I'd be somewhat careful with keyboards and potential repetitive strain problems. A physical setup that may work for one person may be difficult for another, particularly if the person has developed some sort of injury or irritation. Laptop keyboards tend to have shorter key travel, and that changes your finger motion compared to a full keyboard. Obviously the keyboard position relative to the screen can't be adjusted, which can also tempt one into settling on bad typing positions. The point isn't that laptops are necessarily worse or worse for everyone, but they're less flexible unless you're also willing to pay for docking stations, etc. With a desktop or a dock, you can get different keyboards, trackballs, mice, etc. for different users, and you get more flexibility in setting up workspaces. Certainly when I've had hand sensitivities, even good laptop keyboards have tended to cause more irritation than quality full keyboards. So, a suggestion to be somewhat flexible in meeting the needs of individual users.
Well, as I understand it, there were some earlier efforts, such as Speedcoding by Backus himself, so people had some sense that you could program at an abstraction above the machine level. From what I've read, things like Speedcoding weren't fast, and so speed was indeed viewed as a big hurdle. That said, my impression is that languages like FORTRAN were much more comprehensive and ambitious than earlier efforts, so your implication that people viewed it as magic (ahem, I meant AI) may be quite right.
> I was always under the impression that David Patterson at
> Berkeley and John Hennessy (now President of Stanford) invented
> the RISC architecture and then took it to Sun? The Patterson bio
> linked to above seems to indicate that he did invent the
> RISC architecture. Huh.
Nope. The IBM 801 project began in 1975, and I'm fairly sure they had a machine up and running 2 or 3 years later, perhaps sooner.
The Stanford work on MIPS didn't begin until 1981. I was in John's group at Stanford at that time, though not working on RISC, and I distinctly remember that among the factors that led to the university work on RISC was early information on the 801 that started to come out of IBM. I believe that the Berkeley work was roughly contemporary with the Stanford project, though perhaps a bit ahead. Dave Paterson's bio claims that RISC I was the first VLSI RISC, and I suspect that's true. Hard as it may be to believe now, the IBM 801 was built at a time when even a simple CPU took many chips. I recall the actual box being perhaps 2-3 feet long, and maybe 1.5 feet high.
In any case, the IBM 801 work clearly came years earlier than either the Stanford or Bekerely projects, and I think John H. and Dave P. would be the first to acknowledge the seminal work of John Cocke and the IBM 801 team. My impression is that the respect was mutual, and that all involved agreed that both the Standford and Berkeley teams made very important later contributions.
The history of Fortran is quite interesting. My understanding is that John Backus and the team who built Fortran were so worried that assembler programmers wouldn't trust a compiler to generate code fast enough for the slow machines of the day that they implemented a slew of optimizations that were still viewed as aggressive 10-15 years later. Keep in mind that the compiler itself had to run on these slow machines, with limited memory (tens of KBytes), and mostly punch cards for storing object code, math libraries, etc.
By the way, I met Backus once or twice in the late 1970's when I was a very junior member of the programming staff at IBM. He was already something of a legend in the languages community, and I've never met anyone in the field who was kinder, more down to earth, or more interested in having a chat with anyone, regardless of how old or young. The field needs more people like him.
Anyone else think it's striking that in looking back over 20+years of personal computing, the man who coined the term "Information at Your Fingertips" had nothing significant so say about the impact of either the Internet or the Web?
I used the then current version of Karel the Robot for the first two weeks or so of an introductory programming course taught to non-technical students at Stanford in about 1980. Rich Pattis, the author of Karel, was at Stanford at the time. While Karel appears childishly simple on the surface, it provides a good quick introduction to the basics of writing imperative code. Its main strength is in allowing novices to get comfortable with abstraction and code organization before working with non-functional programming constructs such as variables. We made the transition to Pascal after the two week Karel starter.
I haven't kept up with Karel in the past 20+ years, but based on that early experience I highly recommend it.
For what little it adds, when I first heard this perhaps 20+ years ago it was a 747 full of mag. tapes. Higher capacity, greater speed than either trucks or station wagons. Fill that with DVDs and...
In my opinion, the RGB separation is not nearly as cool as the roughly contemporary work of Gabriel Lipmann. His 1891 system achieved full accurate color using no dyed materials in either the film or the viewing system (I.e. no color filters etc.)
Lipmann turned a clear glass B&W film plate so the emulsion faced away from the lens (I.e. the light had to travel through the thickness of the light to reach the emulsion). He placed the emulsion in contact with a reflecting mercury bath. Light from the lens traveled through the emulsion twice, once on its way from the lens, and again bouncing back from the mercury mirror thus forming....standing waves through the thickness of the emulsion.
In other words, color was recorded according in the third plane...through the thickness of the exposed material. Blue light = tightly spaced waves, red = less tight. The plate is viewed by again sandwiching against the mercury reflector, and viewing in white lite. The interference causes the colors to reappear.
Note that these colors are 100% accurate as long as the dimensions of the emulsion are stable. Of course, the balance can change if the viewing light isn't white.
I read about this in a Pop Photo in the 1960's, I think. One of the most beautiful pieces of scientific/photographic work I've heard of. He won a Nobel prize for this in 1908.
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I'd be somewhat careful with keyboards and potential repetitive strain problems. A physical setup that may work for one person may be difficult for another, particularly if the person has developed some sort of injury or irritation. Laptop keyboards tend to have shorter key travel, and that changes your finger motion compared to a full keyboard. Obviously the keyboard position relative to the screen can't be adjusted, which can also tempt one into settling on bad typing positions. The point isn't that laptops are necessarily worse or worse for everyone, but they're less flexible unless you're also willing to pay for docking stations, etc. With a desktop or a dock, you can get different keyboards, trackballs, mice, etc. for different users, and you get more flexibility in setting up workspaces. Certainly when I've had hand sensitivities, even good laptop keyboards have tended to cause more irritation than quality full keyboards. So, a suggestion to be somewhat flexible in meeting the needs of individual users.
Well, as I understand it, there were some earlier efforts, such as Speedcoding by Backus himself, so people had some sense that you could program at an abstraction above the machine level. From what I've read, things like Speedcoding weren't fast, and so speed was indeed viewed as a big hurdle. That said, my impression is that languages like FORTRAN were much more comprehensive and ambitious than earlier efforts, so your implication that people viewed it as magic (ahem, I meant AI) may be quite right.
> I was always under the impression that David Patterson at
> Berkeley and John Hennessy (now President of Stanford) invented
> the RISC architecture and then took it to Sun? The Patterson bio
> linked to above seems to indicate that he did invent the
> RISC architecture. Huh.
Nope. The IBM 801 project began in 1975, and I'm fairly sure they had a machine up and running 2 or 3 years later, perhaps sooner.
The Stanford work on MIPS didn't begin until 1981. I was in John's group at Stanford at that time, though not working on RISC, and I distinctly remember that among the factors that led to the university work on RISC was early information on the 801 that started to come out of IBM. I believe that the Berkeley work was roughly contemporary with the Stanford project, though perhaps a bit ahead. Dave Paterson's bio claims that RISC I was the first VLSI RISC, and I suspect that's true. Hard as it may be to believe now, the IBM 801 was built at a time when even a simple CPU took many chips. I recall the actual box being perhaps 2-3 feet long, and maybe 1.5 feet high.
In any case, the IBM 801 work clearly came years earlier than either the Stanford or Bekerely projects, and I think John H. and Dave P. would be the first to acknowledge the seminal work of John Cocke and the IBM 801 team. My impression is that the respect was mutual, and that all involved agreed that both the Standford and Berkeley teams made very important later contributions.
The history of Fortran is quite interesting. My understanding is that John Backus and the team who built Fortran were so worried that assembler programmers wouldn't trust a compiler to generate code fast enough for the slow machines of the day that they implemented a slew of optimizations that were still viewed as aggressive 10-15 years later. Keep in mind that the compiler itself had to run on these slow machines, with limited memory (tens of KBytes), and mostly punch cards for storing object code, math libraries, etc. By the way, I met Backus once or twice in the late 1970's when I was a very junior member of the programming staff at IBM. He was already something of a legend in the languages community, and I've never met anyone in the field who was kinder, more down to earth, or more interested in having a chat with anyone, regardless of how old or young. The field needs more people like him.
Anyone else think it's striking that in looking back over 20+years of personal computing, the man who coined the term "Information at Your Fingertips" had nothing significant so say about the impact of either the Internet or the Web?
I used the then current version of Karel the Robot for the first two weeks or so of an introductory programming course taught to non-technical students at Stanford in about 1980. Rich Pattis, the author of Karel, was at Stanford at the time. While Karel appears childishly simple on the surface, it provides a good quick introduction to the basics of writing imperative code. Its main strength is in allowing novices to get comfortable with abstraction and code organization before working with non-functional programming constructs such as variables. We made the transition to Pascal after the two week Karel starter. I haven't kept up with Karel in the past 20+ years, but based on that early experience I highly recommend it.
For what little it adds, when I first heard this perhaps 20+ years ago it was a 747 full of mag. tapes. Higher capacity, greater speed than either trucks or station wagons. Fill that with DVDs and...
In my opinion, the RGB separation is not nearly as cool as the roughly contemporary work of Gabriel Lipmann. His 1891 system achieved full accurate color using no dyed materials in either the film or the viewing system (I.e. no color filters etc.)
Lipmann turned a clear glass B&W film plate so the emulsion faced away from the lens (I.e. the light had to travel through the thickness of the light to reach the emulsion). He placed the emulsion in contact with a reflecting mercury bath. Light from the lens traveled through the emulsion twice, once on its way from the lens, and again bouncing back from the mercury mirror thus forming....standing waves through the thickness of the emulsion.
In other words, color was recorded according in the third plane...through the thickness of the exposed material. Blue light = tightly spaced waves, red = less tight. The plate is viewed by again sandwiching against the mercury reflector, and viewing in white lite. The interference causes the colors to reappear.
Note that these colors are 100% accurate as long as the dimensions of the emulsion are stable. Of course, the balance can change if the viewing light isn't white.
I read about this in a Pop Photo in the 1960's, I think. One of the most beautiful pieces of scientific/photographic work I've heard of. He won a Nobel prize for this in 1908.