Posts by Paul Cooper 238 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2007
CMC Reality (a version of Pick). Before that I did use a thing called AS on an IBM 360, but I can't find any reference to it - I think it was something that IBM put together to provide bureau services. It bore no relationship with later things called AS. Then Phoenix on the Cambridge IBM 370. Then CP/M! But I started in computing for real in about 1976.
Indeed. I have at least one book on my shelf that is about 120 years old. I defy you to find ANY digital; media that old! And our present discussion of WP illustrates the problems of old formats. I have quite a few WP files on my machine (my work used it for several years in the early 90s) - most will open in Word, but some won't!
I managed an inspirational moment once - and it was a mechanical part of the system I was working on! I was developing software to process ground-sounding radar data in real-time (in the late 80s - transputers were the big new thing!). The antenna had a complex system to scan it sideways behind a moving vehicle, and the mechanical engineer had devised a nice system using stepping motors etc. Suddenly, he was made aware that the antenna was several times heavier than expected, and the system with all the motors was going to be too heavy to hang off the back of a van. All hands on deck time! But I sat down and worked out the movements of the linkage, and realized that two consecutive joints simply rotated by the same amount in the opposite direction, and a simple belt running between the two would achieve the same result as a clever system of motors. This reduced the weight sufficiently that all was well. I felt very clever for a while!
When I heard of the renaming, my immediate thought was "Meta Incognita" - the name given to part of Baffin Island by Martin Frobisher in 1577! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Incognita_Peninsula).
It isn't, perhaps, an obvious link to one not conversant with the Polar Regions, but I think it does indicate the direction that the new entity is likely to take! "Limits? What Limits?"
Quite literally!
In 1983 I was working on a prototype airborne ice-sounding radar system, and we were doing fieldwork in Svalbard. We had a nice office in the airport buildings at Longyearbyen, and of course, there were many last-minute changes and corrections to the software that were required. The airborne kit included a Z80 based single card computer, which controlled all the data acquisition in flight. Needless to say, this was very basic with NO software at all, so I developed the assembler programs using an Osborne 1 with asm, link and Wordstar as editor. This all worked perfectly in Cambridge!
However, in Svalbard, the Osborne 1 demonstrated exactly the same symptoms as Kristian's machine. You could open it up, switch it on and it would power up happily - but as soon as I touched the keyboard, it died. Light dawned when I realized that every time I walked past a filing cabinet near the door, I attracted a large and painful spark! The carpet was, of course, nylon, and the air in the polar regions has very low humidity, so just walking across the carpet could generate quite a large electrostatic potential! After that, I had to remember to earth my hand before touching the Osborne 1, and all was well.
As the article mentions, Clive Sinclair was well-known in the electronics world long before the ZX80 and ZX81. He produced a whole series of radios and audio amplifiers that were very good value for money at the time. I remember the regular adverts in Practical Electronics! Famously, he discovered that a lot of reject transistors were good enough for audio use; they were being rejected as not good enough for demanding military applications. One story goes that he dug up a whole lot from landfill, and another is that his then wife spent many hours grading the reject transistors.
We shouldn't forget that he was successful in the electronics world before he ever touched computers.
Unlike many, I never owned a Sinclair product, but I did aspire to a ZX81 at one time! But I came into computing via another route, and my experience in programming a S100 based ZX80 single-card computer makes me take my hat off to Sir Clive and his team. Never before was so much squeezed into so little!
I was bereaved earlier this year; my wife died very suddenly and unexpectedly.
I have ample material from online chats conducted while we were courting and engaged (we lived on opposite sides of the world, so all our conversations were electronic). Her Facebook profile would provide ample material to bring it up to date. In other words, I am in a position to do exactly what Joseph did, given the skills (which I don't have).
However, I am not even slightly tempted. It was my wife's intelligence and sometimes quirky response to things that made her what she was. It was doing things with her, sharing common interests, that made our life together. It was helping her cook her favourite Chinese dishes - the list goes on and on.
An AI avatar might perhaps fool me for a few minutes, but even if it got everything right, it still wouldn't fool me for long. How does an AI handle the idiosyncratic English of a person for whom it isn't their first language? What about all the private things that never came anywhere near an electronic interface?
All I'd end up with would be a sort of Barbie-doll version of my late wife. Better to accept that she is gone, move on and see what lies around the corner - as she would have wanted me to.
I can't remember if it was two of us or three who passed (i.e. got a C grade or higher), but only my friend Rhys and I went on to do A-level Computer Science, and we found ourselves helping said teacher with his lessons during our "free" periods when we should have been studying...
I was in a similar position at A-level for Physics. Our old-school Physics teacher had retired, and in his place, a young teacher with experience in the experimentally based Nuffield Physics course had been recruited. Of course, we were already partway through the conventional, mathematically based Physics course, and couldn't switch mid-course. Myself and another guy who was the school mathematical genius frequently ended up either correcting his working or being asked to explain to the class!
It was still around and occasionally used in the 1980s; I think I've got a programming manual for it on my shelf somewhere (the IBM variant). Thankfully I never actually used it - got the manual because I sometimes had to resurrect other people's programs, though I drew the line at things written in really strange languages (one was in SNOBOL, and I've seen RATFOR as well).
I wouldn't go so far as to call it an OS, but I wrote a data logging program for a Z80 based S100 bus single card computer that had no software at all; just the bare iron. I used an Osborne 1 with WordStar, link and asm as my development environment (the system had to be debuggable in the Arctic!). The program was logging data in real-time from a prototype ice-sounding radar! The basic structure was sufficiently flexible that I was able to keep using it through several iterations of ancillary hardware, and I think (with hindsight) that it could have been developed into a real-time OS without too much trouble.
Also something where the failure of a single company will bring the whole thing down.
Latutude and longitude are two nice, simple numbers that give one's location to whatever precision is required, are completely public domain, and can be obtained from any device that can use What3Words.
Academics generally were very early adopters of email; if you're collaborating with people around the world, the benefits are pretty obvious!
As a result, I think I've seen every single one of the error cases that people have reported; OoO loops, emails sent to everyone in the organization; you name it, it's happened to every large academic organization! I hasten to say that the worst I've done is send a message to the "wrong" email group resulting in something reaching people it shouldn't.
Well, I've been preparing sermons electronically since about 1988, starting on a PCW, and never hit that one!
But I have hit a related problem more recently. For a while, I used a phone-based satnav system that linked with my car's electronics. All well and good! But it had a sort of character at a time handwriting recognition system for inputting addresses etc. Again, so far so good, and it was mostly pretty reliable. But I NEVER found a reliable way to distinguish 0 and O. 1 and l were ok; you just did the serif on a 1. But I tried doing the 0 in either direction - always came up with O. Tried crossing it European style (I habitually do that anyway; habits gained from preparing input sheets to be entered on punch cards) - I forget what it came up with but it wasn't 0! I never did find a way to do it.
There was an incident at a Radar site where a tech was working up the tower having carefully taken the 'Man aloft' key with him. Officer came along and wanted to use the system so got the spare key from the safe and turned the transmitter on.
No matter how hard you try, someone will find a way
ISTR there were several early rail disasters where mistakes in passing tokens had fatal results, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1898_St_Johns_rail_accident
A similar phenomenon happens in boating circles. It's the never-ending pause between realizing that you're going to go in the water and actually getting wet. Frequently caused by a dinghy moving away from the jetty while the person concerned has their weight neither in the dinghy nor on the jetty. Can have more complex causes involving free water effects.
A VERY long time ago, I saw a MAD Magazine cartoon which described the shortest interval known to mankind being that between the traffic light turning green and a New York Cab driver honking the horn!
So its a totally different rarity league to something like (earlier mentioned) waxwings, which visit from Scandinavia just abut every winter (though numbers vary, each year sometimes lots, often just a few) and so even though they are very attractive to see they are not a "mega" (but a drab US vagrant is)
They're progressively rarer as you travel south in the UK - I live near Cambridge, and waxwings in this area are something only seen maybe once a decade or even less frequently. They're seen much more frequently in Scotland and Northern England, but I think the year we had them (winter 1995-1996) was the latest time they've been seen in East Anglia - but I may be wrong.
IIn the winter of 1995-1996, I was fortunate enough to have a flock of waxwings congregate in a crab-apple tree in our front garden. They're rare-ish winter visitors in the UK, so we did notice a fair number of people coming along to see them. All were very polite and very careful not to violate our privacy, remaining on the road and not attempting to enter our front garden even though they would probably have got closer and a better camera angle by doing so. When I first saw them (they're a fairly distinctive bird), I was quite worried about being besieged by hordes of anorak wearing twitchers, but in fact people were actually quite polite about it.
In academia, if you work in a University it is usual for people to retain IPR on the work they do, and to take their work with them when they move to another university. This includes data, samples, code and whatever. Of course, a lot of it is published and freely available anyway, but there is always a corpus of work that is not yet published. I don't think this is documented anywhere in particular, but it's the usual way things happen.
Those who moved from University to a government institution sometimes got a nasty shock when they realized that their research belonged to the institute, NOT to themselves personally. When it came to Freedom of Information and Environmental Information Regulations (the latter was more important in most cases), it made a big difference - the institute could and did instruct them to release data to third parties in compliance with those regulations. Some more recalcitrant members of staff had to be threatened with disciplinary action before they could be made to take it seriously!
Many moons ago, I was "sysadmin" for a mini-computer system - a CMC reality (this was the late 70s). In those days, system upgrades were performed by the manufacturer, so that wasn't an issue.
However, we were handling large databases (by 1978 standards - tens of thousands of records, I think) and writing software to manipulate these databases in ad-hoc ways almost every day. But what a lot of people here are forgetting is that in those days, system resources were tiny, disc (yes, we had a disc) space was extremely limited and backup was a 1600bpi reel-reel magnetic tape. Indeed disc space was so limited that you often had to save a file to tape to be able to load another one. However, several databases had to be on-line - we ran an online query system for a few clients (no internet - this was via modems and hunting groups). Remember, too, that in those days even the concept of a file or a record varied from machine to machine - the ubiquitous Unix style bit-stream model of a file wasn't by any means universal. The CMC, for example, regarded a file as a collection of records whose location was allocated according to a hashing function derived from key fields - a record was a collection of fields. So even if you had a backup, it wasn't an image of what was on the disc, it was the output of a command to convert the disc version to a sequential format.
Anyway, the point I'm working round to is that very often we had no choice but to work on a live and running database - there wasn't space or resources to do anything else. And equally, the safeguard was to ensure you were working on a very well-defined small set of records when carrying out tests so that you knew what you were going to have to fix if it went pear-shaped. But of course, it was far more error-prone than anything a modern DBA or sysadmin would allow. today! And equally, of course, we were often manipulating data input by bored keyboard operators, so incorrectly formatted data were fairly common (we did apply validation on entry, but again, it was limited by the resources available). Very often, we'd run a command to reformat a field according to new customer requirements and find that it fell over when it hit a condition that we hadn't anticipated because an operator had put in something the client had told us didn't happen!
Whatever the rights and wrongs of what we were doing, it didn't half teach you to bench-check your code VERY carefully!
COLREGS DON'T say anything about "right of way" - there's no such concept in them. As you say, every navigator has the responsibility to avoid collisions. However, there is no "right of way" - there's "Stand on" vessel, which is the vessel which should maintain its speed and course, and there "give way" vessel, which has to change its course and speed in the manner mandated by the regulations.
It also strikes me as odd that a company would think nothing of spending an awful lot of money on film and development without either their own dark room facility, or understand the savings that would have come with an (even that expensive) digital camera.
Even the relatively small outfit (~400 employees; 2 photographers!) I worked for had it's own colour processing system.
Back in the dark and distant days on the 1980s, I did have one or two programs that either would or woudln't work if a comment was in a particular location! I think that would have been in IBM's H Fortran Compiler, which was often rather too clever in its optimizations - my favourite was it movind a RAND function outside a loop because the argument didn't change within the loop!
Back in 1987, a colleague and I had been working in Greenland, with piles of prototype electronics, test equipment and who knows what. We left Greenland on US Military flights and arrived around midnight at a US military airfield in New Jersey. There, we had to enter the USA and get through customs. Unfortunately for us, the military types who were on duty to check us through were a) peeved anyway at being on duty around midnight and b) had been told to expect one flight, but two arrived. So, when a pallet load of weird-looking kit turned up with a limey (me!) and a guy who claimed to be Texan but spoke with an impeccable English accent attached to it, they decided it was time to have some fun, and asked in menacing tones, "OK, what's in these cases?" Fortunately, our institute was well practised at getting our weird kit through remote airfields, and we had prepared a careful packing list for every crate. I showed them the list; they realized they didn't even know what half the stuff was, and wouldn't recognize it if it sat up and bit them and decided to forgo their fun!
Of course, the fact that our ultimate destination in the US was Los Alamos National Laboratory might also have been a factor!
Possibly financial. Airport parking could be more expensive than the taxi fare and the parking might be some way from where you need to be so might even take longer than a taxi dropping you off at the front entrance.
No, it was H&S based - the airport was a 2 hour drive (at least) away, and airport parking would have been much dearer. One airport we used regularly was 3-4 hours drive away - and it was the only option for the required destination (the Falklands)
The disruptive effect would only happen after the asteroid reached the inner solar system. The mechanism by which they leave the Oort Cloud must be a different one - possibly even random gravitational encounters would be sufficient, though the possibility of there being a massive dark body (e.g. Planet X) can't be discounted.
Surely the fact that one of the first few asteroids that we have inspected up close is apparently close (in geological terms) to disruption has important implications.
It implies that it is common for such bodies to be close to being disrupted, and hence places limits on the expected life-span of such bodies. Therefore, it also implies that such bodies must form at a rate to replace the loss by disruption. By form, I include entry into the inner solar system by perturbation of the Oort cloud.
My late wife was a Learning Support Assistant for a child with dyspraxia, about 15 years ago; the child must now be in his early 20s! It is a strange one - the child was quite normal in many ways, but the things they find challenging are not always obvious. Physical clumsiness and inability to concentrate are the usual things that get noticed, but there's also a lack of connection between thought processes; it's difficult for the mind to make cross-links between topics. I suspect that what we call "lateral thinking" would be difficult for a person with dyspraxia.
But aren't most discoveries made by observing something that is NOT expected. If you automatically discard data that does not fit a pre-conceived idea, you run the risk of missing something truly amazing or unique!
As happened with the detection of the ozone hole, you mean? NASA could have detected the ozone hole from satellite measurements, but the relevant measurements were discarded as "out of range". It took scientists at BAS making ground-based measurements as part of a long-term survey to find the ozone hole. But if NASA hadn't made assumptions about what the data should look like, they would have beaten Farman et al to it.
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