mhewett

I was working at IBM in Boca Raton in 1990-91 when OS/2 was being developed. Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy." I thought, OMG, this project is hosed. This was just a few months before it was supposed to be released.

The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.

My wife worked at Boeing for seven years in the 1980s, in management. We tracked down her pension recently, hoping for a huge payout after it had been invested for 35 years. It turns out that she will get $96/month. We are very disappointed in the Boeing pension managers.

I stand corrected. My offer still stands.

The CEO who presided over the fall of Yahoo received $40 million in compensation.

I'm advertising here that my fee for doing the same job is only half that amount.

One comment from his thesis advisors on AM was that they couldn't tell which part was performed by AM and which part was guided by Lenat. I think that comment holds for both AM and EURISKO. In those days everyone wanted a standalone AI. Now, people realize that cooperative human-AI systems are acceptable and even preferable in many ways.

I'll make sure my profile has an email address. I'm very busy the next few months but keep pinging me to remind me to get these materials online.

Lenat was my assigned advisor when I started my Masters at Stanford. I met with him once and he gave me some advice on classes. After that he was extremely difficult to schedule a meeting with (for any student, not just me). He didn't get tenure and left to join MCC after that year. I don't think I ever talked to him again after the first meeting.

He was extremely smart, charismatic, and a bit arrogant (but a well-founded arrogance). From other comments it sounds like he was pleasant to young people at Cycorp. I think his peers found him more annoying.

His great accomplishments were having a multi-decade vision of how to build an AI and actually keeping the vision alive for so long. You have to be charismatic and convincing to do that.

In the mid-80s I took his thesis and tried to implement AM on a more modern framework, but the thesis lacked so many details about how it worked that I was unable to even get started implementing anything.

BTW, if there are any historians out there I have a copy of Lenat's thesis with some extra pages including emailed messages from his thesis advisors (Minsky, McCarthy, et al) commenting on his work. I also have a number of AI papers from the early 1980s that might not be generally available.

I once owned a 1.5 acre property that had approximately 1.4 acres of English ivy on it. It was horrible; the ivy is, by all practical means, impossible to kill. An area covered with a tarp for two months looks exactly like an uncovered area. The only way to get rid of it was to pull the roots out of the ground, mostly by hand. And it grows new roots every meter or so.

If you want to get rich, invent a way to kill ivy that does not also kill people.

I've been through changes like this several times and the SURE indicator that big changes are coming is when the higher-ups say "Nothing will change". Seriously.

I actually think that, below the CEO level, the managers are engaged in wishful thinking, rather than deceit.

Not everyone. Everyone I know loved it.

It would take him 5-10 years to become a competent programmer. Does he want to finally achieve stability in his career at age 70?

I would suggest that he become a business advisor to small companies. His expertise is invaluable and he could be useful immediately.

I once called a travel agent to book a flight to San Jose (California). She mis-heard me as wanting to go to Santa Fe (New Mexico). She called me a few days later in a panic, saying "Sorry, I accidentally booked you a flight to San Jose. I'll cancel it and re-book it". Two wrongs do make a right.

In the article it says that Dijkstra didn't use a computer, TV, or cell phone.

I was a computer operator in the late 1970s and I used to read ComputerWorld which was the biggest enterprise tech "journal" (actually a newspaper) of the day. In the late 1970s they had a number of articles commenting on the need to fix the Y2K problem. So smart people were planning for it well ahead of time. On the other hand memory and storage were so limited then it was probably hard to get permission to allocate two more bytes for a 4-digit year. But people were definitely thinking about it for a long time before the year 2000.

The Warren Abstract Machine has a bunch of Prolog-related opcodes mixed in with a bunch of opcodes for maintaining linked lists and other data structures. Once you figure that out the WAM becomes slightly easier to understand.

"nautical miles from radians" has to be one of the most esoteric functions built into any language.