Vintage IBM

August 12 is the the 30th aniversary of the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer. A machine that changed the face of personal computing see:

How IBM’s 5150 PC shaped the computer industry

Article entitled:

“Its the oldest still working Seagate drive in the UK”

Seagate reckons it has found the oldest working Seagate disk drive in the UK,  a 28-year-old ST-412 disk drive from 1983.  Here

I remember these, 10 Megabytes and quite expensive at the time but for disk I/O  a significant speedup from a floppy drive.  I may still have one somewhere. I am sure I have the later ST-225 20 Meggers.

On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines is a book by Palm Pilot-inventor Jeff Hawkins with New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee. The book explains Hawkins’ memory-prediction framework theory of the brain and describes some of its consequences. (Times Books: 2004, ISBN 0-8050-7456-2)

I saw Richard Stallman (of Emacs and GNU FSF) at Virginia Tech where he spoke at invitation of the ACM. He spoke on copyright, what he perceived as the problems with it and how he would fix it. (Basically he proposed reducing the copyright term substantially to 10 years, a number he thought about right but was willing to say that it should be tried and adjusted if appropriate). He also advocated dividing the copyrightable works into 3 classes and treating each class differently. The first class were reference works, textbooks and like (things you need to do your job). For these advocated essentially a GPL approach anybody could copy or modify and redistribute. The second class were “impressions”, works of opinion etc. These he would allow free noncommercial distribution but no modification. The third class was entertainment, music, video, art etc. These he would allow free noncommercial distribution but was ambivalent about modification saying there were good arguments to be made for modification and nonmodification (for example to preserve artistic integrity). Obviously he covered more, a few political comments some of which I agreed with and some I did not. Afterwards he sat down, answered questions, during which he took his socks off. All in all an entertaining and thought provoking session which perhaps got off to a slow start.

http://www.jaymoseley.com/hercules/ Hercules an IBM S/370 and ESA/390 Emulator than runs on Intel architecture. Of course it needs an operating system. Some of the older MVS, MVT, VM 370 R6 operating systems are in the public domain, but not the manuals. (Interesting that they are in the public domain perhaps they were not copyrighted at that time because it was believed that software was not copyrightable/patentable?

The second programming language I became proficient in was SNOBOL4 which stood for “StriNg Oriented symBOLic Language” or something similar, a bad case of mangling a name to come up with a cool acronym. SNOBOL4 was a really cool language. It is a string manipulation language with a very powerful pattern representation datatype and pattern matching which is quite a more powerful and easier to use than regular expression such as are used in Perl and grep. Snobol had tables. Tables were like arrays but the “subscript” was a character string instead of an integer. (Called hashes in some other languages). It was an interpreted language implemented as a macro processor and could sometimes be rather slow. Later a true compiler called SPITBOL which stood for ‘SPeedy ImplemenTation of SnoBOL” another name mangled to get a cool acronym. Spitbol produced quite speedy programs. Snobol inspire several follow ons, SNOCONE was a preprocessor for C that implemented Snobol. An implementation of Snobol patterns in Python called SnoPyl. The developer of Snobol, Ralph Griswold went on to implement another language Icon Icon never enjoyed the same degree of usage as Snobol probably because while it implemented a number of improvements over Snobol (more modern control structures for example), it implemented a different pattern string manipulation system. This pattern implementation may have had theoretical advantages over that of Snobol, but in practice it never became as wide spread as that of Snobol. I remember seeing recruiting ads for the NSA looking for CS majors/programmers with knowledge of Snobol, thinking about it Snobol would certainly be a natural to use for some aspects of code breaking.

Programming language Inventor or Serial killer? A very well done humorous quiz http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/?

I have often thought about a “killer” programming language but this quiz is something different. You wonder what would make someone think of doing this, but it is well done.

I am something of a computer nerd and I understand why many computer types find computers more tractable than people. ( The “no social skills” syndrome.) Computers behave in more or less predictable ways (though at the moment you might not understand why, but deep down there is a perfectly logical explanation for their behavior) and usually if you spend enough time you can find the cause of the unexpected behavior. Interpersonal relationships, particularly ones with a strong emotional content, often degenerate in to a state in which it seems no amount of time will enable you to develop a “fix” or a deep and correct understanding of what went wrong. People, especially some people are just too variable (perhaps the are just a too complex system with many inputs and chaotic (in the mathematical sense) behavior). I have seen several times two seemingly perfectly reasonable behaving persons who ended up in a divorce somehow transform to irrational bitter enemies doing down right hateful things to one another, I have also seen this happen with only one of the persons are primarily behaving badly, and the other person occasionally with justifiable anger which resulted in seemingly a disproportionate response from the other person. The on going saga with Brittany Spears seems to be a case in point. I am not really sure why I have been following it, probably because it has been featured prominently on google news. A good description of the latest “Spears was in a total meltdow” is a case in point, she has been behaving bizarrely, if you believe the news, and in many respects her own worst enemy. While there apparently was a lot of mutual unpleasantness, (Her head shaving episode was apparently precipitated by Kevin Federline telling her that she would lose custody based on upon her drug use which could be proved by a hair test). To me looking from the outside her behavior and logic seem inexplicable and no amount time spent will enable me (or probably anyone) else to find a “perfectly logical explanation” for her behavior and certainly not a “bug” fix.

I am making the transition from plain html to the WordPress blogging software. I pretty much knew from the beginning that some sort of blogging software would be necessary but I started out coding it in html with the thought I would change later.

It was partly a “real programmers code html in vi” mentality but mostly because there were many blogging software packages and I hadn’t decided which one was the “best” for my purposes and my environment. In the end it finally came down to WordPress versus Moveable Type. The decision to go with WordPress was given an extra impetus when a webhosting customer decided to use it more as a Content Management System rather than a blogging tool see http://www.thechildrensgarden.info. And lastly a decision between WordPress vs WordPress-MU where WordPress-MU is a single multiuser installation implemented sitewide. I went with a straight WordPress (per website) implementation for now. One thing I noticed is that WordPress’s spell checker caught a few spelling errors that I had missed coding straight html in vi.

The IBM 650 was a vacuum tube based computer of the 1950s to early 1960s vintage. They were decimal arithmetic based computers with a small rotating drum memory. These were largely business computers and most often used for accounting and the like but there existed a Fortran implementation for them. The 650 was really IBM’s first successful (as in made a lot of money) computer. My connection with them is rather tenuous. Virginia Tech had one prior to my becoming involved with computing there. When I was just beginning to learn about computing they had switched to an IBM 7040 and IBM 1401. (I believe there was an IBM 1620 prior to the IBM 7040.) The IBM 1401 was largely the successor to the IBM 650 in IBM’s product line. There were still manuals, programs, and miscellaneous equipment related to the IBM 650 at Virginia Tech when I started using and working with computers there. I am very surprised that someone still had an IBM 650 outside a museum given its age.