's problem.

It's a way of letting somebody evolve from a purely Java solution into, at least partly, a Perl solution. It's important not only to make Perl evolve, but to make it so that people can evolve their own programs. It's how I program, and I think a lot of people program that way. Most of us are too stupid to know what we want at the beginning.

DDJ : Is there hope down the line to present Perl to a standardization body?

LW: Well, I have said in jest that people will be free to standardize Perl when I'm dead. There may come a time when that is the right thing to do, but it doesn't seem appropriate yet.

DDJ : When would that time be?

LW: Oh, maybe when the federal government declares that we can't export Perl unless it's standardized or something.

DDJ : Only when you're forced to, basically.

LW: Yeah. To me, once things get to a standards body, it's not very interesting anymore. The most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. I remember walking into some BOF that USENIX held six or seven years ago, and John Quarterman was running it, and he saw me sneak in, sit in the back corner, and he said, "Oh, here comes Larry Wall! He's a standards committee all of his own!"

A great deal of the success of Perl so far has been based on some of my own idiosyncrasies. And I recognize that they are idiosyncrasies, and I try to let people argue me out of them whenever appropriate. But there are still ways of looking at things that I seem to do differently than anybody else. It may well be that perl5-porters will one day degenerate into a standards committee. So far, I have not abused my authority to the point that people have written me off, and so I am still allowed to exercise a certain amount of absolute power over the Perl core.

I just think headless standards committees tend to reduce everything to mush. There is a conservatism that committees have that individuals don't, and there are times when you want to have that conservatism and times you don't. I try to exercise my authority where we don't want that conservatism. And I try not to exercise it at other times.

DDJ : How did you get involved in computer science? You're a linguist by background?

LW: Because I talk to computer scientists more than I talk to linguists, I wear the linguistics mantle more than I wear the computer-science mantle, but they actually came along in parallel, and I'm probably a 50/50 hybrid. You know, basically, I'm no good at either linguistics or computer science.

DDJ : So you took computer-science courses in college?

LW: In college, yeah. In college, I had various majors, but what I eventually graduated in -- I'm one of those people that packed four years into eight -- what I eventually graduated in was a self-constructed major, and it was Natural and Artificial Languages, which seems positively prescient considering where I ended up.

DDJ : When did you join O'Reilly as a salaried employee? And how did that come about?

LW: A year-and-a-half ago. It was partly because my previous job was kind of winding down.

DDJ : What was your previous job?

LW: I was working for Seagate Software. They were shutting down that branch of operations there. So, I was just starting to look around a little bit, and Tim noticed me looking around and said, "Well, you know, I've wanted to hire you for a long time," so we talked. And Gina Blaber (O'Reilly's software director) and I met. So, they more or less offered to pay me to mess around with Perl.

So it's sort of my dream job. I get to work from home, and if I feel like taking a nap in the afternoon, I can take a nap in the afternoon and work all night.

DDJ : Do you have any final comments, or tips for aspiring programmers? Or aspiring Perl programmers?

LW: Assume that your first idea is wrong, and try to think through the various options. I think that the biggest mistake people make is latching onto the first idea that comes to them and trying to do that. It really comes to a thing that my folks taught me about money. Don't buy something unless you've wanted it three times. Similarly, don't throw in a feature when you first think of it. Think if there's a way to generalize it, think if it should be generalized. Sometimes you can generalize things too much. I think like the things in Scheme were generalized too much. There is a level of abstraction beyond which people don't want to go. Take a good look at what you want to do, and try to come up with the long-term lazy way, not the short-term lazy way.

[Sep 21, 2019] Half my life with Perl by Randal L. Schwartz

Sep 21, 2019 | www.socallinuxexpo.org

... ... ...

Derailed to an unexpectedly good outcome

• Contract coding ($30/hr in 1977 -- about $120/hr today) at age 15

• Out of high school at age 16

• Got a summer temp job at Tektronix (largest employer in state)

  - ... as a tech writer

• Learned writing on the job

  - Organization (book and company) from Lyle Settle

  - Tech editing from Jack Falk

• Stayed in that slot for four years

  - Migrated from temp to salaried position quickly (youngest salaried, highest paid minor)

• Then a year as a programmer

  - Realized not really different... expressing an art into a medium. Oh, and meetings.

---

Larry Wall

• rn
  • - Started on Usenet in 1981
  • - Used that as my primary news reader for many years
  • - Until Tek sysadmins "nice'd" it
  • - Been reading Usenet with GNU Emacs (GNEWS, then GNUS) since then
  • - Really enjoyed the very readable manpage
• patch
• perl

---

Perl 1

• § Released in 1987
• § Downloaded, compiled, played with a bit
• - Interesting to do, since it was quite a number of separate postings
• - Might have been the first “sharchive”
• § Looked like a “super Awk” to me
• § And I was already pretty good at Awk

---

Perl 2

• Released in 1988
• A lot more complete
• My go-to language for new tools
• Also started rewriting many of my shell scripts
  • - And my GNU Emacs Lisp utilities

---

Trolling Usenet

• Spread the perl word in comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.shell
• Answered as many questions as I could in Perl
• Inevitably...

  - "Would someone be kind enough to provide me with a script (sed? awk? no perl please) that I could run on several hundred files?"

• So I'd show

  - The shell solution

  - The much shorter (and likely faster) Perl solution

• Recruited a lot of early Perl adopters this way

... ... ...

---

Birth of a camel

• Perl2 manpage is 20 pages; Perl3 is 60 pages
• "We need more documentation"
• Larry says "ok, when I get some spare time"
• I chimed in "I can help, being tech-writer and also on alpha team"
• O'Reilly IT person ("ambar") saw that...

  - "If you're gonna write something, we might as well publish it"

• Wrote Larry and suggested "Pe(a)rls of Wisdom" (or was it the other way around?)

  - Thank goodness he pushed back on that :)

• We met face-to-face (Carrows in Salem), and decided we could work together

  - Sonny Malone: I don't know the first thing about being a partner

  Danny McGuire: It's easy. We share the responsibilities and we argue a lot. It's like being

  married... without the good part

  -- Xanadu

---

Writing the camel

• Written in TROFF, with which I was quite experienced (production at Tek 8 years earlier)

• The "in-house" O'Reilly TROFF macros looked hauntingly familiar

  - ... because I had written them!

  - Steve Talbott took my Tek macros to Tim O'Reilly, and used on nearly every book of theirs

• No change control -- book written entirely by email. UUCP-based email.

• I created the book design based on what I had learned from Lyle

  - And suggested the humorous index entries

• I also invented "Perl = the language, perl = the interpreter"

• Six months of nights and weekends

• Larry decided the book would describe "Perl 4" (by bumping 3.044 to 4.000 at release)

  - In the preface I said "but it might be 4.003 because of changes after we submit the book"

  - I was right. :)

---

Release the camel!

• Larry and I met for the second time at the Usenix conference in Dallas (early 1991)

  - Shared a room at the hotel ("Do you know a 'Larry Wall'?")

• Signed many dozens (hundreds?) of copies

  - Larry started using his special Camel stamp

• Runaway best seller

  - Tim had to rethink high volume press

  - We ran through a typical year's print in just the first two months

• People wrote me thanking me for "finally being able to use Perl officially"

  - Darn PHBs not trusting things without printed docs

---

[Sep 21, 2019] The list of programming languages by dates

Sep 21, 2019 | www.scriptol.com

1948

• Plankalkül. First high-level language. The date is that of the first public description.

1949

• Short Code.

1951

• A-0 (starting work for Math-Matic).

1952

• Autocode.

1955

• FLOW-MATIC. By Grace Hopper, first language with words.
  

1956

• IPL.

1957

• Fortran.
• Math-Matic.

1958

• Fortran II.
• Lisp, work begins by John Mc Carthy at MIT..
• ALGOL 58 also called IAL (International Algorithmic Language). Original specification by a comitee of European and American computer scientists.
• IAL.
• UNCOL. First intermediate language for a virtual machine.

1959

• Lisp 1.5.
• COBOL, work begins.

1960

• ALGOL 60. Revision of ALGOL 58, and first implementation.
• APL, work begins.
• COBOL defined.
• First JIT functions used for Lisp.

1962

• APL implemented.
• Fortran IV appears.
• SNOBOL, work begins.
• Simula.

1963

• ALGOL 60 is revised.
• CPL. Universities of Cambridge and of London. Extended version of Algol 60. Predecessor of BCPL.
• PL/1, work begins.
• Joss.

1964

• Apl-360 is implemented.
• Basic.
• PL/1.
• COWSEL. Renamed POP-1 in 1966, sort of Lisp without parenthesis.
• MATHLAB. Became popular since MATHLAB 68.
• ... ... ...

[Sep 07, 2019] Knuth: Early on in the TeX project I also had to do programming of a completely different type on Zilog CPU which was at the heart of lazer printer that I used

Sep 07, 2019 | archive.computerhistory.org

Knuth: Yeah. That's absolutely true. I've got to get another thought out of my mind though. That is, early on in the TeX project I also had to do programming of a completely different type. I told you last week that this was my first real exercise in structured programming, which was one of Dijkstra's huge... That's one of the few breakthroughs in the history of computer science, in a way. He was actually responsible for maybe two of the ten that I know.

So I'm doing structured programming as I'm writing TeX. I'm trying to do it right, the way I should've been writing programs in the 60s. Then I also got this typesetting machine, which had, inside of it, a tiny 8080 chip or something. I'm not sure exactly. It was a Zilog, or some very early Intel chip. Way before the 386s. A little computer with 8-bit registers and a small number of things it could do. I had to write my own assembly language for this, because the existing software for writing programs for this little micro thing were so bad. I had to write actually thousands of lines of code for this, in order to control the typesetting. Inside the machine I had to control a stepper motor, and I had to accelerate it.

Every so often I had to give another [command] saying, "Okay, now take a step," and then continue downloading a font from the mainframe.

I had six levels of interrupts in this program. I remember talking to you at this time, saying, "Ed, I'm programming in assembly language for an 8-bit computer," and you said "Yeah, you've been doing the same thing and it's fun again."

You know, you'll remember. We'll undoubtedly talk more about that when I have my turn interviewing you in a week or so. This is another aspect of programming: that you also feel that you're in control and that there's not a black box separating you. It's not only the power, but it's the knowledge of what's going on; that nobody's hiding something. It's also this aspect of jumping levels of abstraction. In my opinion, the thing that computer scientists are best at is seeing things at many levels of detail: high level, intermediate levels, and lowest levels. I know if I'm adding 1 to a certain number, that this is getting me towards some big goal at the top. People enjoy most the things that they're good at. Here's a case where if you're working on a machine that has only this 8-bit capability, but in order to do this you have to go through levels, of not only that machine, but also to the next level up of the assembler, and then you have a simulator in which you can help debug your programs, and you have higher level languages that go through, and then you have the typesetting at the top. There are these six or seven levels all present at the same time. A computer scientist is in heaven in a situation like this.

Feigenbaum: Don, to get back, I want to ask you about that as part of the next question. You went back into programming in a really serious way. It took you, as I said before, ten years, not one year, and you didn't quit. As soon as you mastered one part of it, you went into Metafont, which is another big deal. To what extent were you doing that because you needed to, what I might call expose yourself to, or upgrade your skills in, the art that had emerged over the decade-and-a-half since you had done RUNCIBLE? And to what extent did you do it just because you were driven to be a programmer? You loved programming.

Knuth: Yeah. I think your hypothesis is good. It didn't occur to me at the time that I just had to program in order to be a happy man. Certainly I didn't find my other roles distasteful, except for fundraising. I enjoyed every aspect of being a professor except dealing with proposals, which I did my share of, but that was a necessary evil sort of in my own thinking, I guess. But the fact that now I'm still compelled to I wake up in the morning with an idea, and it makes my day to think of adding a couple of lines to my program. Gives me a real high. It must be the way poets feel, or musicians and so on, and other people, painters, whatever. Programming does that for me. It's certainly true. But the fact that I had to put so much time in it was not totally that, I'm sure, because it became a responsibility. It wasn't just for Phyllis and me, as it turned out. I started working on it at the AI lab, and people were looking at the output coming out of the machine and they would say, "Hey, Don, how did you do that?" Guy Steele was visiting from MIT that summer and he said, "Don, I want to port this to take it to MIT." I didn't have two users.

First I had 10, and then I had 100, and then I had 1000. Every time it went to another order of magnitude I had to change the system, because it would almost match their needs but then they would have very good suggestions as to something it wasn't covering. Then when it went to 10,000 and when it went to 100,000, the last stage was 10 years later when I made it friendly for the other alphabets of the world, where people have accented letters and Russian letters. <p>I had started out with only 7-bit codes. I had so many international users by that time, I saw that was a fundamental error. I started out with the idea that nobody would ever want to use a keyboard that could generate more than about 90 characters. It was going to be too complicated. But I was wrong. So it [TeX] was a burden as well, in the sense that I wanted to do a responsible job.

I had actually consciously planned an end-game that would take me four years to finish, and [then] not continue maintaining it and adding on, so that I could have something where I could say, "And now it's done and it's never going to change." I believe this is one aspect of software that, not for every system, but for TeX, it was vital that it became something that wouldn't be a moving target after while.

Feigenbaum: The books on TeX were a period. That is, you put a period down and you said, "This is it."

[Sep 07, 2019] As soon as you stop writing code on a regular basis you stop being a programmer. You lose you qualification very quickly. That's a typical tragedy of talented programmers who became mediocre managers or, worse, theoretical computer scientists

Programming skills are somewhat similar to the skills of people who play violin or piano. As soon a you stop playing violin or piano still start to evaporate. First slowly, then quicker. In two yours you probably will lose 80%.

Notable quotes:

"... I happened to look the other day. I wrote 35 programs in January, and 28 or 29 programs in February. These are small programs, but I have a compulsion. I love to write programs and put things into it. ..."

Sep 07, 2019 | archive.computerhistory.org

Dijkstra said he was proud to be a programmer. Unfortunately he changed his attitude completely, and I think he wrote his last computer program in the 1980s. At this conference I went to in 1967 about simulation language, Chris Strachey was going around asking everybody at the conference what was the last computer program you wrote. This was 1967. Some of the people said, "I've never written a computer program." Others would say, "Oh yeah, here's what I did last week." I asked Edsger this question when I visited him in Texas in the 90s and he said, "Don, I write programs now with pencil and paper, and I execute them in my head." He finds that a good enough discipline.

I think he was mistaken on that. He taught me a lot of things, but I really think that if he had continued... One of Dijkstra's greatest strengths was that he felt a strong sense of aesthetics, and he didn't want to compromise his notions of beauty. They were so intense that when he visited me in the 1960s, I had just come to Stanford. I remember the conversation we had. It was in the first apartment, our little rented house, before we had electricity in the house.

We were sitting there in the dark, and he was telling me how he had just learned about the specifications of the IBM System/360, and it made him so ill that his heart was actually starting to flutter.

He intensely disliked things that he didn't consider clean to work with. So I can see that he would have distaste for the languages that he had to work with on real computers. My reaction to that was to design my own language, and then make Pascal so that it would work well for me in those days. But his response was to do everything only intellectually.

So, programming.

I happened to look the other day. I wrote 35 programs in January, and 28 or 29 programs in February. These are small programs, but I have a compulsion. I love to write programs and put things into it. I think of a question that I want to answer, or I have part of my book where I want to present something. But I can't just present it by reading about it in a book. As I code it, it all becomes clear in my head. It's just the discipline. The fact that I have to translate my knowledge of this method into something that the machine is going to understand just forces me to make that crystal-clear in my head. Then I can explain it to somebody else infinitely better. The exposition is always better if I've implemented it, even though it's going to take me more time.

[Sep 07, 2019] Knuth about computer science and money: At that point I made the decision in my life that I wasn't going to optimize my income;

Sep 07, 2019 | archive.computerhistory.org

So I had a programming hat when I was outside of Cal Tech, and at Cal Tech I am a mathematician taking my grad studies. A startup company, called Green Tree Corporation because green is the color of money, came to me and said, "Don, name your price. Write compilers for us and we will take care of finding computers for you to debug them on, and assistance for you to do your work. Name your price." I said, "Oh, okay. $100,000.", assuming that this was In that era this was not quite at Bill Gate's level today, but it was sort of out there.

The guy didn't blink. He said, "Okay." I didn't really blink either. I said, "Well, I'm not going to do it. I just thought this was an impossible number."

At that point I made the decision in my life that I wasn't going to optimize my income; I was really going to do what I thought I could do for well, I don't know. If you ask me what makes me most happy, number one would be somebody saying "I learned something from you". Number two would be somebody saying "I used your software". But number infinity would be Well, no. Number infinity minus one would be "I bought your book". It's not as good as "I read your book", you know. Then there is "I bought your software"; that was not in my own personal value. So that decision came up. I kept up with the literature about compilers. The Communications of the ACM was where the action was. I also worked with people on trying to debug the ALGOL language, which had problems with it. I published a few papers, like "The Remaining Trouble Spots in ALGOL 60" was one of the papers that I worked on. I chaired a committee called "Smallgol" which was to find a subset of ALGOL that would work on small computers. I was active in programming languages.

[Sep 07, 2019] Knuth: maybe 1 in 50 people have the "computer scientist's" type of intellect

Sep 07, 2019 | conservancy.umn.edu

Frana: You have made the comment several times that maybe 1 in 50 people have the "computer scientist's mind." Knuth: Yes. Frana: I am wondering if a large number of those people are trained professional librarians? [laughter] There is some strangeness there. But can you pinpoint what it is about the mind of the computer scientist that is....

Knuth: That is different?

Frana: What are the characteristics?

Knuth: Two things: one is the ability to deal with non-uniform structure, where you have case one, case two, case three, case four. Or that you have a model of something where the first component is integer, the next component is a Boolean, and the next component is a real number, or something like that, you know, non-uniform structure. To deal fluently with those kinds of entities, which is not typical in other branches of mathematics, is critical. And the other characteristic ability is to shift levels quickly, from looking at something in the large to looking at something in the small, and many levels in between, jumping from one level of abstraction to another. You know that, when you are adding one to some number, that you are actually getting closer to some overarching goal. These skills, being able to deal with nonuniform objects and to see through things from the top level to the bottom level, these are very essential to computer programming, it seems to me. But maybe I am fooling myself because I am too close to it.

Frana: It is the hardest thing to really understand that which you are existing within.

Knuth: Yes.

[Sep 07, 2019] conservancy.umn.edu

Sep 07, 2019 | conservancy.umn.edu

Knuth: Well, certainly it seems the way things are going. You take any particular subject that you are interested in and you try to see if somebody with an American high school education has learned it, and you will be appalled. You know, Jesse Jackson thinks that students know nothing about political science, and I am sure the chemists think that students don't know chemistry, and so on. But somehow they get it when they have to later. But I would say certainly the students now have been getting more of a superficial idea of mathematics than they used to. We have to do remedial stuff at Stanford that we didn't have to do thirty years ago.

Frana: Gio [Wiederhold] said much the same thing to me.

Knuth: The most scandalous thing was that Stanford's course in linear algebra could not get to eigenvalues because the students didn't know about complex numbers. Now every course at Stanford that takes linear algebra as a prerequisite does so because they want the students to know about eigenvalues. But here at Stanford, with one of the highest admission standards of any university, our students don't know complex numbers. So we have to teach them that when they get to college. Yes, this is definitely a breakdown.

Frana: Was your mathematics training in high school particularly good, or was it that you spent a lot of time actually doing problems?

Knuth: No, my mathematics training in high school was not good. My teachers could not answer my questions and so I decided I'd go into physics. I mean, I had played with mathematics in high school. I did a lot of work drawing graphs and plotting points and I used pi as the radix of a number system, and explored what the world would be like if you wanted to do logarithms and you had a number system based on pi. And I had played with stuff like that. But my teachers couldn't answer questions that I had.

... ... ... Frana: Do you have an answer? Are American students different today? In one of your interviews you discuss the problem of creativity versus gross absorption of knowledge.

Knuth: Well, that is part of it. Today we have mostly a sound byte culture, this lack of attention span and trying to learn how to pass exams. Frana: Yes,

[Sep 07, 2019] Knuth: I can be a writer, who tries to organize other people's ideas into some kind of a more coherent structure so that it is easier to put things together

Sep 07, 2019 | conservancy.umn.edu

Knuth: I can be a writer, who tries to organize other people's ideas into some kind of a more coherent structure so that it is easier to put things together. I can see that I could be viewed as a scholar that does his best to check out sources of material, so that people get credit where it is due. And to check facts over, not just to look at the abstract of something, but to see what the methods were that did it and to fill in holes if necessary. I look at my role as being able to understand the motivations and terminology of one group of specialists and boil it down to a certain extent so that people in other parts of the field can use it. I try to listen to the theoreticians and select what they have done that is important to the programmer on the street; to remove technical jargon when possible.

But I have never been good at any kind of a role that would be making policy, or advising people on strategies, or what to do. I have always been best at refining things that are there and bringing order out of chaos. I sometimes raise new ideas that might stimulate people, but not really in a way that would be in any way controlling the flow. The only time I have ever advocated something strongly was with literate programming; but I do this always with the caveat that it works for me, not knowing if it would work for anybody else.

When I work with a system that I have created myself, I can always change it if I don't like it. But everybody who works with my system has to work with what I give them. So I am not able to judge my own stuff impartially. So anyway, I have always felt bad about if anyone says, 'Don, please forecast the future,'...

[Sep 06, 2019] Knuth: Programming and architecture are interrelated and it is impossible to create good architecure wthout actually programming at least of a prototype

Notable quotes:

"... When you're writing a document for a human being to understand, the human being will look at it and nod his head and say, "Yeah, this makes sense." But then there's all kinds of ambiguities and vagueness that you don't realize until you try to put it into a computer. Then all of a sudden, almost every five minutes as you're writing the code, a question comes up that wasn't addressed in the specification. "What if this combination occurs?" ..."

"... When you're faced with implementation, a person who has been delegated this job of working from a design would have to say, "Well hmm, I don't know what the designer meant by this." ..."

Sep 06, 2019 | archive.computerhistory.org

...I showed the second version of this design to two of my graduate students, and I said, "Okay, implement this, please, this summer. That's your summer job." I thought I had specified a language. I had to go away. I spent several weeks in China during the summer of 1977, and I had various other obligations. I assumed that when I got back from my summer trips, I would be able to play around with TeX and refine it a little bit. To my amazement, the students, who were outstanding students, had not competed [it]. They had a system that was able to do about three lines of TeX. I thought, "My goodness, what's going on? I thought these were good students." Well afterwards I changed my attitude to saying, "Boy, they accomplished a miracle."

Because going from my specification, which I thought was complete, they really had an impossible task, and they had succeeded wonderfully with it. These students, by the way, [were] Michael Plass, who has gone on to be the brains behind almost all of Xerox's Docutech software and all kind of things that are inside of typesetting devices now, and Frank Liang, one of the key people for Microsoft Word.

He did important mathematical things as well as his hyphenation methods which are quite used in all languages now. These guys were actually doing great work, but I was amazed that they couldn't do what I thought was just sort of a routine task. Then I became a programmer in earnest, where I had to do it. The reason is when you're doing programming, you have to explain something to a computer, which is dumb.

When you're writing a document for a human being to understand, the human being will look at it and nod his head and say, "Yeah, this makes sense." But then there's all kinds of ambiguities and vagueness that you don't realize until you try to put it into a computer. Then all of a sudden, almost every five minutes as you're writing the code, a question comes up that wasn't addressed in the specification. "What if this combination occurs?"

It just didn't occur to the person writing the design specification. When you're faced with implementation, a person who has been delegated this job of working from a design would have to say, "Well hmm, I don't know what the designer meant by this."

If I hadn't been in China they would've scheduled an appointment with me and stopped their programming for a day. Then they would come in at the designated hour and we would talk. They would take 15 minutes to present to me what the problem was, and then I would think about it for a while, and then I'd say, "Oh yeah, do this. " Then they would go home and they would write code for another five minutes and they'd have to schedule another appointment.

I'm probably exaggerating, but this is why I think Bob Floyd's Chiron compiler never got going. Bob worked many years on a beautiful idea for a programming language, where he designed a language called Chiron, but he never touched the programming himself. I think this was actually the reason that he had trouble with that project, because it's so hard to do the design unless you're faced with the low-level aspects of it, explaining it to a machine instead of to another person.

Forsythe, I think it was, who said, "People have said traditionally that you don't understand something until you've taught it in a class. The truth is you don't really understand something until you've taught it to a computer, until you've been able to program it." At this level, programming was absolutely important

[Sep 06, 2019] Oral histories

Sep 06, 2019 | www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

Having just celebrated my 10000th birthday (in base three), I'm operating a little bit in history mode. Every once in awhile, people have asked me to record some of my memories of past events --- I guess because I've been fortunate enough to live at some pretty exciting times, computersciencewise. These after-the-fact recollections aren't really as reliable as contemporary records; but they do at least show what I think I remember. And the stories are interesting, because they involve lots of other people.

So, before these instances of oral history themselves begin to fade from my memory, I've decided to record some links to several that I still know about:

Interview by Philip L Frana at the Charles Babbage Institute, November 2001

transcript of OH 332
audio file (2:00:33)

Interviews commissioned by Peoples Archive, taped in March 2006

playlist for 97 videos (about 2--8 minutes each)

Interview by Ed Feigenbaum at the Computer History Museum, March 2007

Part 1 (3:07:25) Part 2 (4:02:46)
(transcript)

Interview by Susan Schofield for the Stanford Historical Society, May 2018

(audio files, 2:20:30 and 2:14:25; transcript)

Interview by David Brock and Hansen Hsu about the computer programs that I wrote during the 1950s, July 2018

video (1:30:0)
(texts of the actual programs)

Some extended interviews, not available online, have also been published in books, notably in Chapters 7--17 of Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth (conversations with Dikran Karagueuzian in the summer of 1996), and in two books by Edgar G. Daylight, The Essential Knuth (2013), Algorithmic Barriers Falling (2014).

[Sep 06, 2019] Knuth: No, I stopped going to conferences. It was too discouraging. Computer programming keeps getting harder because more stuff is discovered

Sep 06, 2019 | conservancy.umn.edu

Knuth: No, I stopped going to conferences. It was too discouraging. Computer programming keeps getting harder because more stuff is discovered. I can cope with learning about one new technique per day, but I can't take ten in a day all at once. So conferences are depressing; it means I have so much more work to do. If I hide myself from the truth I am much happier.

[Sep 06, 2019] How TAOCP was hatched

Notable quotes:

"... Also, Addison-Wesley was the people who were asking me to do this book; my favorite textbooks had been published by Addison Wesley. They had done the books that I loved the most as a student. For them to come to me and say, "Would you write a book for us?", and here I am just a secondyear gradate student -- this was a thrill. ..."

"... But in those days, The Art of Computer Programming was very important because I'm thinking of the aesthetical: the whole question of writing programs as something that has artistic aspects in all senses of the word. The one idea is "art" which means artificial, and the other "art" means fine art. All these are long stories, but I've got to cover it fairly quickly. ..."

Sep 06, 2019 | archive.computerhistory.org

Knuth: This is, of course, really the story of my life, because I hope to live long enough to finish it. But I may not, because it's turned out to be such a huge project. I got married in the summer of 1961, after my first year of graduate school. My wife finished college, and I could use the money I had made -- the $5000 on the compiler -- to finance a trip to Europe for our honeymoon.

We had four months of wedded bliss in Southern California, and then a man from Addison-Wesley came to visit me and said "Don, we would like you to write a book about how to write compilers."

The more I thought about it, I decided "Oh yes, I've got this book inside of me."

I sketched out that day -- I still have the sheet of tablet paper on which I wrote -- I sketched out 12 chapters that I thought ought to be in such a book. I told Jill, my wife, "I think I'm going to write a book."

As I say, we had four months of bliss, because the rest of our marriage has all been devoted to this book. Well, we still have had happiness. But really, I wake up every morning and I still haven't finished the book. So I try to -- I have to -- organize the rest of my life around this, as one main unifying theme. The book was supposed to be about how to write a compiler. They had heard about me from one of their editorial advisors, that I knew something about how to do this. The idea appealed to me for two main reasons. One is that I did enjoy writing. In high school I had been editor of the weekly paper. In college I was editor of the science magazine, and I worked on the campus paper as copy editor. And, as I told you, I wrote the manual for that compiler that we wrote. I enjoyed writing, number one.

Also, Addison-Wesley was the people who were asking me to do this book; my favorite textbooks had been published by Addison Wesley. They had done the books that I loved the most as a student. For them to come to me and say, "Would you write a book for us?", and here I am just a secondyear gradate student -- this was a thrill.

Another very important reason at the time was that I knew that there was a great need for a book about compilers, because there were a lot of people who even in 1962 -- this was January of 1962 -- were starting to rediscover the wheel. The knowledge was out there, but it hadn't been explained. The people who had discovered it, though, were scattered all over the world and they didn't know of each other's work either, very much. I had been following it. Everybody I could think of who could write a book about compilers, as far as I could see, they would only give a piece of the fabric. They would slant it to their own view of it. There might be four people who could write about it, but they would write four different books. I could present all four of their viewpoints in what I would think was a balanced way, without any axe to grind, without slanting it towards something that I thought would be misleading to the compiler writer for the future. I considered myself as a journalist, essentially. I could be the expositor, the tech writer, that could do the job that was needed in order to take the work of these brilliant people and make it accessible to the world. That was my motivation. Now, I didn't have much time to spend on it then, I just had this page of paper with 12 chapter headings on it. That's all I could do while I'm a consultant at Burroughs and doing my graduate work. I signed a contract, but they said "We know it'll take you a while." I didn't really begin to have much time to work on it until 1963, my third year of graduate school, as I'm already finishing up on my thesis. In the summer of '62, I guess I should mention, I wrote another compiler. This was for Univac; it was a FORTRAN compiler. I spent the summer, I sold my soul to the devil, I guess you say, for three months in the summer of 1962 to write a FORTRAN compiler. I believe that the salary for that was $15,000, which was much more than an assistant professor. I think assistant professors were getting eight or nine thousand in those days.

Feigenbaum: Well, when I started in 1960 at [University of California] Berkeley, I was getting $7,600 for the nine-month year.

Knuth: Knuth: Yeah, so you see it. I got $15,000 for a summer job in 1962 writing a FORTRAN compiler. One day during that summer I was writing the part of the compiler that looks up identifiers in a hash table. The method that we used is called linear probing. Basically you take the variable name that you want to look up, you scramble it, like you square it or something like this, and that gives you a number between one and, well in those days it would have been between 1 and 1000, and then you look there. If you find it, good; if you don't find it, go to the next place and keep on going until you either get to an empty place, or you find the number you're looking for. It's called linear probing. There was a rumor that one of Professor Feller's students at Princeton had tried to figure out how fast linear probing works and was unable to succeed. This was a new thing for me. It was a case where I was doing programming, but I also had a mathematical problem that would go into my other [job]. My winter job was being a math student, my summer job was writing compilers. There was no mix. These worlds did not intersect at all in my life at that point. So I spent one day during the summer while writing the compiler looking at the mathematics of how fast does linear probing work. I got lucky, and I solved the problem. I figured out some math, and I kept two or three sheets of paper with me and I typed it up. ["Notes on 'Open' Addressing', 7/22/63] I guess that's on the internet now, because this became really the genesis of my main research work, which developed not to be working on compilers, but to be working on what they call analysis of algorithms, which is, have a computer method and find out how good is it quantitatively. I can say, if I got so many things to look up in the table, how long is linear probing going to take. It dawned on me that this was just one of many algorithms that would be important, and each one would lead to a fascinating mathematical problem. This was easily a good lifetime source of rich problems to work on. Here I am then, in the middle of 1962, writing this FORTRAN compiler, and I had one day to do the research and mathematics that changed my life for my future research trends. But now I've gotten off the topic of what your original question was.

Feigenbaum: We were talking about sort of the.. You talked about the embryo of The Art of Computing. The compiler book morphed into The Art of Computer Programming, which became a seven-volume plan.

Knuth: Exactly. Anyway, I'm working on a compiler and I'm thinking about this. But now I'm starting, after I finish this summer job, then I began to do things that were going to be relating to the book. One of the things I knew I had to have in the book was an artificial machine, because I'm writing a compiler book but machines are changing faster than I can write books. I have to have a machine that I'm totally in control of. I invented this machine called MIX, which was typical of the computers of 1962.

In 1963 I wrote a simulator for MIX so that I could write sample programs for it, and I taught a class at Caltech on how to write programs in assembly language for this hypothetical computer. Then I started writing the parts that dealt with sorting problems and searching problems, like the linear probing idea. I began to write those parts, which are part of a compiler, of the book. I had several hundred pages of notes gathering for those chapters for The Art of Computer Programming. Before I graduated, I've already done quite a bit of writing on The Art of Computer Programming.

I met George Forsythe about this time. George was the man who inspired both of us [Knuth and Feigenbaum] to come to Stanford during the '60s. George came down to Southern California for a talk, and he said, "Come up to Stanford. How about joining our faculty?" I said "Oh no, I can't do that. I just got married, and I've got to finish this book first." I said, "I think I'll finish the book next year, and then I can come up [and] start thinking about the rest of my life, but I want to get my book done before my son is born." Well, John is now 40-some years old and I'm not done with the book. Part of my lack of expertise is any good estimation procedure as to how long projects are going to take. I way underestimated how much needed to be written about in this book. Anyway, I started writing the manuscript, and I went merrily along writing pages of things that I thought really needed to be said. Of course, it didn't take long before I had started to discover a few things of my own that weren't in any of the existing literature. I did have an axe to grind. The message that I was presenting was in fact not going to be unbiased at all. It was going to be based on my own particular slant on stuff, and that original reason for why I should write the book became impossible to sustain. But the fact that I had worked on linear probing and solved the problem gave me a new unifying theme for the book. I was going to base it around this idea of analyzing algorithms, and have some quantitative ideas about how good methods were. Not just that they worked, but that they worked well: this method worked 3 times better than this method, or 3.1 times better than this method. Also, at this time I was learning mathematical techniques that I had never been taught in school. I found they were out there, but they just hadn't been emphasized openly, about how to solve problems of this kind.

So my book would also present a different kind of mathematics than was common in the curriculum at the time, that was very relevant to analysis of algorithm. I went to the publishers, I went to Addison Wesley, and said "How about changing the title of the book from 'The Art of Computer Programming' to 'The Analysis of Algorithms'." They said that will never sell; their focus group couldn't buy that one. I'm glad they stuck to the original title, although I'm also glad to see that several books have now come out called "The Analysis of Algorithms", 20 years down the line.

But in those days, The Art of Computer Programming was very important because I'm thinking of the aesthetical: the whole question of writing programs as something that has artistic aspects in all senses of the word. The one idea is "art" which means artificial, and the other "art" means fine art. All these are long stories, but I've got to cover it fairly quickly.

I've got The Art of Computer Programming started out, and I'm working on my 12 chapters. I finish a rough draft of all 12 chapters by, I think it was like 1965. I've got 3,000 pages of notes, including a very good example of what you mentioned about seeing holes in the fabric. One of the most important chapters in the book is parsing: going from somebody's algebraic formula and figuring out the structure of the formula. Just the way I had done in seventh grade finding the structure of English sentences, I had to do this with mathematical sentences.

Chapter ten is all about parsing of context-free language, [which] is what we called it at the time. I covered what people had published about context-free languages and parsing. I got to the end of the chapter and I said, well, you can combine these ideas and these ideas, and all of a sudden you get a unifying thing which goes all the way to the limit. These other ideas had sort of gone partway there. They would say "Oh, if a grammar satisfies this condition, I can do it efficiently." "If a grammar satisfies this condition, I can do it efficiently." But now, all of a sudden, I saw there was a way to say I can find the most general condition that can be done efficiently without looking ahead to the end of the sentence. That you could make a decision on the fly, reading from left to right, about the structure of the thing. That was just a natural outgrowth of seeing the different pieces of the fabric that other people had put together, and writing it into a chapter for the first time. But I felt that this general concept, well, I didn't feel that I had surrounded the concept. I knew that I had it, and I could prove it, and I could check it, but I couldn't really intuit it all in my head. I knew it was right, but it was too hard for me, really, to explain it well.

So I didn't put in The Art of Computer Programming. I thought it was beyond the scope of my book. Textbooks don't have to cover everything when you get to the harder things; then you have to go to the literature. My idea at that time [is] I'm writing this book and I'm thinking it's going to be published very soon, so any little things I discover and put in the book I didn't bother to write a paper and publish in the journal because I figure it'll be in my book pretty soon anyway. Computer science is changing so fast, my book is bound to be obsolete.

It takes a year for it to go through editing, and people drawing the illustrations, and then they have to print it and bind it and so on. I have to be a little bit ahead of the state-of-the-art if my book isn't going to be obsolete when it comes out. So I kept most of the stuff to myself that I had, these little ideas I had been coming up with. But when I got to this idea of left-to-right parsing, I said "Well here's something I don't really understand very well. I'll publish this, let other people figure out what it is, and then they can tell me what I should have said." I published that paper I believe in 1965, at the end of finishing my draft of the chapter, which didn't get as far as that story, LR(k). Well now, textbooks of computer science start with LR(k) and take off from there. But I want to give you an idea of

[Jul 30, 2019] FreeDOS turns 25 years old by Jim Hall

Jul 28, 2019 | opensource.com

FreeDOS turns 25 years old: An origin story The operating system's history is a great example of the open source software model: developers working together to create something.

Get the highlights in your inbox every week.

FreeDOS .

That's a major milestone for any open source software project, and I'm proud of the work that we've done on it over the past quarter century. I'm also proud of how we built FreeDOS because it is a great example of how the open source software model works.

For its time, MS-DOS was a powerful operating system. I'd used DOS for years, ever since my parents replaced our aging Apple II computer with a newer IBM machine. MS-DOS provided a flexible command line, which I quite liked and that came in handy to manipulate my files. Over the years, I learned how to write my own utilities in C to expand its command-line capabilities even further.

Around 1994, Microsoft announced that its next planned version of Windows would do away with MS-DOS. But I liked DOS. Even though I had started migrating to Linux, I still booted into MS-DOS to run applications that Linux didn't have yet.

I figured that if we wanted to keep DOS, we would need to write our own. And that's how FreeDOS was born.

On June 29, 1994, I made a small announcement about my idea to the comp.os.msdos.apps newsgroup on Usenet.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF PD-DOS PROJECT:
A few months ago, I posted articles relating to starting a public domain version of DOS. The general support for this at the time was strong, and many people agreed with the statement, "start writing!" So, I have

Announcing the first effort to produce a PD-DOS. I have written up a "manifest" describing the goals of such a project and an outline of the work, as well as a "task list" that shows exactly what needs to be written. I'll post those here, and let discussion follow.

While I announced the project as PD-DOS (for "public domain," although the abbreviation was meant to mimic IBM's "PC-DOS"), we soon changed the name to Free-DOS and later FreeDOS.

I started working on it right away. First, I shared the utilities I had written to expand the DOS command line. Many of them reproduced MS-DOS features, including CLS, DATE, DEL, FIND, HELP, and MORE. Some added new features to DOS that I borrowed from Unix, such as TEE and TRCH (a simple implementation of Unix's tr). I contributed over a dozen FreeDOS utilities

By sharing my utilities, I gave other developers a starting point. And by sharing my source code under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), I implicitly allowed others to add new features and fix bugs.

Other developers who saw FreeDOS taking shape contacted me and wanted to help. Tim Norman was one of the first; Tim volunteered to write a command shell (COMMAND.COM, later named FreeCOM). Others contributed utilities that replicated or expanded the DOS command line.

We released our first alpha version as soon as possible. Less than three months after announcing FreeDOS, we had an Alpha 1 distribution that collected our utilities. By the time we released Alpha 5, FreeDOS boasted over 60 utilities. And FreeDOS included features never imagined in MS-DOS, including internet connectivity via a PPP dial-up driver and dual-monitor support using a primary VGA monitor and a secondary Hercules Mono monitor.

New developers joined the project, and we welcomed them. By October 1998, FreeDOS had a working kernel, thanks to Pat Villani. FreeDOS also sported a host of new features that brought not just parity with MS-DOS but surpassed MS-DOS, including ANSI support and a print spooler that resembled Unix lpr.

You may be familiar with other milestones. We crept our way towards the 1.0 label, finally releasing FreeDOS 1.0 in September 2006, FreeDOS 1.1 in January 2012, and FreeDOS 1.2 in December 2016. MS-DOS stopped being a moving target long ago, so we didn't need to update as frequently after the 1.0 release.

Today, FreeDOS is a very modern DOS. We've moved beyond "classic DOS," and now FreeDOS features lots of development tools such as compilers, assemblers, and debuggers. We have lots of editors beyond the plain DOS Edit editor, including Fed, Pico, TDE, and versions of Emacs and Vi. FreeDOS supports networking and even provides a simple graphical web browser (Dillo). And we have tons of new utilities, including many that will make Linux users feel at home.

FreeDOS got where it is because developers worked together to create something. In the spirit of open source software, we contributed to each other's work by fixing bugs and adding new features. We treated our users as co-developers; we always found ways to include people, whether they were writing code or writing documentation. And we made decisions through consensus based on merit. If that sounds familiar, it's because those are the core values of open source software: transparency, collaboration, release early and often, meritocracy, and community. That's the open source way !

I encourage you to download FreeDOS 1.2 and give it a try.

[Apr 16, 2019] European contributions to computing and the internet

Apr 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

Amerimutt Golem , says: April 16, 2019 at 10:28 am GMT

@Thomm .... ... ...

Actually smart Northern European men enabled the very Internet you are using to spread kosher propaganda.

1. Gottfried Leibniz/German – binary number system.
2. George Boole/English – Boolean logic.
3. Konrad Kuze/German – electronic computer.
4. Donald Davies/Welsh – packet switching.
5. Clifford Cocks/English – public key encryption years before Rivest , Shamir, and Adleman.
6. Edsger Dijkstra/Dutch – Dijkstra's algorithm and programming.
7. Tim Berners-Lee/English – HTML and http.
8. Håkon Wium Lie/Norwegian – Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
9. Linus Torvalds/Finn – Linux on which many web servers run. Klaus Knopper/German – Knoppix Linux variant.
10. Frank Codd/English – relational database model.
11. Michael Widenius/Swede – MySQL on which many web applications run.
12. Kristen Nygaard & Ole-Johan Dahl/Norwegians – object-oriented programming and Simula programming language.
13. Guido van Rossum/Dutch – Python programming language.
14. Lennart Augustsson/Swede – Haskell programming language.
15. Bjarne Stroustrup/Dane – C++ programming language.
17 Geoffrey Hinton/English – artificial intelligence.
18. Jürgen Dethloff and Helmut Göttrup/Germans – chip card used in mobile phones plus credit and debit cards.
19. Karlheinz Brandenburg/German – MP3 format.

[Oct 30, 2018] The Watson family held integrity, equality, and knowledge share as a formidable synthesis of company ethics. With them gone old IBM was gone...

It not Watson family gone it is New Deal Capitalism was replaced with the neoliberalism

Notable quotes:

"... Except when your employer is the one preaching associate loyalty and "we are family" your entire career. Then they decide you've been too loyal and no longer want to pay your salary and start fabricating reasons to get rid of you. ADP is guilty of these same practices and eliminating their tenured associates. Meanwhile, the millennials hired play ping pong and text all day, rather than actually working. ..."

Oct 30, 2018 | features.propublica.org

Zytor-LordoftheSkies , Thursday, March 22, 2018 11:55 AM

A quick search of the article doesn't find the word "buy backs" but this is a big part of the story. IBM spent over $110 BILLION on stock buy backs between 2000 and 2016. That's the number I found, but it hasn't stopped since. If anything it has escalated.

This is very common among large corporations. Rather than spend on their people, they funnel billions into stock buy backs which raises or at least maintains the stock value so execs can keep cashing in. It's really pretty disgraceful. This was only legalized in 1982, which not-so-coincidentally is not long after real wages stalled, and have stalled ever since.

Suzan Zytor-LordoftheSkies ,

Thanks for this bit of insanely true reporting. When laid off from Westinghouse after 14 years of stellar performance evaluations I was flummoxed by the execs getting million-dollar bonuses as we were told the company wasn't profitable enough to maintain its senior engineering staff. It sold off every division eventually as the execs (many of them newly hired) reaped even more bonuses.

Georgann Putintsev Suzan ,

Thank you ... very insightful of you. As an IBMer and lover of Spreadsheets / Statistics / Data Specalist ... I like reading Annual Reports. Researching these Top Execs, BOD and compare them to other Companies across-the-board and industry sectors. You'll find a Large Umbrella there.
There is a direct tie and inter-changeable pieces of these elites over the past 55 yrs. Whenever some Corp/ Political/ Government shill (wannbe) needs a payoff, they get placed into high ranking top positions for a orchestrating a predescribed dark nwo agenda. Some may come up the ranks like Ginny, but ALL belong to Council for Foreign Relations and other such high level private clubs or organizations. When IBM sells off their Mainframe Manufacturing (Poughkeepsie) to an elite Saudi, under an American Co. sounding name of course, ... and the U.S. Government ... doesn't balk ... that has me worried for our 1984 future.

Carol Van Linda Suzan ,

Sears is doing this also

Suzan Carol Van Linda ,

Details? Thanks!

vibert Zytor-LordoftheSkies ,

True in every large corporation. They use almost free money from the US Government to do it. (Taxpayer's money)

DDRLSGC vibert ,

Yeah, it is amazing how they stated that they don't need help from the government when in reality they do need government to pass laws that favor them, pack the court system where judges rule in their favor and use their private police and the public sector police to keep the workers down.

Johnny Player DDRLSGC ,

Why do you put disqus in your name? . Is that so you can see if they sell your info and you know where it originated from?

Theo Geauxvan Zytor-LordoftheSkies ,

I wonder how many billions (trillions?) have been funneled from corporate workers pockets this way? It seems all corporations are doing it these days. Large-scale transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy.

Stevie Ponders Theo Geauxvan ,

It's called asset stripping. Basically corporate raiding (as in pillage) from the inside.

R. J. Smith , Thursday, March 22, 2018 9:06 AM

"Member of the IBM family" -- BS. Your employer is not your family.

Randall Smith R. J. Smith

Not anymore. With most large companies, you've never been able to say they are "family." Loyalty used to be a thing though. I worked at a company where I saw loyalty vanish over a 10 year period.

marsto R. J. Smith

Except when your employer is the one preaching associate loyalty and "we are family" your entire career. Then they decide you've been too loyal and no longer want to pay your salary and start fabricating reasons to get rid of you. ADP is guilty of these same practices and eliminating their tenured associates. Meanwhile, the millennials hired play ping pong and text all day, rather than actually working.

DDRLSGC marsto

Yeah, and how many CEOs actually work to make their companies great instead of running them into the ground, thinking about their next job move, and playing golf

Mary Malley R. J. Smith ,

I have to disagree with you. I started with IBM on their rise up in those earlier days, and we WERE valued and shown that we were valued over and over through those glorious years. It did feel like we were in a family, our families mattered to them, our well-being. They gave me a month to find a perfect babysitter when they hired me before I had to go to work!

They helped me find a house in a good school district for my children. They bought my house when I was moving to a new job/location when it didn't sell within 30 days.

They paid the difference in the interest rate of my loan for my new house from the old one. I can't even begin to list all the myriad of things that made us love IBM and the people we worked with and for, and made us feel a part of that big IBM family.

Did they change, yes, but the dedication we gave was freely given and we mutually respected each other. I was lucky to work for them for decades before that shift when they changed to be just like every other large corporation.

Georgann Putintsev Mary Malley ,

The Watson family held integrity, equality, and knowledge share as a formidable synthesis of company ethics moving a Quality based business forward in the 20th to 21st century. They also promoted an (volunteer) IBM Club to help promote employee and family activities inside/outside of work which they by-en-large paid for. This allowed employees to meet and see other employees/families as 'Real' & "Common-Interest" human beings. I participated, created, and organized events and documented how-to-do-events for other volunteers. These brought IBMers together inside or outside of their 'working' environment to have fun, to associate, to realize those innate qualities that are in all of us. I believe it allowed for better communication and cooperation in the work place.

To me it was family. Some old IBMers might remember when Music, Song, Skits were part of IBM Branch Office meetings. As President of the IBM Clubs Palo Alto branch (7 yrs.), I used our Volunteer Club Votes to spend ALL that IBM donated money, because they <administratively> gave it back to IBM if we didn't.

Without a strong IBM Club presence, it gets whittled down to 2-3 events a year. For a time WE WERE a FAMILY.

bookmama3 Georgann Putintsev , in reply to" aria-label="in reply to"> •

Absolutely! Back when white shirts/black suits were a requirement. There was a country club in Poughkeepsie, softball teams, Sunday brunch, Halloween parties in the fall, Christmas parties in December where thousands of age appropriate Fisher Price toys were given out to employee's kids. Today "IBMer" is used by execs as a term of derision. Employees are overworked and under appreciated and shortsighted, overpaid executives rule the roost. The real irony is that talented, vital employees are being retired for "costing too much" while dysfunctional top level folk are rewarded with bonuses and stock when they are let go. And it's all legal. It's disgraceful.

OrangeGina R. J. Smith , in reply to" aria-label="in reply to"> •

very true, however for many of us, our co-workers of a very long time ARE family. Corporations are NOT people, but they are comprised of them.

HiJinks R. J. Smith , in reply to" aria-label="in reply to"> •

It was true at one time, but no more.

Herb Tarlick R. J. Smith , in reply to" aria-label="in reply to"> •

This one was until the mid eighties.

[Oct 15, 2018] Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen dead at 65 by Jacob Kastrenakes and Rachel Becker

Oct 15, 2018 | www.theverge.com

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died today from complications with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was 65. Allen said earlier this month that he was being treated for the disease.

Allen was a childhood friend of Bill Gates, and together, the two started Microsoft in 1975. He left the company in 1983 while being treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma and remained a board member with the company through 2000. He was first treated for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2009, before seeing it go into remission.

In a statement given to ABC News , Gates said he was "heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends." He went on to commend his fellow co-founder for his life after Microsoft:

From our early days together at Lakeside School, through our partnership in the creation of Microsoft, to some of our joint philanthropic projects over the years, Paul was a true partner and dear friend. Personal computing would not have existed without him.

But Paul wasn't content with starting one company. He channelled his intellect and compassion into a second act focused on improving people's lives and strengthening communities in Seattle and around the world. He was fond of saying, "If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it." That's the king of person he was.

Paul loved life and those around him, and we all cherished him in return. He deserved much more time, but his contributions to the world of technology and philanthropy will live on for generations to come. I will miss him tremendously.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Allen's contributions to both Microsoft and the industry were "indispensable." His full statement is quoted below:

Paul Allen's contributions to our company, our industry, and to our community are indispensable. As co-founder of Microsoft, in his own quiet and persistent way, he created magical products, experiences and institutions, and in doing so, he changed the world. I have learned so much from him -- his inquisitiveness, curiosity, and push for high standards is something that will continue to inspire me and all of us as Microsoft. Our hearts are with Paul's family and loved ones. Rest in peace.

In a memoir published in 2011, Allen says that he was responsible for naming Microsoft and creating the two-button mouse. The book also portrayed Allen as going under-credited for his work at Microsoft, and Gates as having taken more ownership of the company than he deserved. It created some drama when it arrived, but the two men ultimately appeared to remain friends, posing for a photo together two years later.

After leaving Microsoft, Allen became an investor through his company Vulcan, buying into a diverse set of companies and markets. Vulcan's current portfolio ranges from the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, to a group focused on using machine learning for climate preservation, to Stratolaunch, which is creating a spaceplane . Allen's investments and donations made him a major name in Seattle, where much of his work was focused. He recently funded a $46 million building in South Seattle that will house homeless and low-income families.

Both Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai called Allen a tech "pioneer" while highlighting his philanthropic work in statements on Twitter. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Allen's work "inspired so many."

me title=

me title=

me title=

Allen has long been the owner of the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks as well. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said Allen "worked tirelessly" to "identify new ways to make the game safer and protect our players from unnecessary risk." NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said Allen "helped lay the foundation for the league's growth internationally and our embrace of new technologies."

He also launched a number of philanthropic efforts, which were later combined under the name Paul G. Allen Philanthropies. His "philanthropic contributions exceed $2 billion," according to Allen's own website, and he had committed to giving away the majority of his fortune.

Allen's sister, Jody Allen, wrote a statement on his family's behalf:

My brother was a remarkable individual on every level. While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist, for us he was a much loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend.

Paul's family and friends were blessed to experience his wit, warmth, his generosity and deep concern. For all the demands on his schedule, there was always time for family and friends. At this time of loss and grief for us – and so many others – we are profoundly grateful for the care and concern he demonstrated every day.

Some of Allen's philanthropy has taken a scientific bent: Allen founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2003, pouring $500 million into the non-profit that aims to give scientists the tools and data they need to probe how brain works. One recent project, the Allen Brain Observatory , provides an open-access "catalogue of activity in the mouse's brain," Saskia de Vries, senior scientist on the project, said in a video . That kind of data is key to piecing together how the brain processes information.

In an interview with Matthew Herper at Forbes , Allen called the brain "hideously complex" -- much more so than a computer. "As an ex-programmer I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens," he said . After founding the brain science institute, Allen also founded the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Cell Science in 2014, as well as the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group in 2016 , which funds cutting-edge research.

Even back in 2012, when Allen spoke with Herper at Forbes , he talked about plans for his financial legacy after his death -- and he said that a large part of it would be "allocated to this kind of work for the future."

In a statement emailed to The Verge, The Allen Institute's President and CEO Allan Jones said:

Paul's vision and insight have been an inspiration to me and to many others both here at the Institute that bears his name, and in the myriad of other areas that made up the fantastic universe of his interests. He will be sorely missed. We honor his legacy today, and every day into the long future of the Allen Institute, by carrying out our mission of tackling the hard problems in bioscience and making a significant difference in our respective fields.

According to Quincy Jones, Allen was also an excellent guitar player .

[Oct 15, 2018] Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Dies of Cancer At Age 65 - Slashdot

Oct 15, 2018 | science.slashdot.org

---

bennet42 ( 1313459 ) , Monday October 15, 2018 @08:24PM ( #57483472 )

Re:RIP Paul! ( Score: 5 , Informative)

Man what a shock! I was lucky enough to be working at a Seattle startup that Paul bought back in the 90s ( doing VoIP SOHO phone systems ). He liked to swing by office on a regular basis as we were just a few blocks from Dicks hamburgers on Mercer St (his favorite). He was really an engineer's engineer. We'd give him a status report on how things were going and within a few minutes he was up at the white board spitballing technical solutions to ASIC or network problems. I especially remember him coming by the day he bought the Seahawks. Paul was a big physical presence ( 6'2" 250lbs in those days ), but he kept going on about how after meeting the Seahawks players, he never felt so physically small in his life. Ignore the internet trolls. Paul was a good guy. He was a humble, modest, down-to-earth guy. There was always a pick-up basketball game on his court on Thursday nights. Jam session over at his place were legendary ( I never got to play with him, but every musician that I know that played with him was impressed with his guitar playing ). He left a huge legacy in the pacific northwest. We'll miss you Paul!

Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) writes: < MJennings.USA@NOT_any_of_THISgmail.com > on Monday October 15, 2018 @06:56PM ( #57482948 ) Homepage

Bill Gates was so angry, Allen left the company. ( Score: 5 , Interesting)

The book Paul Allen wrote avoids a full report, but gives the impression that Bill Gates was so angry, Paul Allen left the company because interacting with Bill Gates was bad for his health.

Quotes from the book, Idea Man [amazon.com] by Paul Allen.

Page 49:

THREE DECADES AFTER teaching Bill and me at Lakeside, Fred Wright was asked what he'd thought about our success with Microsoft. His reply: "It was neat that they got along well enough that the company didn't explode in the first year or two."

Page 96:

When Bill pushed on licensing terms or bad-mouthed the flaky Signetics cards, Ed thought he was insubordinate. You could hear them yelling throughout the plant, and it was quite a spectacle-the burly ex-military officer standing toe to toe with the owlish prodigy about half his weight, neither giving an inch.

Page 177:

Bill was sarcastic, combative, defensive, and contemptuous.

Page 180:

"For Bill, the ground had already begun shifting. At product review meetings, his scathing critiques became a perverse badge of honor. One game was to count how many times Bill confronted a given manager; whoever got tagged for the most "stupidest things " won the contest. "I give my feedback," he grumbled to me, "and it doesn't go anywhere."

RubberDogBone ( 851604 ) , Monday October 15, 2018 @10:16PM ( #57483928 )

RIP Dr. Netvorkian ( Score: 2 )

Rest well, Mr. Allen.

He used to have the nickname "Doctor NetVorkian" because many of the things he invested in promptly tanked in one way or another after his investment. He had a lot of bad luck with his investments.

For those who don't understand the joke, a certain Dr. Kervorkian became notorious for helping ill patients commit suicide.

toadlife ( 301863 ) , Monday October 15, 2018 @06:29PM ( #57482740 ) Journal

Heyyyyy! ( Score: 5 , Funny)

Allen had nothing to do with systemd!

hey! ( 33014 ) writes:

Re: ( Score: 2 )

What a ray of sunshine you are.

CohibaVancouver ( 864662 ) , Monday October 15, 2018 @06:44PM ( #57482862 )

Re:Now burning in hell ( Score: 5 , Informative)

He is now burning in hell for Microsoft and Windows

Windows, Anonymous Coward? Allen left Microsoft in 1982. Windows 1.0 launched in 1985.

("The" Windows - Windows 3.1 - Didn't launch until 1992, a decade after Allen had left.)

BitterOak ( 537666 ) , Monday October 15, 2018 @06:56PM ( #57482940 )

Re:Now burning in hell ( Score: 5 , Insightful)

Microsoft created Windows and Allen co-founded Microsoft - he cannot wipe that blood off his hands!

But you can wipe Windows off your hard drive, so I don't get your point. Paul Allen was a great guy in many, many ways.

El Cubano ( 631386 ) writes:

Re: ( Score: 2 )

But you can wipe Windows off your hard drive, so I don't get your point. Paul Allen was a great guy in many, many ways.

Agreed. Even if you could "blame" him for all or part of Windows, he did start the Museum of Pop Culture [wikipedia.org]. If you are ever in Seattle, it is a must see. I mean, they have what is probably the best Star Trek museum display anywhere (which is saying a lot since the Smithsonian has a very nice one as well), including most of the original series set pieces and I believe one of the only actual Enterprise models used for filming. In my mind, that gives him a great deal of geek cred. Plus, as I under

110010001000 ( 697113 ) writes:

Re: ( Score: 2 )

Well if he donated guitars and liked Star Trek then he must have been a good guy.

110010001000 ( 697113 ) , Monday October 15, 2018 @07:20PM ( #57483078 ) Homepage Journal

Re:And Then? ( Score: 1 )

You forgot he was a big Patent Troll. He won't be missed or remembered.

110010001000 ( 697113 ) , Monday October 15, 2018 @10:28PM ( #57483964 ) Homepage Journal

Re:And Then? ( Score: 2 )

I knew someone would say that. You are right. I won't. But he won't either. He was a patent troll. Oh but: RIP and thoughts and prayers, right? He was a great guy and will be missed.

[Sep 07, 2018] This is the Story of the 1970s Great Calculator Race

Sep 07, 2018 | science.slashdot.org

[Editor's note: all links in the story will lead you to Twitter] : In the 1970s the cost -- and size -- of calculators tumbled. Business tools became toys; as a result prestige tech companies had to rapidly diversify into other products -- or die! This is the story of the 1970s great calculator race... Compact electronic calculators had been around since the mid-1960s, although 'compact' was a relative term. They were serious, expensive tools for business . So it was quite a breakthrough in 1967 when Texas Instruments presented the Cal-Tech: a prototype battery powered 'pocket' calculator using four integrated circuits . It sparked a wave of interest. Canon was one of the first to launch a pocket calculator in 1970. The Pocketronic used Texas Instruments integrated circuits, with calculations printed on a roll of thermal paper. Sharp was also an early producer of pocket calculators. Unlike Canon they used integrated circuits from Rockwell and showed the calculation on a vacuum fluorescent display . The carrying handle was a nice touch!

The next year brought another big leap: the Hewlet-Packard HP35 . Not only did it use a microprocessor it was also the first scientific pocket calculator. Suddenly the slide rule was no longer king; the 35 buttons of the HP35 had taken its crown. The most stylish pocket calculator was undoubtedly the Olivetti Divisumma 18 , designed by Mario Bellini. Its smooth look and soft shape has become something of a tech icon and an inspiration for many designers. It even featured in Space:1999! By 1974 Hewlett Packard had created another first: the HP-65 programmable pocket calculator . Programmes were stored on magnetic cards slotted into the unit. It was even used during the Apollo-Soyuz space mission to make manual course corrections. The biggest problem for pocket calculators was the power drain: LED displays ate up batteries. As LCD displays gained popularity in the late 1970s the size of battery needed began to reduce . The 1972 Sinclair Executive had been the first pocket calculator to use small circular watch batteries , allowing the case to be very thin. Once LCD displays took off watch batteries increasingly became the norm for calculators. Solar power was the next innovation for the calculator: Teal introduced the Photon in 1977, no batteries required or supplied!

But the biggest shake-up of the emerging calculator market came in 1975, when Texas Instruments -- who made the chips for most calculator companies -- decided to produce and sell their own models. As a vertically integrated company Texas Instruments could make and sell calculators at a much lower price than its competitors . Commodore almost went out of business trying to compete: it was paying more for its TI chips than TI was selling an entire calculator for. With prices falling the pocket calculator quickly moved from business tool to gizmo : every pupil, every student, every office worker wanted one, especially when they discovered the digital fun they could have! Calculator games suddenly became a 'thing' , often combining a calculator with a deck of cards to create new games to play. Another popular pastime was finding numbers that spelt rude words if the calculator was turned upside down; the Samsung Secal even gave you a clue to one!

The calculator was quickly evolving into a lifestyle accessory . Hewlett Packard launched the first calculator watch in 1977... Casio launched the first credit card sized calculator in 1978 , and by 1980 the pocket calculator and pocket computer were starting to merge. Peak calculator probably came in 1981, with Kraftwerk's Pocket Calculator released as a cassingle in a calculator-shaped box . Although the heyday of the pocket calculator may be over they are still quite collectable. Older models in good condition with the original packaging can command high prices online. So let's hear it for the pocket calculator: the future in the palm of your hand!

---

Anonymous Coward , Monday September 03, 2018 @10:39PM ( #57248568 )

HP were real engineers ( Score: 3 , Informative)

I have a HP-15C purchased in 1985 and it is still running on the original batteries - 32 years!
That is phenomenal low power design for the technology and knowledge at the time.

mmogilvi ( 685746 ) writes:

Re: ( Score: 3 , Interesting)

I replaced the batteries in my 15c for the first time a couple of years ago. And just to be clear, it has three small non-rechargable button batteries, like you would find in a watch.

cyn1c77 ( 928549 ) , Monday September 03, 2018 @11:58PM ( #57248754 )

Re:HP were real engineers ( Score: 2 )

I have a HP-15C purchased in 1985 and it is still running on the original batteries - 32 years!
That is phenomenal low power design for the technology and knowledge at the time.

That's phenomenal even by today's design standards!

JBMcB ( 73720 ) , Monday September 03, 2018 @11:21PM ( #57248666 )

Olivetti Divisumma 18 ( Score: 3 )

My dad's friend was a gadget hound, and had one of these in the 80's. Not a great machine. The keys were weird and mushy. It had no electronic display. It only had a thermal printer that printed shiny dark gray numbers on shiny light gray paper. In other words, visibility was poor. It looked amazing, though, and you could spill a coke on it and the keys would still work.

Much more impressive but more utilitarian - he had a completely electro-mechanical rotary auto-dial telephone. It took small, hard plastic punch cards you'd put the number on. You'd push the card into a slot on the telephone, and it would feed the card in and out, generating pulses until it got to the number you punched out. Then it would pull the card back in and do it again for the next number until the whole number was dialed. No digital anything, just relays and motors.

fermion ( 181285 ) , Tuesday September 04, 2018 @01:53AM ( #57248998 ) Homepage Journal

chicken or the egg ( Score: 5 , Insightful)

In some ways, the electronic calculator market was created by TI and it's need to sell the new IC. There were not many applications, and one marketable application was the electronic calculator. In some ways it was like live Apple leveraging the microwave for the iPod.

Like the iPod, the TI calculators were not great, but they were very easy to use. The HP calculators were and are beatiful. But ease of use won out.

Another thing that won out was until about a decade ago all TI calculators were very limited. This made them ideal machines for tests. HP calculators could do unit analsys, and since 1990 they had algebra systems, and could even do calculus. This made them the ideal machine for technical students and professionals, but no high school would waste time teaching it because all they care about is filling out bubbles on an answer sheet.

The interesting contemporary issue that I see is that schools are still teaching calculators when really smart phones can do everything and more, especially with apps like Wolfram Alpha. Unless you are a legacy HP user, asking kids to buy a calculator just to boosts TI profits seems very wasteful to me. This is going to change as more tests move to online format, and online resources such as Desmos take over the physical clacultor, but in the meantime the taxpayer is on the hook for millions of dollars a year per large school district just for legacy technology.

Dhericean ( 158757 ) , Tuesday September 04, 2018 @05:01AM ( #57249428 )

Japan and Calculators ( Score: 3 )

An interesting NHK World documentary about Japanese calculator culture and the history of calculators in Japan. I generally watch these at speed = 1.5.

Begin Japanology (13 June 2013) - Calculators [youtube.com]

weilawei ( 897823 ) , Tuesday September 04, 2018 @05:17AM ( #57249468 ) Homepage

No TI-89 Fans Yet? ( Score: 2 )

I love my TI-89. I still use it daily. There's a lot to be said for multiple decades of practice on a calculator. Even the emulator of it on my phone, for when I don't have it handy, isn't the same.

It doesn't need to be particularly fast or do huge calculations--that's what programming something else is for. But nothing beats a good calculator for immediate results. ›

mknewman ( 557587 ) , Tuesday September 04, 2018 @09:31AM ( #57250228 )

TI started in 1972 not 1975 ( Score: 2 )

I had a Datamath in 1973, and a SR-57 programmable (100 steps, 10 memories) in 1975. Those were the days.

Ken Hall ( 40554 ) , Tuesday September 04, 2018 @09:50AM ( #57250316 )

TI Programmer ( Score: 2 )

First calculator that did octal and hex math (also binary). Got one when they came out, cost $50 in 1977. Still have it, still works, although the nicad battery died long ago. In a remarkable show of foresight, TI made the battery pack with a standard 9V battery connector, and provided a special battery door that let you replace the rechargeable battery with a normal 9V. I replaced it with a solar powered Casio that did a bunch more stuff, but the TI still works.

[Mar 27, 2018] The Quest To Find the Longest-Serving Programmer

Notable quotes:

"... the National Museum of Computing ..."

Mar 27, 2018 | developers.slashdot.org

(tnmoc.org) the National Museum of Computing published a blog post in which it tried to find the person who has been programming the longest . At the time, it declared Bill Williams, a 70-year old to be one of the world's most durable programmers, who claimed to have started coding for a living in 1969 and was still doing so at the time of publication. The post has been updated several times over the years, and over the weekend, the TNMC updated it once again. The newest contender is Terry Froggatt of Hampshire, who writes: I can beat claim of your 71-year-old by a couple of years, (although I can't compete with the likes of David Hartley). I wrote my first program for the Elliott 903 in September 1966. Now at the age of 73 I am still writing programs for the Elliott 903! I've just written a 903 program to calculate the Fibonacci numbers. And I've written quite a lot of programs in the years in between, some for the 903 but also a good many in Ada.

[Jan 02, 2008] First Look Perl 5.10 by Scott Gilbertson

Jan 02, 2008 | Wired.com

As most Perl fans are no doubt aware, the Perl Foundation released version 5.10 last month and introduced a number of significant upgrades for the popular programming language. Perl 5.10 is the first significant feature upgrade since the 5.8 release back in 2002.

First the good news, AKA why you should go ahead and upgrade: the major new language features are turned off by default which means you can upgrade without breaking existing scripts, and take advantage of the new features for new scripts. Even cooler is ability to progressively upgrade scripts using the "use" syntax.

For instance, add the line use feature 'switch'; prior to a block of code where you'd like to take advantage of the new switch statement in Perl 5.10 and then turn it off after upgrading that block of code using the statement no feature 'switch';. New features can be enabled by name or as a collective group using the statement use feature ':5.10';.

In addition to the switch statement, there's a new say statement which acts like print() but adds a newline character and a state feature, which enables a new class of variables with very explicit scope control.

But perhaps the most interesting of 5.10's new features is the new 'or' operator, //, which is a "defined or" construct. For instance the following statements are syntactically equivalent:

$foo // $bar defined $foo ? $foo : $bar 

Obviously the first line is much more compact and (I would argue) readable - i.e. is $foo defined? If not, give it the value $bar." You can also add an equal sign like so:

$bar //= $foo; 

Which is the same as writing:

$bar = $foo unless defined $bar; 

Another noteworthy new feature is the smart match operator, which the Perl Foundation explains as "a new kind of comparison, the specifics of which are contextual based on the inputs to the operator." For example, to find if scalar $needle is in array @haystack, simply use the new ~~ operator

if ( $needle ~~ @haystack ) ... 

Perl 5.10 also finally gains support for named regex statements, which means you can avoid the dreaded lines of $1 $2 etc, which often make Perl regex hard to decipher. Finally I might be able to understand what's going on in complex regex scripts like Markdown.

Other improvements include a faster interpreter with a smaller memory footprint, better error messages and more. For full details on the new release check out the notes.

I'll confess I abandoned Perl for Python some time ago, but after playing with 5.10 I may have to rethink that decision, Perl 5.10's new features are definitely worth the upgrade and a must have for anyone who uses Perl on a daily basis.

Recommended Links

Softpanorama Recommended

Top articles

[Dec 01, 2019] Academic Conformism is the road to 1984. - Sic Semper Tyrannis Published on Dec 01, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Sites

Slightly Skeptical View on Larry Wall and Perl

• Perl-related Humor
• Larry Wall Articles and Interviews
• Larry Wall's Artistic License
• Nikolai Bezroukov. Labyrinth of Software Freedom (BSD vs GPL and social aspects of free licensing debate)
  • Labyrinth of Software Freedom. Chapter 1: Social Roots, Complexity and Never Ending Process of Interpretation of GPL
  • Labyrinth of Software Freedom. Ch 2: Social Dynamics of Free Software Licenses in the the context of Program Life Cycle

Perl history

• perldelta - what's new for perl5.004
• perldelta - what's new for perl5.005
• perldelta - what's new for perl v5.6.0
• perldelta 5.8
• perl5100delta - perldoc.perl.org
• perl5101delta - perldoc.perl.org

Other URLs of Interest

This list and all the urls in the timeline can also be found at the Perl Bookmark Database.

Developer Pages

• Perl.com, the mother of all Perl sites.
• cpan.org, the definitive Perl archive.
• The CPAN FAQ.
• The Perl FAQs.
• Perl Documentation.
• Perl Advocacy.
• Perl book reviews and more book reviews.
• A nicely indexed and current Perl reference list
• Another reference list of Perl bookmarks.
• The Perlbug database with web interface. (Thank you Richard Foley)
• The CPAN testers results page.
• The CPAN search page and its companion, WAIT. Both are very useful resources for finding information in CPAN.
• CPAN Search, perldoc.com and more docs .
• ;login Perl articles by Hal Pomeranz between 1993 and 1997.
• Tom Christiansens' PPT Project.
• Proper patching methods as described by Tom Christiansen
• Tom's grab bag of assorted interesting stuff.
• Tom's Perl5 Overview 12.93
• Perl Guts Illustrated by Gisle Aas
• A paper comparing C, C++, Java and Perl.
• The Perl Mailing List Database.
• All the Perl News you can handle.
• mod_perl for Apache. Get it.
• Matt Sergeant's Take23 mod_perl news and info portal.
• Mailing list archive for P5P and many other Perl lists.
• Perl module mechanics page with a lot of good module information and how-tos.
• The Perl FAQ a Day. Tastes great, less filling.
• Bradley Kuhn's online book/tutorial.
• Excellent RFC archive.
• The O'Reilly Network
• Freshmeat's Perl listings.
• O'Reilly's Perl Success Stories which may come in handy to help convince your boss that Perl is useful.
• Want to use the Camel on your web page? O'Reilly has a page detailing the usage of their dromedary friend and trademark.
• A small archive of retroperl.
• Valueclick has a large archive of ancient Perl.

Win32 Perl

• IndigoPerl.
• A Win32 script archive.
• ActiveState, purveyors of ActivePerl.
• Perl for Windows NT How-to.
• Perl for Win32 page that is well done and full of useful information and links.
• MS Services for Unix which include Perl.

MacPerl

• MacPerl FAQ.
• MacPerl Porters.
• MacPerl Book.
• The MacPerl Home Page.

Larry's Speeches and Interviews

• State of the Onion from TPC1.
• State of the Onion from TPC2.
• State of the Onion from TPC3.
• State of the Onion from TPC4.
• Webreview interview.
• A DDJ interview with Larry. Worth reading. (2.98)
• Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast Archive of Larry's talks.
• Larry's Natural Language paper.
• Larry's very own, and very amusing, Geek Code.
• Salon Magazine's "The Joy of Perl". (10.98)
• Feed Magazine's Divine Intervention interview. (2.99)
• Amazon.com inteview with Larry after an XML conference. (4.98)
• Softpanorama Society honors Larry in their OpenSource Hall of Fame.
• The ACM publication Crossroads features and interview with Larry. (12.94)
• Camel Lot #6
• Interview with Paula Gordon during the Atlanta Linux Showcase in October 2000.

Other Timelines, Histories and Archives

• Webreview has a nice OSS '97-'98 timeline.
• Webreview article on Perl and brief history.
• The perlhist pod by Jarkko.
• A brief history of Perl at perl.com.
• News.com has an"Evolution of a Net Community" timeline.
• Forbes Magazine publishes a Linux Timeline.
• A snazzy, if a bit overdone, Java timeline.
• Who is Sun Microsystems.
• A DNS historical timeline.
• Another OpenSource software, Sendmail.
• Eric Raymonds History of Hackerdom.
• A brief, but well done, history of Usenet.
• A brief history of the internet.
• Keith Lynch's net timeline if a bit ecclectic.
• A spiffy graphical timeline at BBN tracing the history from the people who put the "@" in your email.
• GTE has a very interesting telecommunications timeline.
• Ousterhout's history of Tcl/Tk.
• O'Reilly's Perl News Article Archive.
• The Net.legends FAQ.
• The Apache Project describes its roots.
• Debian Linux Project History.
• A statistical history of fetchmail.
• The history of UNIX
• A really cool family tree diagram for Unix.
• A look at Unix Tools and how they helped shape the future as well as the past
• A history of the Macintosh at Stanford.
• The story of the ping program.
• The GUI Timeline and GUI Gallery

OpenSource

• A roundtable discussion hosted by amazon.com discussing OpenSource.
• Another history of the OpenSource movement.
• History of the Open Source Effort.
• Forbes article from May 1999 regarding the OpenSource bandwagon.
• O'Reilly's OpenSource web site.
• O'Reilly's OpenSource biliography.
• The entire text of "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" is available on-line.
• An excellent list of OSS Articles from Feed Magazine. Also a brief timeline.
• Eben Moglen's "Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright", which is a delightful look at OpenSource through the viewpoint of the law.
• Wired Magazine's Tour de Source guide to the Open Source start-ups.
• The Attentions Economy and the Net is an interesting look at the economics of the web and our descreasing attention span.
• Internet, Innovation and Open Source by Ilkka Tuomi
• Homesteading the Noosphere where Eric Raymond examines the hacker culture and emerging Open Source culture.

A Few OpenSource Companies

• Caldera
• Sendmail, Inc.
• Scriptics
• Linuxcare
• Redhat Linux
• Activestate
• Walnut Creek CDROM
• Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
• C2NET
• Cyclades

Perl Conferences

• O'Reilly's Perl Conference
• Yet Another Perl Conference, a.k.a YAPC
• A German Perl Workshop.
• O'Reilly's Japanese Perl/Ruby Con. (cute pun on rubicon :)

General and Miscellaneous

• Got your magnetic Perl kit yet? Get thee to Perl Toys and order one now.
• Nerd Gear has cool JAPH shirts.
• Think Geek offers a Camel JAPH shirt.
• Do you have your Perl Geek Code yet?
• Dr. Dobbs Journal article on Perl from December 1995.
• Neil Stephensen's essay on the evolution of OSs.
• Taken the Perl Purity Test yet?
• The Jargon File.
• Got your Perl Monger shirt and hat yet?
• The Hacker FAQ for the clueless manager.
• Geek Chic hats, etc. with a large portion of the sales going to support OpenSource endeavours.
• Extropia's page of hacks, some of which are written in Perl.

Perl Training and Support

• Stonehenge Consulting Services run by Randal Schwartz.
• Joseph Hall's Perl training.
• Tom Christiansen's Perl Consultancy.
• Sun Education offers "Perl Programming".
• Chip Salzenberg's perlsupport.com offering technical support and solutions for Perl.
• The Perl Clinic operated by ActiveState and The Ingram Group offer professional support on an annual or per incident basis.

Other Useful Perl Pages

• Lincoln Stein's fine web page.
• Mark-Jason Dominus' Perl Paraphernalia page chock full of Perl treats.
• Alligator Descartes Perl page with the DBI page being a special feature.
• Graham Barr's homepage with lots of good information on his modules like IO and libnet.
• Joseph Hall's web page and be sure to check out Innocent Inanimate Objects.
• Malcom Beattie's spot on the web.
• Brent Michalski's perlguy page.
• Pudge's pad.
• Perl & XML page by Michel Rodriguez. Excellent resource.
• Yahoo's Perl site index.
• Dale Bewley's Perl page which is nicely organised.
• Confused about which Perl book to buy? Go to The Perl Book Buying Guide.
• Jonathan Eisenzopf's "Mother of Perl" site. Nice tutorials.
• The Perl Zone.
• Kevin's Perl Script Site.
• The Other Kevin's infotastic page.
• The Perl Shell page.
• Practical Perl Programming tutorial
• Just some guy's Perl page
• japhy's Perl collection.

Sources and Special Thanks

• [HIT] Hobbes' Internet Timeline v4.1
• brian d foy for capturing that most priceless picture of Randal singing Happy Birthday to Perl.

The Timeline of Perl and its Culture ©1999-2001 Elaine Ashton. Permission is granted for use of this document in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes. For commercial uses, please contact the author first. Links to this document are welcome after e-mailing the author with the document URL where the link will appear.

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.

Last modified: June, 06, 2021