|
|
"History
is just people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 348......December 2024 Published since 1985 for clients and contacts of ABQ
Communications Corporation, the fuzzy focus of The ABQ Correspondent
is "the impact of new technology on society." If you'd like to
receive email notification when each monthly issue is posted, please let
us know. correspo
at swcp dot com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Celebrating my birthday at the Albuquerque’s Ironside
Restaurant, where the walls are covered with hundreds of pictures of military
veterans who have come to their attention, I spotted a picture of Grace
Hopper. Recalling my encounter with her, I told this story at dinner, and was
encouraged to write it out. So: It must
have been 1976 when David Bunnell, Publisher of Personal Computing
Magazine, of which I was the Editor, decided to stage the “first
personal computer convention that was not sponsored by a single company.”
He had staged a sponsored show for MITS (at which Bill Gates gave his first anti-software-piracy speech), and
was in a rush to beat out others in presenting the first general industry
show. That’s another story…as is David. The show was
scheduled in a hotel at the corner of Century and Sepulveda close to LAX.
Somehow, word got to friend George Glaser that my associate Glenn Norris and
I would be in LA at that time. George was then a figure in the computer industry…president of the American Federation of
Information Processing Societies. He had a couple of tickets he couldn’t use
for the annual dinner meeting of the California based Digital
Computer Association at a hotel
near LAX while we were to be there, and he offered them to us. The DCA,
aka the Drunken Computer Association, was a legitimate professional
society that had flourished for some years with regular meetings,
proceedings, and all that. However, rubes from out in boondocks like Santa
Monica couldn’t be taken seriously in real centers of professional and
academic excellence like Princeton and Boston, so the DCA withered. They
finally threw in the towel, and suspended serious activity, surviving for
another quarter century or so by holding an annual dinner for old times’
sake, at which people drank a lot of wine. Glenn and I
showed up at the dinner in good time, and watched notable people stream in…like
Fred Gruenberger and the chap who was then editor of Datamation Magazine (whose name I can’t
recall, but who had bought an article from me and had it handsomely
illustrated…so I should remember his name), One of the notable people
was Navy Captain Grace Hopper, who
appeared in uniform. She was a true pioneer of the Computer Age, a
resourceful innovator, and a popular speaker. (She often handed to the audiences at her talks a cord 984 feet long that they wound
around the room. It represented the distance a signal could travel in a
microsecond. She also passed out 11.8-inch pieces of wire, explaining that
they represented the distance a signal could travel in a nanosecond…not very
far. …her point being that as processors got faster,
computers really had to get smaller, so that data could arrive on time. She
later passed out envelopes of pepper, explaining the particles as
picoseconds. The flag of the unit she commanded was a pirate skull and crossbones,
the only one in the U.S. Navy.) She retired from the service as a Rear
Admiral. Oddly, as
people came in, many of them were carrying large shopping bags that they
carefully placed under the tables. Dinner began,
accompanied by lots of wine. At one point Captain Hopper was called to the
platform and presented with a T-Shirt that said “Grandma Cobol” on it.
There were cries of “Put it on!” but she declined with dignity, saying that
she would never put anything on over her uniform…bringing cheers and
applause. Things moved on to business; people brought us up to date on recent
events, passings, etc…then came the featured
event of the evening. Somebody stood up to deliver a technical paper
that had been scheduled for presentation many years before, but that event had
been canceled as the DCA contracted. When the speaker stepped to the
microphone, those shopping bags were pulled out from under the tables…full
of wine corks, thousands of them. People threw the corks at the
speaker… at others on the platform…at each other…and at the
waiters (maybe that’s why the event was at a different location every
year). Corks rained
on our table, and I was able to clip Glenn behind the ear with a couple of
them. Seated next to me, Captain Hopper did not throw wine corks. She just
chain-smoked, occasionally sweeping a pile of corks in front of me, so I
could throw them. When the
riotous activity subsided, the party was over. DCA persisted
for a few more years but is now apparently just a warm memory. I’m pleased to be able to share it. BTW, “Amazing Grace” is not my coinage. Someone else came up with that appropriate descriptor long ago. Item: Fred Gruenberger is mentioned in
the piece above about Grace Hopper. Looking for information about Fred, I
came upon this report
of a meeting of computer experts and educators that was carefully timed
to occur just before the 1967 Fall Joint Computer Conference (a year before
the 1968 conference featuring the “Mother of all Demonstrations” in which
Doug Engelbart introduced the computer mouse). One is charmed by Fred’s
preface to the document: “This Paper is an expurgated and
condensed transcript of the Tenth Annual Computer Symposium
held at The RAND Corporation, 13 November
1967…” Expurgated? The discussion must have grown a bit heated. This conversation among people who had a big hand in
creating the digital revolution is remarkable, seven years before MITS
introduced the Altair personal computer. The guys had some inkling, but not
much more than that, of what was coming, of a time when most individuals in
modern society are dependent on using computers in one form or another. In
addressing “who should be taught what about computing,” Fred himself said: “I
submit that there is a large group of people (those who are artistically
inclined, for example) to whom this is an unbearable chore. They will reap no
benefit whatsoever….” Well, as one to whom being taught
Fortran was an unbearable chore, I sympathize with his attitude, but the
paradigm has changed over the years; “apps” are a way of life, and most everyone
is “computer literate.” Item: An associate sent along a link ostensibly demonstrating a
development in machine intelligence. In spite of
careful attention to the interesting half-hour presentation, most of what the
enthusiastic man said went in one of my ears and out the other without being
much impeded by understanding…math logic not being my thing. When I asked for
help, it turned out that my associate had sent the wrong link, and would have
to search for the right one. I was assured, however, that the math presentation
explains a lot about cryptography….and that rang a bell. It shows that everything
is related mathematically to everything else…pointing out why it is nigh unto
impossible to come up with random sequences helpful to creating secret codes.
Take a
look. It’s both interesting and beautiful. The presentation
of the Mathologer recalls a high point in my
technical career. In the mid-1980’s, that same associate and I used to take
long walks (often some miles) to chat about this and that out of earshot of
eavesdroppers. On one occasion, I explained at length my scheme for
generating random sequences of characters we wanted for the pattern
recognition method we were working on with neural nets. He listened closely, and finally said
“You’ve just re-invented the code wheel on which the Enigma Machine
is based.” Oh. (Note that the Enigma code was broken.) _______________________________________________ ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from 1997 is
recalled by the sound of local granddaughter’s Nissan
Leaf electric car backing out of the
driveway. ELECTRIC CONFUSION Russ Eberhart called enthusiastically from Indianapolis to say that we should
watch ESPN 2 the following night, when his
university’s electric car would appear at the renowned Indianapolis Raceway
in a featured race against cars of other universities. Not toys, he said,
these are serious racing machines that
reach speeds as high as 140mph -- for as long as twelve minutes before
the batteries are tuckered out. At that, their
crew can swap out 1100 pounds of batteries in a
30-second pit stop. Remarkable. Dr. Eberhart is apparently the technical
director of the student project that builds and maintains the racers. The
event appeared as scheduled with appropriate fanfare and commentary from
well-known broadcasters. The drivers
were not students, but professionals with a lot of experience, who could
handle the powerful machines aggressively, but safely on the Indy track. On the first lap, the driver of the
Indiana vehicle ran the car into the wall, and smashed it non-trivially,
though nobody was hurt. The young man leading the pit crew glumly explained
that another race was coming up in a couple of weeks, for which they might be
ready only if they worked day and night. His crew had already not slept for
two weeks in preparation for this event. The cause of the crash was
uncertain, but the broadcasters had commented during the race that the cars were silent, except for the
noise of their tires on the pavement. The
absence of the engines’ roar and whine struck them as eerie. One suspects
that the effect was also unsettling to the professional drivers, who didn’t have those sounds
to tell them what was happening, and may have become disoriented. Maybe a
student should have driven. Keep watching. While people
have been experimenting with electric vehicles
since the 1830s (Really that long ago… see this excellent article on EVs from Car
and Driver) …practical
EVs have been a long time a-comin’. We’re not
quite there yet, given the limitations on range that
must be solved by improved electrical energy
technology. Still, it’s a
kick to ride in the Leaf and Mustang electrics
that are remarkably powerful, bristling with sensors
that let us detect hazards I’m unaware of in my
pretty good little Chevy Trax. Further, the electrics
can take action on the information those sensors
collect, for example, reading speed limit signs
and suggesting that the driver notice other changes.
We hear reports
that college student Malia in San Francisco
really prefers to take the driverless (Waymo, I
think) cabs instead of walking home from work of evenings. Is it worrisome? Everybody hears about
it when an automatic vehicle gets into an accident,
but human drivers routinely have accidents
that attract little attention. It’s hard to know, because
we have so little statistical data thus far,
whether the automatic vehicles are better or worse
drivers than people are. One is fairly confident
that the automatics are steadily improving. Not so sure about human drivers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917 See on Amazon __________________________________________________
____________________ Copyright
© 2024 ABQ Communications Corporation. All rights reserved. |
This book was written, richly
illustrated, and published by excellent grandkid Malia. At 7 (gosh, eleven
years ago) she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes… suddenly, of course; “Get
her to the hospital NOW!” and things have been