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"History is just
people doing things" THE ABQ CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302 Online
Edition Number 351......March 2025 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
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HAVE A SEAT Back in what must have been 1976, I
received a proposal for an article in Personal Computing Magazine, of
which I was Editor.
(In those quaint old days of print, the protocol for offering a piece to a
publication was to send a letter outlining it to see if the editor would be
interested.) Yes, the idea was appealing, and I replied that I’d soon be in
the author’s home territory and could meet with him. He invited me to his home in South San
Francisco, which was one of those houses not common outside California
whose front is at street level, and whose back is supported on stilts over a
chasm. He gave me a tour, pointing out a storage area stacked high
with folded corrugated cardboard objects. They were kits of model airplane
gliders, cleverly die-cut so the purchaser could pop out the pieces and
assemble the aircraft following instructions printed on them. When a
customer ordered a glider, my host could just slap a label on the sturdy
folded object, and mail it off. Impressive. I was offered a comfortable chair,
handed a draft of the proposed article, and asked what sort of music I liked. He played a number of instruments,
and planned to practice on a recorder while I read. I said I liked Bach, and he
indeed played Bach while I read. I said we’d publish the piece. We
chatted interestingly about the computer biz before I left. It was an unusual
experience. He was more than talented (he invented computer languages, was an artist, initiated the design of the Apple MacIntosh, had much to do with the Mozilla Firefox browser, which I use routinely, etc…); he was also outspoken and influential, His work is present in daily life these fifty years later. He was also highly quotable. e.g: “Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers and nobody thinks of complaining.” Partly because of his influence, our
computers now work much of the time. Unlike most of the techie creators of
personal computers, who thought that computer users cared how the infernal
things work, Raskin promoted the idea that computers were appliances that
customers used for doing something they wanted done. Good on him. I saw Jef last at the West Coast
Computer Faire in 1977, where Faire proprietor Jim Warren roller-skated around the floor of
the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, visiting his exhibitors. That show was
notable for the introduction of the Apple II, which became an icon of its era.
As we looked around the busy hall, Jef commented, “This is either the end of
something or the beginning of something.” I think it was both. Jef Raskin died in 2005 at only 61. Too bad. He was really interesting
and had more to do. GETTING THERE Forty-some years ago, pre-artificial neural nets and
LLMs, I published a couple of things speculating on the potential for
turning “personal robots” into companions who would be helpful and
comforting to old folks like me, now. I had expected such critters to be
among us long ago, but it takes a while for fundamentally different ideas
to come into general use. Robot companions seem to be creeping up on us
at last. A WIRED article reports interestingly on experience
with an “AI travel companion” in Tokyo. The author found it…um…
companionable and helpful as well as error-prone. (Who of us is not
error-prone?) She seems to have been glad of its company and utility. A
Quartz article, 2025 could be the year AI Grows Up deals with less “personal” AI
agents performing functions in business, and the probable need to set
agents watching agents to be sure that they don’t do anything harmfully
silly. “Who watches the watchers?” is a classic issue, just in new context.
That’s what auditing firms are about.
We haven’t found a way to predict comprehensively what “emerging technology” will be able to do what we’ll be either glad of or sorry about, just too many unknown variables. Wikipedia says that “
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Item: While looking at references to Jef Raskin, I found this quote from him: "An unlimited-length file name is a file. The content of a file is its own best name." Remarkably, while explaining to ignorant me in 1968 what a computer is and does, Woody Bledsoe used this key phrase: “The
information is the address; the address is the information.” With the rise of
LLMs these many years later, what they were saying is becoming crystal clear. Item: It has apparently occurred to Saudi Arabia that, while they have had immense…really IMMENSE revenue from oil for quite some time now, that resource is not unlimited. Maybe they should use some of that money to create other resources. One of the things they’ve come up with is The Line, a city 1600 feet tall, 656 feet wide, and 105 miles long. They’ve already started to build it…and there’s a remote chance that the mad scheme can be carried through. Holy Smoke! It’s in a special area of the country, called NEOM, formally dedicated to doing new stuff. The general population of Saudi Arabia is not especially noted for embracing new stuff, and one can imagine a certain reluctance to accept social changes that must inevitably accompany a project on this scale, but the country’s management does not shrink from enforcing its dictates. This should be scary as well as fascinating to watch in coming decades. Item: A report
about a lady collecting slime moulds on her Tasmanian property reminds us that
these are extraordinarily interesting living…er…things with capabilities that
still puzzle us. For example, they can work their way through a maze to find
food. This
interesting short article from Discover, admiring their talents, is a bit rude
about them. They deserve better. _______________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE
PAST This item
from March 1996 just seems appropriate for the start
of this forty-first year COMFORT IN CLASSIFICATION You’ll notice on the Correspo Home Page that we finally have a real ISSN...an
“International Standard Serial Number”...assigned by the National Serials
Data Program of the U.S. Library of Congress to the Online Edition of the ABQ
Correspondent. What does it mean?
Well..unh... um...who knows?. The
printed edition of the ABQ Correspondent has sported an ISSN for some years.
In the case of printed publications, serial
numbers are potentially helpful to librarians who hope to arrange all
documents in orderly fashion, so that scholars can find them again in the
future. It’s less clear that an ISSN assigned to this online edition of the
Correspo has value for anybody. Where the heck will anybody look to find the
material? I forgot to save the first
few files of this, and even the ones now preserved are just WordPerfect
files copied to fragile floppy disks.
A scarier idea is that the material is stored in a great Monitoring Computer
in the Sky by agencies of governments unspecified, whose work is aided by the
ISSN. That’s goofy, but who knows? The ISSN gives a certain cachet to the publication, and one’s
ego is bolstered by the notion that some scholar in future years may be
interested in these paragraphs, improbable as it may seem. The Online Correspo seems more
“official” now, with a definable place in the world. It was
challenging to move the Correspo online after ten years of
publication...two sides of an 8½”
x 11” sheet of canary
yellow paper…printed out, copied at Kinko’s or some
such shop, folded inside another sheet of paper
with somebody’s address on it, stamped, and mailed. (A
first class stamp must have been about fifteen cents
at the time…more like fifty cents now… couldn’t afford
it.) Without practical constraint on the length of the
online copy, we arrived at trying to limit pieces to
400-500 words, but sometimes wander embarrassingly
beyond that. Should we automatically show reader
responses? Goodness, no. How about frequency?
Well, the print edition had been every-other- month but
monthly was practical online and not a nuisance to
readers…and so on and so on. Lots changed . …and it has
been a sort of meaningless comfort all these years to
have an International Standard Serial Number to make
the Correspo seem real. Onward. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN 979-8320821917
See on Amazon __________________________________________________
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