Vintage IBM

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.

The IBM PC and particularly the later IBM PC AT (and PS/2s ) had really well designed keyboard particularly compared to many of its competitors. I believe the explanation is the IBM had a tremendous amount of experience with typewriters (the IBM Selectric typewriters with the interchangeable spherical typeball elements (”golf ball”) were dominant in business and government offices for many years, apparently justly.) IBM also had a lot of experience in keyboards in several generations of CRT displays, 2260, 327Xs, the Displaywriter, and shortly before the IBM PC 5150 was introduced, a product called the Datamaster, a small business computer which shares some design elements with the IBM PC.

The PCs keyboard wasn’t quite perfect but it was pretty good, both in layout, and in presence of PF (Program Function) keys. A feature I think they got from the 327X CRT displays. The keyboards were solid, reliable, gave a positive tactile and audio feedback hen a key was pressed, which is important for a touch typist. The IBM PC AT introduced in 1984 improved the keyboard even more. The “enhanced” version of these keyboards ere called the Model M.
The AT changed the electrical interface so that the “AT” keyboards were not compatible with the PC/PC XT keyboard (There were some keyboards with PC/AT compatibility switch I am not sure if these were made by IBM or a 3rd party). The AT keyboard was carried over nto the PS/2 family with not much change other than changing the connector to a PS/2 mini-DIN connector. There are a large number f models and variants. Sometime in the process IBM spun off its typewriter (and small scale printer) division located in Lexington Kentucky, which became a company called Lexmark. Many Model M variants were made by Lexmark over the years, eventually the keyboard business was sold to a company called Unicomp which continued to make variants of the Model M. The Model M keyboards are still sought after today by cognoscenti and people who keyboard a lot, because of their superior typing characteristics and reliability. Model M keyboards appear fairly frequently on Ebay because of this demand. I am typing this on a 20 year old Model M Part No 1391401 made Nov 24, 1987 (It’s hooked to a keyboad video mouse (KVM) switch box and I use it on 4 different computers, none of them made by IBM.) For some people the presence of a good keyboard was an important selling point for the IBM PC and successors over their competition.

The first “Personal Computer” I had was the IBM PC 5150, though I had worked with “mini” computers before such as the PDP 5, (yes the PDP-5 a predecessor to the PDP-8), the PDP-8, and PDP-11, and played with the IBM 5100 computer, primarily the APL version. I also read the famous Popular Electronics MITS Altair issue and followed the S100 bus machines and then the Apple II PC, read Byte etc but I didn’t purchase one as the main frames had more allure. IBM announced the 5150 PC in August of 1981, and shortly there after I saw a presentation and demonstration at a IBM user group meeting (SHARE) in I believe Chicago. I was so impressed that I attended the demonstration and question and answer session twice (it was scheduled multiple times), I believe that several of the original developers were present. There were several software options announced including a version of CPM. (Despite the famaous story of Digital Research taking the IBM nondisclosure agreement and changing IBM to Digital Research and “disclosee or whatever” to IBM and IBM refusing to sign). IBM announced a CPM-86 version with the IBM PC, and also the UCSD D-PASCAL system in addition to PC-DOS. I wish I could say immediately recognized that DOS was the way to go, but that was not the case. However to me, it was clear the hardware was a winner but it wasn’t clear to me which operating environment was going to prevail. If I remember correctly DOS was by far the cheaper of the three and I suspect that had as much or more to do with its eventual dominance than anything else. One feature about the IBM PC 5150 that impressed me was the nominal 1 Megabyte address space. True, as it later became clear only 640K (or perhaps somewhat more) was user usable. For the time this was an impressive amount of memory and the major thing I found lacking in most if not all of the then existing personal computers. For comparison the IBM 370/155 mainframe had a maximum physically installable RAM of two million bytes.

This is a blog dedicated to random observations on computing, computers  (Vintage IBM or otherwise), Life, the Universe and everything to do with technology (with apologies to Douglas Adams).