The VAX processor in 1978 had five operating modes, and putting aside PDP-11 compatibility mode, those were in the onion-layer model User, Executive, Supervisor, and Kernel. This was the first hardware processor to put into play the concepts we use today *EXCEPT* that it was totally enforced by hardware.
As with all such history this is not correct. The VAX protection rings enforced by hardware were designed (and acknowledged by the developers) as a somewhat simplified version of that used in the amazing MULTICS system. MULTICS didn't sell as many processors as the VAX, but it was certainly "put in play" in the market.
Leaving work systems out of it, First home computer was my PDP-11/73 running BSD Unix 2.8/2.9. Dialup on a 1200 Baud modem and could connect through the TAC to the arpanet for FTP and telnet access. Never did configure email. This was shared between my wife and me. Then came usenet with UUCP. Now I had email and bunches of newsgroups on netnews and easy connection to the university's Vax. Finally, TCP/IP came along and the 11/73 gave way to a sequence of Intel PCs running Windows initially and then Linux as it became available. By then we had multiple PCs, one for each family member sharing the now-56Kbaud modem through my machine. There were a few moves into Windows for example as the youngster seemed to need something special for school. But Linux/Unix has always done what I need better than the offerings from microsoft. So now I am posting from a Fedora-based system running on Intel. A low-power system does gatewaying, local DNS, firewalling, etc through the DSL line for a variety of desktops, laptops, Ipads, Rasberry Pi's for playing...
Ok, Damn kids get off of my lawn. I started C on a PDP-11-40 running Unix V6 in 1976. Over the years I have written, read, and re factored probably millions of lines of C. One more common error seen over the years is to forget the braces around an if-then clause or a while statement or some such.
while (something is needed)
do something;
do something 2; do stuff after the loop;...
The funny thing is that the braces may have been forgotten, but the indentation was usually correct for the intent of the code. Python simply recognised this issue and made the indentation master rather than the braces because the indentation was correct more often than the braces.
There is a wonderful exhibit currently at the Albuquerque Museum of Natural History showing how multi-spectral analysis was used on the Mona Lisa. There are at least three different layers and the technique allows analysis of pigment/varnish types and their ageing.
The big news here seems to be not so much the particular Picasso painting analyzed, but that there is a newer technology that is more portable and so will allow more analysis of old paintings.
I highly recommend the Di Vinci Mona Lisa exhibit to everyone interested in this technology either in Albuquerque or as it moves around the country. I saw it last week as it opened in Albuquerque and was fascinated.
First: I subscribe to one of the dish TV services. They rave about how great they are offering me 180-something channels. Of which I can find something to watch on exactly four. The rest are sales blurbs (lots of sales blurbs) or religious pandering for not-my-religion or Spanish language or ancient re-runs. (sorry, no offence meant, but I don't speak Spanish. Now where are the German language channels? But I digress). So I am paying all this money to watch my local city's news at 9:00, weather, an occasional old movie without commercials and re-runs of the Big Bang Theory. I don't care about the other 180-something chunks of wasted bandwidth. Second: I remember the early 1980s when cable was first starting to penetrate the markets. Their big claim was that rather than all the commercials on broadcast TV I only pay a single monthly fee and watch commercial-free television. Then the marketeers discovered that they once again had a bunch of captive eyeballs. So I surf past a movie that I should like. It's theatre length was 72 minutes and it runs from 6:00 to 9:00. Three hours. guess what they fill the extra time with?
Cable and satellite TV are dying because they are dinosaurs milking an old abusive business model and not understanding how the world has changed.
I attended the dress rehearsal Thursday Evening. I am normally not a fan of the modern "let's see how discordant we can be" operas. I prefer Mozart, Pucinni, et. al. However, this is an exception. The music blends live orchestra with electronic music in a good way. The sets use digital projects that managed to match the moods of the story well. I was uncertain at the start about the jumping back and forth in time to thread together bits of the story, but by the end I was very impressed with how well they had woven the stories together. They didn't try to sugar-coat the dark side of Jobs. And they left a very complete feeling of having viewed the evolution of a unique human being. The soprano as his wife did well and the bass mentor/monk was delightful. All in all, I give it a nine out of ten. I think Mozart would have polished the music just a bit more, but I would pay to see it again.
Although many don't see it, America leads in freedom of personal aviation. I can use my aircraft just as I use my car. I have proper FAA licenses and medical certificates. I am instrument rated and can fly with the same rules as the airlines. I can also get in my plane and go camping at a remote strip or visit a restaurant in the next town's airport without requesting permission from anyone just as I would with my car. If I fly into big central airports following the same rules as the airlines then I can and do coordinate with the proper FAA officials. My use of these facilities is fully funded by taxes levied on the aviation gasoline that I burn n the plane. The idea here is that as a free American I can choose my mode of transportation within the nation's transportation system on the same basis as anyone else, private or corporate. For the most part, my aircraft is like my car.
With a switch from costs coming from taxes on aviation gasoline to "user fees" for various specific operations and a switch from a government control system to a private NGO the freedom to use an aircraft much like a car for personal transportation will mostly disappear. This is exactly what has happened in (e.g.) Europe where(for example) fees for each takeoff and landing effectively stop practice at small airports. Then a governing board that will inevitably be dominated by the airlines will set the rules so that those pesky private aircraft will be effectively gone.
If you like this idea, then please accept the same for our highways. Each time you drive to the store for some milk, every time you take a weekend at the lake, you must first file a "drive plan" with a corporate board run by the trucking industry. Then you will give a credit card number so that your driveway exit, road use, and parking use fees will be automatically paid for the trip.
And if you think that this is tin-foil-hat stuff, please look at the rules for private aircraft in Europe and the rest of the world. This is the death of one more freedom that we currently have in this great country.
The headline is more general than the article. The title just says "the most influential brain scientists of the modern era". "Influential" depends on the context and the target audience.
The article does clarify in its first line "influential neuroscience research" and thus the measure of number of citations is probably reasonable within that specific community.
But the article headline seems to imply a more general use of "influential" that implied to me "in the general population", Thus before reading the article itself I was assuming that Amy Farrra-Fowler would have to rank very high. She has probably done more to bring knowledge of brain science to the general population than all the rest of the cited authors in the paper itself. If it is general awareness of brain science as implied by the headline, she would probably rank number one.
But then I had to break the primary rule of Slashdot and go read the actual paper...
GIMP can handle the pictures. Now FrameMaker would be cool.
Way back when... I was a heavy Framemaker user on our Sun Workstations. I was bringing in Linux on 486s. I served as a beta test site for Adobe Framemaker on Linux. It worked flawlessly and I was ready to fork over similar license fees as I paid on my Sun Workstations. Then Adobe axed the release with some statement about how Linux users only wanted free stuff. My take away was, and remains, that Adobe is the most anti-linux shop out there. Way more of a problem than Microsoft.
Oh, The joys of a shelf full of old computer books. DEC transitioned MUMPS from the 18-bit line onto the PDP-11s. I think that the majority of Mumps systems were on the 11s and then moved to VAX as it came on the scene. I can find no mention in the PDP-8 books. If MUMPS was moved there it was not a standard DEC product. Likewise, the PDP-10 books don't cover MUMPS. I would assume that it was moved to the 36-bit machines, but have no reference. Does anyone out ther have some record of MUMPS on the PDP-10??
The DEC PDP-11 reference manual set had one volume on software systems for the PDP-11s. I pulled the 1975 and 1980 versions.
DEC PDP-11 Software Handbook, Copyright 1975 Section II: PDP-11 Operating Systems Chapter 1: Cassette Programming System CAPS-11 Chapter 2: Foreground/Background RT-11 Chapter 3: Resource Sharing Timesharing System RSTS/E Chapter 4: Multi-user Database Managemetn System MUMPS-11 Chapter 5: RSX-11 Chapter 6: IAS
The intro to MUMPS describes it as: A small to large sized timesharing system that offers a unique fast access data storage and retrieval system for large database processing.
The MUMPS chapter is 26 pages long with a reasonable amount of reference detail for the time. The database aspect was the unique selling point.
By the 1980 version of the same DEC PDP-11 Software Handbook, MUMPS had moved to Chapter 8: Digital Standard MUMPS. The intro section describes: DSM-11 Digital Standard MUMPS operating system for PDP-11 processors. A small to large sized timesharing system that offers a unique fast-access data storage and retrieval system for large data base processing. Originally designed for medical record management and now available for similar data base applications.
Chapter 8 of the 1980 Software Handbook has a more prose-like description than the reference-manual-like 1975 chapter. The new version has a good description of hospital medical record processing and claims over 500 major hospitals using MUMPS.
So it was under active development and use through the 70s on the PDP-11s. With that base it is not surprising that MUMPS is still in use.
Them: Hi This is Microsoft. You have a problem on your desktop Me: Oh! Wow! how do we fix it? Them: Do you see your START button? Me: (Looking over my Gnome Desktop on my Fedora workstation...) No. Them: Just look on you lower left. Me: I have ACTIVITIES on the upper Left. Them: That must be it. Pull down the menu from that START Button. Me: OK Them: Do you see the RUN item Me: No...
And they get more and more frustrated by this looser who can't seem to work the START menu. I really try to follow their instructions. After all they said that they had analyzed my machine and knew exactly how to fix it. They MUST know what they are doing then. You mean that, maybe, possibly, thay were not completely truthfull???
Albuquerque has had problems recently with police shooting a homeless man and their lapel cameras show something that appears to be a real unjustified use of force.
Now that there is loads of bad press from the released videos, the last couple of "incidents" have been plagued with ummm... Camera Malfunctions! That's it. The cameras just malfunctioned and didn't work. We just don't understand it. Sorry, but we don't have any video of that last shooting...
A really good idea, but the devil is in the details.
Let's take this thread, pull on it, and see how the sweater unravels...
While a few nut cases shooting up schools grab headlines, the majority of gun crime is committed related to drugs.
If you have the turf around school A and I have the turf around school B and we have a conflict on who sells on the streets separating our areas, then my only recourse is to grab the AK47s, jump in the pimp-mobile and go shoot up your street hoping to take out you, my rival. Of course, since our only education in firearm use is watching Die Hard movies, it is not surprising that we miss our rival drug lord and kill two dogs, the toddler next door, and three potted begonias on the neighbour's porch.
If drugs were decriminalized then we could lawyer up and take each other to court like civilised businessmen.
Gun violence would decline and the related gap in the political discourse related to guns would be, at least, tightened in scope.
The FAA requires up-to-date charts appropriate for the routes being flown. The FAA has approved these as legal substitutes for printed charts as long as they are current (at Least IPads are, I assume Delta will be getting approval for these things).
So unless they are also carrying the "38 pounds" of paper charts, these things ARE flight critical devices by definition.
This was many old-school programmers' first exposure to computers as entertainment. For example, both my wife and I recall playing it on TI SilentWriters (paper output plus an acoustic modem) when we were kids. Even more than Space Wars, which was written at least a year later and only ran on much less common hardware, this was the start of computer gaming.
There is a more compelling reason beyond pure entertainment that speaks to the original question of relevance to computer science and software engineering.
I was an early player of Adventure on a PDP-10. At that time all software, even in languages like Fortran, were specific to a single architecture thorough non-standard libraries, internal use of architectural features, etc. Adventure was the FIRST system that was valuable enough (for whatever reasons) that it was ported to practically everything out there. It was neat at the time to be at some trade show, go to the Data General or Interdata booth and find Adventure running as a demo.
Today we take portability of Linux, Android, C or python or Perl programs, or practically anything else as a given. It is difficult for those not there at the time to appreciate just how different this was in a world of universal walled gardens. But at the time Adventure was unique and, I contend, worthy of study for just that reason.
Addison Wesley 1976. It showed the Unix Philosophy to a larger audience than Version 6 could reach at the time. Best programming book ever if you want to go for pragmatic influence rather than computer science. It also came with the ability to get the code. While the code is now dated, the philosophy is still leading edge. And lots of us played with that code.
Ah the memories! Fortran was still ubiquitous. It made Fortran usable. Kind of makes me want to go dig up RATFOR and do something...
The whole point of Microsoft developing.net was Microsoft trying to embrace-extend Java with Microsoft-only bits and Sun suing Microsoft over use of the name "Java". Microsoft took their marbles and went off to play in their own yard creating.net.
The only difference here is that Sun sued over calling something "Java" that wasn't exactly Java. Oracle is doing something a bit deeper in that they are saying that Google can't fork the language even if they call it something different.
But Java has already been forked into "real-java" vs ".net/mono/etc". If this suit were being done in some dream world where a still-existing Sun were suing Microsoft over the Java-like structure of.net, then I think the perception would be quite different than Oracle vs Google. the real question here is how much control software patents give over a language.
Superintendent James Hayes sees the technology as an essential move to prepare kids for the future. The School Committee approved the move last year, and Hayes said he's getting the news out now so families can prepare. 'We have one platform,' Hayes said. 'And that's going to be the Mac.'"
...and I know how to turn on the camera so I can watch the children getting ready for bed... Ummm I mean in case the computer gets stolen...
I didn't vote for Obama, hell I didn't even vote. Crap like this is why.
You figured Obama would pull some "crap", so you didn't oppose him, despite having a consequence- and cost-free way of doing that? I fail to follow your logic here.
"Yes we can!" - take over your Internets?
Well, since it seems that his opponents can't even be bothered to haul their arse a few blocks over to the closest voting place... yeah, I guess he can.
Let me clarify that. You didn't have to stand against the Persian army with your 299 comrades.
Yet
You didn't have to engage in sabotage against the Nazi army in occupied France.
Yet
You didn't have to express a political opinion that could get you fired. All you had to do was haul your ass a few blocks away to cast a vote that could not be traced back to you.
And the longer you refuse to haul your sorry ass down to vote, the closer the "Yets" get.
Slashdot Mirror
Last night I saw upon the stair
A Little man who wasn't there.
I saw him there again today.
I wish, I wish, he'd go away.
The VAX processor in 1978 had five operating modes, and putting aside PDP-11 compatibility mode, those were in the onion-layer model User, Executive, Supervisor, and Kernel. This was the first hardware processor to put into play the concepts we use today *EXCEPT* that it was totally enforced by hardware.
As with all such history this is not correct. The VAX protection rings enforced by hardware were designed (and acknowledged by the developers) as a somewhat simplified version of that used in the amazing MULTICS system. MULTICS didn't sell as many processors as the VAX, but it was certainly "put in play" in the market.
Leaving work systems out of it,
First home computer was my PDP-11/73 running BSD Unix 2.8/2.9. Dialup on a 1200 Baud modem and could connect through the TAC to the arpanet for FTP and telnet access. Never did configure email. This was shared between my wife and me. Then came usenet with UUCP. Now I had email and bunches of newsgroups on netnews and easy connection to the university's Vax. Finally, TCP/IP came along and the 11/73 gave way to a sequence of Intel PCs running Windows initially and then Linux as it became available. By then we had multiple PCs, one for each family member sharing the now-56Kbaud modem through my machine. There were a few moves into Windows for example as the youngster seemed to need something special for school. But Linux/Unix has always done what I need better than the offerings from microsoft. So now I am posting from a Fedora-based system running on Intel. A low-power system does gatewaying, local DNS, firewalling, etc through the DSL line for a variety of desktops, laptops, Ipads, Rasberry Pi's for playing...
I wonder what I will be running tomorrow?
Ok, Damn kids get off of my lawn. I started C on a PDP-11-40 running Unix V6 in 1976. Over the years I have written, read, and re factored probably millions of lines of C. One more common error seen over the years is to forget the braces around an if-then clause or a while statement or some such.
while (something is needed) ...
do something;
do something 2;
do stuff after the loop;
The funny thing is that the braces may have been forgotten, but the indentation was usually correct for the intent of the code. Python simply recognised this issue and made the indentation master rather than the braces because the indentation was correct more often than the braces.
I love C, but Python got this bit correct.
There is a wonderful exhibit currently at the Albuquerque Museum of Natural History showing how multi-spectral analysis was used on the Mona Lisa. There are at least three different layers and the technique allows analysis of pigment/varnish types and their ageing.
The big news here seems to be not so much the particular Picasso painting analyzed, but that there is a newer technology that is more portable and so will allow more analysis of old paintings.
I highly recommend the Di Vinci Mona Lisa exhibit to everyone interested in this technology either in Albuquerque or as it moves around the country. I saw it last week as it opened in Albuquerque and was fascinated.
First:
I subscribe to one of the dish TV services. They rave about how great they are offering me 180-something channels. Of which I can find something to watch on exactly four. The rest are sales blurbs (lots of sales blurbs) or religious pandering for not-my-religion or Spanish language or ancient re-runs. (sorry, no offence meant, but I don't speak Spanish. Now where are the German language channels? But I digress). So I am paying all this money to watch my local city's news at 9:00, weather, an occasional old movie without commercials and re-runs of the Big Bang Theory. I don't care about the other 180-something chunks of wasted bandwidth.
Second:
I remember the early 1980s when cable was first starting to penetrate the markets. Their big claim was that rather than all the commercials on broadcast TV I only pay a single monthly fee and watch commercial-free television. Then the marketeers discovered that they once again had a bunch of captive eyeballs. So I surf past a movie that I should like. It's theatre length was 72 minutes and it runs from 6:00 to 9:00. Three hours. guess what they fill the extra time with?
Cable and satellite TV are dying because they are dinosaurs milking an old abusive business model and not understanding how the world has changed.
I attended the dress rehearsal Thursday Evening.
I am normally not a fan of the modern "let's see how discordant we can be" operas. I prefer Mozart, Pucinni, et. al.
However, this is an exception. The music blends live orchestra with electronic music in a good way. The sets use digital projects that managed to match the moods of the story well. I was uncertain at the start about the jumping back and forth in time to thread together bits of the story, but by the end I was very impressed with how well they had woven the stories together. They didn't try to sugar-coat the dark side of Jobs. And they left a very complete feeling of having viewed the evolution of a unique human being.
The soprano as his wife did well and the bass mentor/monk was delightful. All in all, I give it a nine out of ten. I think Mozart would have polished the music just a bit more, but I would pay to see it again.
OK, I tried
(first '(A B C))
and it came out:
"Car Quote A B C Damn kids get off of my lawn."
I hate getting old.
Although many don't see it, America leads in freedom of personal aviation. I can use my aircraft just as I use my car. I have proper FAA licenses and medical certificates. I am instrument rated and can fly with the same rules as the airlines. I can also get in my plane and go camping at a remote strip or visit a restaurant in the next town's airport without requesting permission from anyone just as I would with my car. If I fly into big central airports following the same rules as the airlines then I can and do coordinate with the proper FAA officials. My use of these facilities is fully funded by taxes levied on the aviation gasoline that I burn n the plane. The idea here is that as a free American I can choose my mode of transportation within the nation's transportation system on the same basis as anyone else, private or corporate. For the most part, my aircraft is like my car.
With a switch from costs coming from taxes on aviation gasoline to "user fees" for various specific operations and a switch from a government control system to a private NGO the freedom to use an aircraft much like a car for personal transportation will mostly disappear. This is exactly what has happened in (e.g.) Europe where(for example) fees for each takeoff and landing effectively stop practice at small airports.
Then a governing board that will inevitably be dominated by the airlines will set the rules so that those pesky private aircraft will be effectively gone.
If you like this idea, then please accept the same for our highways. Each time you drive to the store for some milk, every time you take a weekend at the lake, you must first file a "drive plan" with a corporate board run by the trucking industry. Then you will give a credit card number so that your driveway exit, road use, and parking use fees will be automatically paid for the trip.
And if you think that this is tin-foil-hat stuff, please look at the rules for private aircraft in Europe and the rest of the world.
This is the death of one more freedom that we currently have in this great country.
Asimov clearly covered this ground in his brilliant paper "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline".
Nothing to see here. Move on.
The headline is more general than the article. The title just says "the most influential brain scientists of the modern era". "Influential" depends on the context and the target audience.
The article does clarify in its first line "influential neuroscience research" and thus the measure of number of citations is probably reasonable within that specific community.
But the article headline seems to imply a more general use of "influential" that implied to me "in the general population", Thus before reading the article itself I was assuming that Amy Farrra-Fowler would have to rank very high. She has probably done more to bring knowledge of brain science to the general population than all the rest of the cited authors in the paper itself. If it is general awareness of brain science as implied by the headline, she would probably rank number one.
But then I had to break the primary rule of Slashdot and go read the actual paper...
GIMP can handle the pictures. Now FrameMaker would be cool.
Way back when... I was a heavy Framemaker user on our Sun Workstations. I was bringing in Linux on 486s. I served as a beta test site for Adobe Framemaker on Linux. It worked flawlessly and I was ready to fork over similar license fees as I paid on my Sun Workstations. Then Adobe axed the release with some statement about how Linux users only wanted free stuff. My take away was, and remains, that Adobe is the most anti-linux shop out there. Way more of a problem than Microsoft.
Oh, The joys of a shelf full of old computer books.
DEC transitioned MUMPS from the 18-bit line onto the PDP-11s. I think that the majority of Mumps systems were on the 11s and then moved to VAX as it came on the scene. I can find no mention in the PDP-8 books. If MUMPS was moved there it was not a standard DEC product. Likewise, the PDP-10 books don't cover MUMPS. I would assume that it was moved to the 36-bit machines, but have no reference. Does anyone out ther have some record of MUMPS on the PDP-10??
The DEC PDP-11 reference manual set had one volume on software systems for the PDP-11s.
I pulled the 1975 and 1980 versions.
DEC PDP-11 Software Handbook, Copyright 1975
Section II: PDP-11 Operating Systems
Chapter 1: Cassette Programming System CAPS-11
Chapter 2: Foreground/Background RT-11
Chapter 3: Resource Sharing Timesharing System RSTS/E
Chapter 4: Multi-user Database Managemetn System MUMPS-11
Chapter 5: RSX-11
Chapter 6: IAS
The intro to MUMPS describes it as: A small to large sized timesharing system that offers a unique fast access data storage and retrieval system for large database processing.
The MUMPS chapter is 26 pages long with a reasonable amount of reference detail for the time. The database aspect was the unique selling point.
By the 1980 version of the same DEC PDP-11 Software Handbook, MUMPS had moved to Chapter 8: Digital Standard MUMPS.
The intro section describes:
DSM-11 Digital Standard MUMPS operating system for PDP-11 processors.
A small to large sized timesharing system that offers a unique fast-access data storage and retrieval system for large data base processing. Originally designed for medical record management and now available for similar data base applications.
Chapter 8 of the 1980 Software Handbook has a more prose-like description than the reference-manual-like 1975 chapter. The new version has a good description of hospital medical record processing and claims over 500 major hospitals using MUMPS.
So it was under active development and use through the 70s on the PDP-11s.
With that base it is not surprising that MUMPS is still in use.
Them: Hi This is Microsoft. You have a problem on your desktop
Me: Oh! Wow! how do we fix it?
Them: Do you see your START button?
Me: (Looking over my Gnome Desktop on my Fedora workstation...) No.
Them: Just look on you lower left.
Me: I have ACTIVITIES on the upper Left.
Them: That must be it. Pull down the menu from that START Button.
Me: OK
Them: Do you see the RUN item
Me: No...
And they get more and more frustrated by this looser who can't seem to work the START menu.
I really try to follow their instructions.
After all they said that they had analyzed my machine and knew exactly how to fix it. They MUST know what they are doing then.
You mean that, maybe, possibly, thay were not completely truthfull???
Albuquerque has had problems recently with police shooting a homeless man and their lapel cameras show something that appears to be a real unjustified use of force.
Now that there is loads of bad press from the released videos, the last couple of "incidents" have been plagued with ummm... Camera Malfunctions! That's it. The cameras just malfunctioned and didn't work. We just don't understand it. Sorry, but we don't have any video of that last shooting...
A really good idea, but the devil is in the details.
Let's take this thread, pull on it, and see how the sweater unravels...
While a few nut cases shooting up schools grab headlines, the majority of gun crime is committed related to drugs.
If you have the turf around school A and I have the turf around school B and we have a conflict on who sells on the streets separating our areas, then my only recourse is to grab the AK47s, jump in the pimp-mobile and go shoot up your street hoping to take out you, my rival. Of course, since our only education in firearm use is watching Die Hard movies, it is not surprising that we miss our rival drug lord and kill two dogs, the toddler next door, and three potted begonias on the neighbour's porch.
If drugs were decriminalized then we could lawyer up and take each other to court like civilised businessmen.
Gun violence would decline and the related gap in the political discourse related to guns would be, at least, tightened in scope.
Mush of our current gun violence and thus the
Sorry, Wrong!
The FAA requires up-to-date charts appropriate for the routes being flown. The FAA has approved these as legal substitutes for printed charts as long as they are current (at Least IPads are, I assume Delta will be getting approval for these things).
So unless they are also carrying the "38 pounds" of paper charts, these things ARE flight critical devices by definition.
Adventure, a.k.a. Colossal Cave, by Crowther and Woods (extended by others).
http://rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html
This was many old-school programmers' first exposure to computers as entertainment. For example, both my wife and I recall playing it on TI SilentWriters (paper output plus an acoustic modem) when we were kids. Even more than Space Wars, which was written at least a year later and only ran on much less common hardware, this was the start of computer gaming.
There is a more compelling reason beyond pure entertainment that speaks to the original question of relevance to computer science and software engineering.
I was an early player of Adventure on a PDP-10. At that time all software, even in languages like Fortran, were specific to a single architecture thorough non-standard libraries, internal use of architectural features, etc. Adventure was the FIRST system that was valuable enough (for whatever reasons) that it was ported to practically everything out there. It was neat at the time to be at some trade show, go to the Data General or Interdata booth and find Adventure running as a demo.
Today we take portability of Linux, Android, C or python or Perl programs, or practically anything else as a given. It is difficult for those not there at the time to appreciate just how different this was in a world of universal walled gardens. But at the time Adventure was unique and, I contend, worthy of study for just that reason.
And now that Aaron Swartz is gone, this is a wonderful way to identify the next targets...
I joke that the inward-facing crowd might soon call it “Free/Libre Open Source Hardware” or FLOSHW.
That's GNU/FLOSHW...
SLS on Floppies
Slackware
RedHat
Fedora
Addison Wesley 1976.
It showed the Unix Philosophy to a larger audience than Version 6 could reach at the time.
Best programming book ever if you want to go for pragmatic influence rather than computer science.
It also came with the ability to get the code. While the code is now dated, the philosophy is still leading edge. And lots of us played with that code.
Ah the memories! Fortran was still ubiquitous. It made Fortran usable. Kind of makes me want to go dig up RATFOR and do something...
The whole point of Microsoft developing .net was Microsoft trying to embrace-extend Java with Microsoft-only bits and Sun suing Microsoft over use of the name .net.
"Java". Microsoft took their marbles and went off to play in their own yard creating
The only difference here is that Sun sued over calling something "Java" that wasn't exactly Java. Oracle is doing something a bit deeper in that they are saying that Google can't fork the language even if they call it something different.
But Java has already been forked into "real-java" vs ".net/mono/etc". If this suit were being done in some dream world where a still-existing Sun were suing Microsoft over the Java-like structure of .net, then I think the perception would be quite different than Oracle vs Google. the real question here is how much control software patents give over a language.
Superintendent James Hayes sees the technology as an essential move to prepare kids for the future. The School Committee approved the move last year, and Hayes said he's getting the news out now so families can prepare. 'We have one platform,' Hayes said. 'And that's going to be the Mac.'"
You figured Obama would pull some "crap", so you didn't oppose him, despite having a consequence- and cost-free way of doing that? I fail to follow your logic here.
Well, since it seems that his opponents can't even be bothered to haul their arse a few blocks over to the closest voting place... yeah, I guess he can.
Let me clarify that. You didn't have to stand against the Persian army with your 299 comrades.
Yet
You didn't have to engage in sabotage against the Nazi army in occupied France.
Yet
You didn't have to express a political opinion that could get you fired. All you had to do was haul your ass a few blocks away to cast a vote that could not be traced back to you.
And the longer you refuse to haul your sorry ass down to vote, the closer the "Yets" get.