jwstarr
Joined 4 years ago
Karma
23
Submissions
20
Member since
Feb 5
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 11 months ago
Although ACM Queue's audience is practitioners, author submissions to Queue are invite-only. CACM's new Practice section encourages submissions from outside academia.
Comment · 1 year ago
By "pixel accurate", do you mean the user interface or the rendering? Is she able to leverage the HTML 2D Canvas API or does she have to go lower level than that?
Comment · 2 years ago
As a a starting point, "The Origins of PostScript" (https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/2018-warnock.pdf) provides a few details on the language and Gaffney's involvement. Warnock's oral history for the Computer History Museum (https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273875...) also includes the story. Gaffney's patent provides the most detail but, unfortunately, it is written as a patent rather than a language description.
The DoD DTIC service has a couple of reports that cover the Harbor Pilot Simulation, but I haven't found any reports written by E&S. The Computer History Museum has some records from Evans and Sutherland, but I don't think any of them cover the language.
Comment · 2 years ago
Inspired by similar tales, my friends and I made a game about it (https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/474859/artful-an...) with the twist that the art is stealing itself.
Ross Anderson's _Security Engineering_ has a chapter on physical security. Given the poor quality of security at most art galleries, one might expect more art to be stolen. However, it seems that it is often too difficult to sell.
Comment · 2 years ago
Author here. Thank you for the feedback. I may tackle a history of the registries from netlib and CTAN forward in the near future.
For this article, I deliberately kept the scope limited because it was getting rather long.
Comment · 3 years ago
The author of TECO, Dan Murphy, wrote an article about its history for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. A PDF copy of the article is available here: https://opost.com/tenex/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf
Alas, it does not discuss the gap buffer.
The book The Craft of Text Editing claims the gap buffer technique was first used by TECO (http://www.finseth.com/craft/#c6.6), although this claim is given no support.
Comment · 3 years ago
https://ztoz.blog
Programming topics with an emphasis on computing history
Comment · 4 years ago
Dramatically, the Dartmouth experiment in teaching BASIC to all undergraduates could be profitable. Although they didn't use PDPs (they used a GE-265), it was the same time period. You have two visionaries, Kemeny and Kurtz, trying to bring a computer to every student and every faculty member. Kemeny's background allows appearances from Feynman, von Neumann, Alonzo Church, and Einstein. With the work happening in college, and being educational rather than pure research, students can be integral members of the plot and a couple working together to understand this new language and the concepts of time-sharing can lead naturally to romance.
Comment · 4 years ago
Self-promotion: If you're interested in the MUSIC-V language (the software the catalogue uses) or the hardware, I created a video on the subject a few months ago: https://rumble.com/v153i3p-dawn-of-computer-music.html
Comment · 4 years ago
One resource to try is SIGCIS (https://www.sigcis.org/); it's a professional group of computing historians and a number of retired practitioners.
However, historians don't tend to care about specific technology features, so I suspect you may need to treat this more as a journalistic effort than a historical effort -- emphasis on interviews, press releases, user manuals to build up a timeline.
Definition-wise, PLATO is an interesting case and is a useful test of whatever definition you choose to use. PLATO was a multi-site, multi-user education platform, but featured messaging, chat, and multi-user games. You can access a running PLATO system (https://www.irata.online/) and there are a few books that detail the development and user experience.
Comment · 4 years ago
A more quantitative approach can be found in a pair of papers from John C Nesbit, who analyzed ten algorithms in 1985/86 (https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-computer-based-in... ; https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-computer-based-in...). Generalized edit distance performed best, but also took the most time. The PLATO algorithm, which used a feature vector-esque approach, came in third in quality and was also efficient. Phonetic approaches came in third. Since the charts are hard to read and summarize, I converted the result into F1 scores (https://ztoz.blog/posts/nesbit/).
Dale LaFrenz, who was helping administer MECC, states [1] that Apple won the bid because they filed the only compliant bid. The board was leaning towards TRS-80, but Radio Shack didn't want to bother with the state's bureaucratic bid process.
[1] https://conservancy.umn.edu/items/7f6d8e9e-0560-43e0-9050-3a...