Quite a while back, I found a couple of oldish technical-academic books at the local recycling center, and I just got around to cracking one of them. The Language of Computers by Bernard A. Galler (of the University of Michigan and also of Software Patent Institute). Printed by McGraw-Hill in 1962. The amazing thing is how readable it is. It uses a language called MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder) which came from IBM’s IAL (which later became ALGOL). It covers the basic structure of the language, control structures (if is called whenever), sorting, searching, cryptography, and a program that produces programs. It’s not nearly as impenetrable as some IBM machine language manuals I looked at from the mid-sixties.
One of the most interesting problems one can bring to the computer is the writing of its own programs. This is not so difficult as it may sound. We have already seen in Chapter 5 that by means of our language we have been able to translate sequences of characters into other sequences of characters. Writing a program is also the generation of of sequences of characters(to make up statements), except that we need a rule (or algorithm) to determine which sequences to generate.
Language Log got a great write-up in the Chicago Tribune. [free registration required, via Wordcrafter]
What you won’t find at Language Log are rants about the sorry state of proper standard English in America. Linguists tend to be more interested in observing how words are used than in complaining about what they hear. The Language Log bloggers often distinguish themselves from what they call “language mavens” bent on enforcing traditional rules of English grammar.
Well, I’ve been reading a couple of books on the history of the personal computer: Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age and The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. I already knew bits and nibbles of the history they recount, but it’s nice to read two fairly well-written and organized accounts. Since I spent my childhood in those pre-personal computer days, I’ve been trying to reconstruct the giddy wowness factor of the time when computers finally arrived in the home. The PARC book was a great, quick read, and put to lie some of those commen sensical factoids you hear so often: e.g., that Xerox never successfully marketed any of the incredible inventions that came spewing out of PARC, except that one item, the laser printer made more money for Xerox than PARC cost them. The tense chapter where Jobs gets an up close and personal demonstration of what personal computing should be is also worth the price of the book itself. And boy howdy, he really ran with it after licensing it of course.
Jack Chick’s minions were passing out his post-psychedelic tracts the other day in my neighborhood. Evidentally they think I’m Catholic because my surname ends in a vowel. Oh, well. Anyway, the sad tale of Murphy the Irish cop who dies before he can finish his sprinkled doughnut gave me pause to laugh. Then I did what anybody else would do in my situation: go online and google the bejesus out of Jack Chick Productions. The best are here:
[Addendum 07/29/04: Thanks to Dave Trowbridge over at Redwood Dragon, here’s a link to the cached Cthulu Chick parody.]
I was looking to see if Tannenbaum’s OS book was still in print (it is), when I came across an interesting article on his website about a “little think tank that couldn’t” called the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI, more information here and here) that has published some FUD regarding Linux and the Open Source movement in general. Tannebaum’s is a sad, funny story about being interviewed by Ken Brown, current president of the AdTI and author of Samizdat the book form of the above-mentioned FUD. Tannenbaum has also published a line-by-line rebuttal. Hilarious stuff.
Well, I got hit by an advertisement this morning in the wee hours that was purportedly left in the commentary on an old entry by a US Army battalion commander in Northern Iraq. Interestingly, the gist of the comment was familiar and the email address and name left behind are real ones. The entry itself is over year old and was basically a pointer at a pro-war op-ed piece in the New York Times by Dennis Miller. OK, so far. But then the URL left behind was an Amazon link to a book, which was also written by the proported comment author. Not one of those pay-back Amazon Associates links, but just a straight one to a book about the Gulf War. Inspection of the web logs showed that the search from Google came in from a Guangdong ISP, with one IP address for the search and another for the posting of the entry. Typical spicy ham product. Turns out that not only are the name on the entry and on the book’s cover the same, but that this name is one that was in the news last year for sending out form letters to hometown newspapers from soldiers in his unit. (In fact, this colonel gets a lot of PR here in the States.) But, why does the Pentagon need Chinese help to advertise its war and books written by its mouth-piece? Who knows, but it was fun to delete it. I wonder if I should send the bill for my time to the Secretary of Defense?
I note with sadness the passing of Robert Burchfield the editor of the Supplement to the OED (1957-1986). Requiescat in pace.
Been reading Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction by Nick Montfort. About two-thirds of the way through and enjoying it. One of the first things I did back in the early ’70s when I first got access to a computer (an HP 3000 at Lawrence Hall of Science during a high school science class field trip) was to write little BASIC programs that spewed out sarcastic Star Trek scripts. It was a lot of fun and writing anything in BASIC made me appreciate LISP when I started to learn it a decade later at SSU. It was not until I got to Island Graphics in ’88 that I go a Sun workstation (a 3/50) and discovered Advent. But earlier than that, I had been exposed to Hammurabi (kind of an Ur-SimCity) and Hunt the Wumpus on the PDP-8 at the local JC. (That was during the summer of 1973.) Ah, that computer lab was air-conditioned, but, oh, those noisy old ASR33s.
Well, the Fourth was OK, except for the massive spicy pork product that somebody hammered the commentary with. Hundreds of unsolicited advertisements posing as comments. Banal huzzahs and kudos all linked back to some registered-in-Russia website. Coming in from different IP addresses every couple of seconds. A sign of the future or a blip on the boil-lumped neck of the world-wide web? Sigh.
Fourth of July and V. and I will be going up to Sonoma to see friends. Not sure if I’ll see the parade. It’s rather cool here in the East Bay, but I’m sure it’ll be hot in Sonoma. Probably won’t stay for fireworks. Home and an early evening of it.