RIP John Walker, software and hardware hacker extraordinaire Polymath, pioneering developer of software and hardware, a prolific writer, and true old-school hacker John Walker has passed away. His death was announced in a brief personal obituary on SCANALYST, a discussion forum hosted on Walker's own remarkably broad and fascinating website, Fourmilab. Its name is a playful take on …
One of my favourite short stories is Walker's "We'll Return, After This Message" which he dates December 1989 https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html
It includes the words "Back in '97 Xanadu still wasn't finished...", which suggest that despite his optimistic description in 1988 he very rapidly started having second thoughts.
Clarke in "Odyssey Two" (1982) seems to have swallowed the underlying idea, with just about everything (including electricity bills) stored in a handful of DP vaults scattered around the planet: strongly suggested to be a shared resource. And I think it was in "The Fountains of Paradise" (1979) where he implied that the pinnacle of computer proficiency was being able to generate imaginative SQL one-liners.
Since then we've had the Semantic Web, not to mention indisputable duds like Chandler.
And everybody's gone back to the DP bureau model, where they hire time from Google or Facebook without looking too closely at the fine print.
> "one strike and you're out" policy on poorly written English,
I gotta get off the internet. I keep reading this as "one strike and your out".
Since days of CompuServe forums, _I_ have always felt that if I had 10 readers it was worth my 5 seconds to put all the letters in, than to force 10 readers to work an extra second each to catch my meaning. Theres two much fuckin lasiness tooday.
Ancient languages, e.g. Sumerian, Akkadian, were written with only the consonants. But when you have dialects, the consonants generally sound similar but the vowels can sound very different; for example, in American English, British English, and various others.
What little I remember from reading Ted Nelson's book, "Computer Lib", was that in his proposed Xanadu system, one could navigate it using just four keys: up, down, left, and right. The idea, IIRC, was that the information would be represented in a binary ttee. I wondered at the time, "Who is going to maintain the tree? That looks like a lot of work."
AutoCAD was the first CAD I learnt, back in the mid-80's, and AutoLISP made it quite revolutionarily extensible (scriptable, as often done with Python these days). Today, Cadence (EDA) uses SKILL (adapted from Franz LISP) to similar effect, further validating the approach (god language for extension). Walker's foresight (and animal PERVADE proto-virussing) will be most missed!
(and it doesn't hurt that his name is reminiscent of Johnny Walker!)
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