Did Gates Really Say 640K is Enough For Anyone?<br /> by [[Jon Katz]] in WIRED<br /> accessed on 2026-01-05T16:22:13
- Jan 2026
- Apr 2024
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archive.org archive.org
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[Narrator]: The Cluttered Desk, Index Card,file folders, the in-out basket, the calculator.These are the tools of the office professional's past.Since the dawn of the computer age, better machines have always meant bigger and more powerful.But the software could not accommodate the needs of office professionals who are responsiblefor the look, shape and feel of tomorrow.
In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer age, Apple Inc. in promotional film entitled "Lisa Soul Of A New Machine" touted their new computer, a 16-bit dual disk drive "personal office system", as something that would do away with "the cluttered desk, index cards, file folders, the in-out basket, [and] the calculator." (00:01)
Some of these things moved to the realm of the computer including the messy desk(top) now giving people two messy desks, a real one and a virtual one. The database-like structure of the card index also moved over, but the subjective index and its search power were substituted for a lower level concordance search.
30 years on, for most people, the value of the database idea behind the humble "index card" has long since disappeared and so it seems here as if it's "just" another piece of cluttery paper.
Appreciate the rosy framing of the juxtaposition of "past" and "future" jumping over the idea of the here and now which includes the thing they're selling, the Lisa computer. They're selling the idealized and unclear future even though it's really just today.
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- Dec 2019
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Hans Moravec argued in 1976 that computers were still millions of times too weak to exhibit intelligence. He suggested an analogy: artificial intelligence requires computer power in the same way that aircraft require horsepower. Below a certain threshold, it's impossible, but, as power increases, eventually it could become easy.[79] With regard to computer vision, Moravec estimated that simply matching the edge and motion detection capabilities of human retina in real time would require a general-purpose computer capable of 109 operations/second (1000 MIPS).[80] As of 2011, practical computer vision applications require 10,000 to 1,000,000 MIPS. By comparison, the fastest supercomputer in 1976, Cray-1 (retailing at $5 million to $8 million), was only capable of around 80 to 130 MIPS, and a typical desktop computer at the time achieved less than 1 MIPS.
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- Jul 2019
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Compusophic Systems
those old school tech companies names! compu-sophic! computer - philosophic
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- Nov 2018
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threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
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This idea was brought into CP/M by Gary Kiddal in 1974. You could do neat things with it like copy data off the serial port into a text file, or print a textfile right from the command line! This is done in unix by having special files existing in special folders, like /dev/tty for the console or /dev/lp0 for the first printer. You can get infinite zeros from /dev/zero, random bytes from /dev/random, etc! but here's the problem: CP/M is designed for 8-bit computers with very little memory, and no hard drives. At best you've got an 8" floppy drive. So directories? you don't need 'em. Instead of directories, you just use different disks. but without directories you can't put all your special files over in a /dev/ directory. So they're just "everywhere", effectively. So if you have FOO.TXT and need to print it, you can do "PIP LST:=FOO.TXT" which copies foo.txt to the "file" LST, which is the printer. and it works where ever you are, because there are no directories! it's simple. but what about extensions? Here's the problem: programs like to name their files with the right extension. so if you're running a program and it goes "ENTER FILENAME TO SAVE LISTING TO" you could tell it LST to print it or PTP to punch it out to tape (cause it's 1974, remember?) but the program might try to put .TXT on the end of your filename! LST.TXT isn't the printer, right? Nah. It is. These special devices exist at all extensions, so that this works. so if "CON" is reserved to refer to the keyboard, so is CON.TXT and CON.WAT and CON.BUG
special files in cp/m
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- Oct 2018
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed "bootstrapping strategy".
Bootstrapping strategy: http://dougengelbart.org/content/view/262/000/
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Engelbart's career was inspired in December 1950 when he was engaged to be married and realized he had no career goals other than "a steady job, getting married and living happily ever after".[14] Over several months he reasoned that: he would focus his career on making the world a better place[15] any serious effort to make the world better would require some kind of organized effort that harnessed the collective human intellect of all people to contribute to effective solutions. if you could dramatically improve how we do that, you'd be boosting every effort on the planet to solve important problems – the sooner the better computers could be the vehicle for dramatically improving this capability.[14]
Engelbart's guiding philosophy
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twitter.com twitter.com
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A lot of this would be a non issue if we had end user programming. The problem today is that 'configurability' is itself something the programmer needs to implement
acme example rob pike apparently had an elaborate answer as to why he wouldn't allow to change the colorschme
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- Jun 2017
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Local file Local file
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Nowadays, it would be hard to find a humanist who doesn't use a com- puter in some aspect of his work. The computing humanist has evolved into a scholar who not only uses the computer in his work, but also engages with the methodological and theoretical aspects of computer use in humanities disciplines. The ways in which technology is used by humanists has diversi- fied to span everything from word processor use and web page creation to the development and use of complex software systems for analysis of a broad range of data types, including not only literary and historical texts but also databases of humanities information, images, and sound. As a result, in recent years CHum has come to serve an increasingly wide array of disci- plines and research areas - English, History, New Media, Music, Corpus Linguistics, Comlutational Linguistics, and many others - and received top- notch submissions in all of them. For most of its history, the diversity of disciplines and methodologies represented in CHum's articles enabled cross- fertilization of ideas which was highly valued by the community. However, as computer use in the humanities has come to span an increasingly broad range of activities, and as computational methodologies evolve and become more sophisticated and specialized, it has become more and more difficult to retain that diversity and at the same time provide enough articles relevant to a particular area of interest. It seems, then, that the time has come to narrow the journal's focus in order to best serve its readers
On the narrowing of COmputing and the Humanities
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