I was plesently surprized when pHp scripts I had brought over from an older web site began to work again once I fixed the web server about a week ago. This spurred me to dive back in and because of a tutorial I read to revisit XML as a medium. I wanted to find a way to create a links page, like a directory, but with the ability to hide files and annotate the files. I had tried some programatic solutions, like a javascript I found, but the problem always remained of how to add descriptions that could be interesting to a reader, or at least remind me of what I wrote and more informative than the date based naming concention I often use. I have settled on a pHp script which creates a web page based on reading the XML I maintain by hand, and now when I add a file I want to be seen I have to add an entry by hand to the XML file, embeeded in a pHp file and parsed by another that calls DOM. That isn't too painful.
Even though I have tried lots of color schemes, I rather like blue on blue. I think it is quite restful.
This book, that I bought used at Kepler's Books, which is mentioned in it several times, offers the convincing thesis that the Countercultural and Anti Viet Nam War activism of the 1960's and '70's was at the core of the Personal Computer Revolution and the rise of Silicon Valley. This is not the first such book, Stephen Levy's A Fire in the Valley makes a similar argument while not so emphatically drawing the intimate influience of radical politics and psycodelia on the people at places like Stanford AI Lab, Xerox PARC, and even SRI on the invention of personal computers.
It is strangely true that people who worked by day for defense contractors worked by night to undermine the Military Industrial Complex, but I think that the more correct story is that people with very differing outlooks agreed on the potential of the emerging technology. This story is told more accurately by Levy who describes how the microprocessor was invented for miniturization of circuits in expendable vheicles that had to be cheap and that the same ideas led to the inexpensive computing we have today.
For me, the story as told by Markoff evokes precise memories. Places and names are given of places around Stanford that I visited in the '70's and I got to see some of the systems described. My awareness and experiences were alittle after the fact, but not entirely, but somewhat influienced by the paradigm of time shared computers rather than the personal computer per se, although I was keenly aware of the decreasing costs that would make personal computers much more powerful than they were before 1980.
I saw many of the machines and some of the software mentioned in the book. There is a photo in the book of the Space War game which lived in the Stanford Coffee House. I saw its innards, a PDP-11. It was probably the first coin operated video game. I got to see the Alto and the Star workstations from Xerox, and I had an account on a PDP-10 and later a DEC-20 running TOPS-20, and in that time, around 1985, I went to the chinese dinners mentioned in the book with people who either worked at SAIL or other campus computer centers.
I saw Space War running on a Dec-10 in about 1973. It wasn't until I bought an Apple ][ + in 1982 and saw my first IBM PC running DOS about the same time that I got really exposed to personal computers. I was using mainframes or minicomputers mostly. And that is why personal computers wen't as exciting to me when they first appeared. I already had access to systems that were much more powerful. My first PC was more like a toy or even just a terminal to a larger system via a 300 baud modem. It is hard to appreciate today just how expersive those machines were in relationship to what they could do.
It was later that this distinction began to blur with the Sun 3, which was a personal computer with bitmapped graphics that was more powerful than the microcomputers I had used. That was in 1986. This machine, not even a current top-end system is more powerful than any of those systems including the mainframes. Of course, the blot of software has kept up with the available resources, but the convenience of a multimedia presentation is supposed to be more intensive than using fonts on a glass TTY. So, a WYSE-80 CRT terminal connected to a PDP-11/34 which had but a megabyte of RAM and two 8 megabyte hard drives could run UNIX version 7 (BSD) and support four or five users in 1985. In 1990 I ran a 10 MB UNIX on a PC seprate from DOS. I saw perhaps the second earliest Linux, Yagdrasil, in 1994.
Markoff makes the point that John McCarthy, whom I had met and talked to a few times in the 1980's, believed that time sharing large computers was much better than diviying up resources into personal desktops, Moore's Law, and processor speed would eventually negate much of the concern, but what goes around comes around, especially in computing, and when I heard about UNIX in 1973, and later got to use it on a minicomputer, I realized that it was the future, and fought with people i worked with about it vs. some of the proprietory systems I used in the 1970's and '80's. Time would prove me right even though I was never rewarded for my insights, at the time. Later, of course, my enthuiasm for UNIX would pay off directly by working for Sun Microsystems, even though I think that Sun was badily led, it still was my most sucessful employment and is the main source of the retirement I enjoy now.
This system, even as I use it today has all of the history in it, many of the seminal programs, even if it uses all of the technology for input devices, graphics, and hardware developed back then. I am using Emacs as opposed to a newer editor or a WYSIWYG web editor, right now. not because I dislike them, because I am experienced with it and it ultimately is more powerful for many editing tasks than most other editors. Emacs was available for UNIX and other systems in the mid '70's. I used it extensively in the mid '80's. This system has smalltalk, clisp, and other languages from the period of time described in the book, as well as newer languages. Of course the terminal and curses are here, and the command line of 1975 is still very useful.
I think that most people in business, and especially most of the people I met while job hunting in 2004-08 are stupid for saying that my skills are old-fashioned and irrevelant, even though I try to learn new things like the features in the HTML 5 proposed standard. They are idiots and I have no respect or use for most of them. Even recently I was able to help a young web programmer with a task by recalling a command from the UNIX CLI. It was because of my recall of how to tar a directory to a fellow engineer that I was asked to join Sun after being a contractor for six months in 1997. The terminal is still threre in every current system and knowing how to use it on Mac OS, on Linux, and on Windows with Cygwin is still relavant.
My low view of most business people was reinforced in 2008 by the minmanagement of equity by them, with the help of politicians who mistakenly believed that these were smart guys who could do no wrong. All of them are idiots.