Early computing memories

I took an unexpected walk down Nostalgia Lane yesterday when I stumbled across my copy of The Best of Creative Computing, Vol. 2 in my library. I know at one point, I used to have Volume 1, but I think it disappeared long ago in one of my many moves. Creative Computing was founded by David Ahl in 1974 for the hobbyist and home/personal computer enthusiast as a more accessible version BYTE. I subscribed for several years (though I didn’t have a personal computer and did all my work on mainframes and an IBM 1140 via...punchcards!) and learned a lot on programming from its pages. I copied, adapted, and created from the programs Ahl and his contributors provided in each issue. The Best of that I still have was published in 1977 and has articles from 1974 through 1976 , grouped in topics on technology, programming theory, quite a bit on computers in education, humor and puzzles, resources, (as mentioned) programs (whoa – open source!) for different applications and games, hardware of the day and reviews. When I was young, I was more interested in the programming and puzzles. Still have that interest, but I this time read with increasing interest and amazement several of the other articles. One of the first pieces on technology in the collection looked at video discs (this was 1975 – before Betamax and VHS). Alfred Bork, from UC Irvine, wrote a piece called “Videodiscs – The Ultimate Computer Input Device?” I decided to look up Mr. Bork and found that the entire three (apparently a third came out after I stopped subscribing) volumes of the Best of Creative Computing here, so you can read Bork’s article yourself here. If you follow the next few pages, you’ll see a side-by-side of Philips-MCA’s laser disc with RCA’s (failed) competing videodisc. Cutting edge discussions with eerie future parallels pepper the compendium: - page 68, “Information Anyone?” by Bill Griffith of Boston College opens

With the CIA collecting information on private citizens (Why don’t they stick to overthrowing foreign governments?), commercial credit companies recording the contents of your trashcans and your seven year old using words like “software” and “hardware” and “PL/I”, is it any wonder you wonder?
Hmmm...CIA (Homeland Security, FBI, etc.) – check; credit…recording…trash = targeted ads from cookies and internet use – check; seven year old using foreign words - always going to be a check there…. - Two pages later, a Charles Winn voices an opinion lamenting “The Government Dinosaur”, and offers a vision that could have been written today (need to outsource to private sector) and pre-sages some things that have become a reality (electronic voting – though not quite as envisioned, firewalls – though not called such – to prevent tampering and misuse, use of radio/television to gage the pulse of the constituents), and was a little wishful in hope (instant demographics from the public recreating a true democracy – in use for “reality” shows...but not where it really matters, massive data availability which would render lobbyists unnecessary – yeah, right!). - David (Ahl) comments on the problems of the new Electronic Funds Transfer System and having to pay fees for services rendered, though no service was actually performed! Should the urge take you, I recommend checking out an interesting Way Back look at how some of us learned computing, what we were using, and the way of the future (circa 1976): ads for computers and printers, Star Trek (of course!), computers in teaching geometry, [Hunt the] Wumpus 2 – again, open source, a review of the HP-25 (go back one page for a review of the Magnavox Odyssey). I have a feeling at least one reader (contributor) will enjoy the flashback.

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9/11 as an excuse to say stupid things.

I work in a big office building located in downtown St. Louis, the "Bank of America Plaza." Early this week, I was interviewed for a newspaper article, and I needed an updated photo of myself. A coworker offered to snap that photo using a small digital camera. We want down the elevator to the first floor public lobby of the building, at street level, where we found a large neutral colored wall that we could use as a backdrop for my photo. I stood in front of the wall and my coworker stood about 10 feet away from me. As she took a photo of me a security guard suddenly approached. Me: "In the lobby? In a public lobby?" Guard: "You may not take any pictures here. It’s because of 9/11 and homeland security." Me: "I understand that your employers have instructed you to say these sorts of things, but what you have just told me is about the most idiotic thing I've ever heard. My coworker is simply trying to take a picture of me in front of a wall." Guard: "Sir you cannot continue doing this. You will need to take pictures elsewhere." We left. Apparently, taking pictures of me threatens the United States. Or maybe the threat was taking a picture of the wall behind me. Certainly, the guard made it clear that the building owners prohibit any sort of photos in the lobby. We walked across the street and threatened the United States by taking my photo inside the lobby of a office building across the street, where friendly security guards don’t appreciate the risk of what we were doing. Instead, they naively laughed at our stories about security guards in my own office building.

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Substitute NYT for Wikileaks and substitute Iran for the United States

Wikileaks continues to be punished for being one of the few organizations brash enough to inform us what our governments are really doing and why. This is intolerable, of course, because the U.S. government is being run by big corporations and wealthy people who, for the most part, are driven by greed--so sorry to break this to the kids who are studying civics in grade school, where they don't tell you about armies of lobbyists, and they don't tell you that the banks own Congress. The true powers that be are running the federal government in secret and they are, regrettably, running it into the ground. That's what one should expect when there is no sunshine to keep powerful people accountable. What we have is a needlessly warmongering, debt-ridden secret and personally invasive brave new government.   I truly wish I didn't believe these things. Consider that our government first attacked Wikileaks by starving it financially, despite the lack of any charges filed against it. They did this by harassing Amazon and various financial organizations to make sure that Wikileaks had no funds to fight in Round II, which is underway. We now know that there are secret subpoenas being issued by the US, and thank goodness that Twitter had the decency to inform its users that their privacy is being invaded, unlike the big U.S. telecoms, who have a long documented track record for turning over our private information without informing us (encouraged very much by President Obama's agreement to grant them retroactive immunity for past invasions of our privacy.  Julian Assange sums up the current grand jury proceedings like this, and we know of this only because the U.K. Guardian has continually refused to be the lapdog of the U.S.:

The emergence of the Twitter subpoena – which was unsealed after a legal challenge by the company – was revealed after WikiLeaks announced it believed other US Internet companies had also been ordered to hand over information about its members' activities. WikiLeaks condemned the court order, saying it amounted to harassment. "If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," Assange said in a statement.
Glenn Greenwald comments further:
It's worth recalling -- and I hope journalists writing about this story remind themselves -- that all of this extraordinary probing and "criminal" investigating is stemming from WikiLeaks' doing nothing more than publishing classified information showing what the U.S. Government is doing: something investigative journalists, by definition, do all the time. And the key question now is this: did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply? It's difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue. But if other companies did receive and quietly comply with these orders, it will be a long time before we know, if we ever do, given the prohibition in these orders on disclosing even its existence to anyone. UPDATE III: Iceland's Interior Minister, Ögmundur Jónasson, described the DOJ's efforts to obtain the Twitter information of a member of that country's Parliament as "grave and odd." While suggesting some criticisms of WikiLeaks, he added: "if we manage to make government transparent and give all of us some insight into what is happening in countries involved in warfare it can only be for the good."

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Our JFK Moment?

We finally have our Kennedy Moment in the current political climate. Saturday, January 8th, 2011, is likely to go down as exactly that in the “Where were you when?” canon.  On that day, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, went on a shooting rampage at a supermarket parking lot in Tucson,…

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The science of making butter, and more

Robert Krampf teaches us how to make butter, explaining the science of butter-making. I certainly learned some things along the way. In the following video, he talks about infrared, a color that our eyes can't see. I learned of these videos, and much more in this list of 100 science videos for science teachers.

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