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The ABQ
Correspondent Last Two Issues December 2024 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. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NELS
MUSES 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. November 2024 The surge
in practical use of digital neural net technology in the past couple of years
has stimulated some acceptance of old ideas that were shrugged off when
they were new. One such is the “memristor.” Go back a bit. In the 1970s Dilithium Press published a book Iben Browning and I
wrote called Robots On Your Doorstep.
(Iben was mostly the thinker-upper; I was mostly the writer-downer, though we
used a lot of his good lines, and I had an occasional technical thought.) The
book arose from my realization that much of what we were working on at the
Thomas Bede Foundation involved creating smart machines. I started to
document it…and the product of my work was so dull that I kept falling asleep
on the typewriter, waking up with indentations of the keys on my face…rather
like napping on a chenille bedspread. So,
I turned it into a story full of anecdotes. The book’s first review said
it was “bizarre”, but over the years, some have been intrigued by it,
explaining its peculiarity as “the way people wrote things in the ‘70s.” No,
it’s the way I wrote one thing. A recent published comment said with surprise
“There’s really something to this; they documented an artificial analog
neural net before the digital revolution.” The Correspo has
commented a couple of times on startling work that combines digital neural
nets with living neural nets in a hybrid system. One concern, of course,
is that the living cells die. Though they may be replaced by others, one
wonders about maintaining continuity. Living systems are FAST, processing
immense amounts of data with relatively low energy consumption. We want that
capability, but…. Enter the memristor,
which LLM system Claude helpfully defined thus: “A memristor is like a
special kind of electrical switch that can "remember" how much
electricity has flowed through it in the past.” No point in my trying to
elaborate on that, because after another phrase or two, I have no idea what
I’m talking about, and presumably the memristor is one of several related
systems in development. Still, the point seems clear: we may develop
hybrid digital/analog neural nets without having to worry about the analog
component dying. Further, we may conceivably develop wholly analog
artificial neural nets. Seems bizarre. Every few years, somebody promotes,
and spend a lot of money in development of wind-powered ships using Flettner rotors to assist propulsion. It’s an appealing idea, and was actually put into practice as long ago as 1925…but
the technology comes with some problems that have limited its use. The
rotors are big vertical cylinders, perhaps fifteen meters tall, that
stand upright on the deck of a ship. Those hollow cylinders are split in half
lengthwise, and slid apart along that split. Wind can slide off the convex
rounded surface, but is caught by the concave opening of the other side.
Since the thing is symmetrical, it is a turbine that can be turned by the
wind. BUT, it ain’t a
sail, the propulsion is not provided by the wind’s pushing on it as it
would a sail, and the turbine is not driving a generator. In fact,
the cylinder must be rotated by a motor to make it work with the added energy
of the wind. The motors providing that rotation can
be small, compared to motors used to drive the propellers of a ship. The driving
force comes from the Magnus Effect, produced perpendicular to the rotating
cylinder, that pushes the ship. It isn’t very efficient, but promoters
hope that rotors can provide as much as 50% of the energy needed for
propulsion…saving immense amounts of diesel fuel. We shall see. Anton Flettner (1885-1961)…an “Aviation Engineer and Inventor,” was
important to Germany during WWI and WWII. Though
his wife was Jewish, he had connections with
Heinrich Himmler, who had his family escorted to neutral
Sweden during WWII. After the war, Flettner was brought to the US by Operation Paperclip, about which many of
us have extremely mixed feelings. It gets a bit
personal, because I knew people who worked with such as von
Braun and Dornberger, Indeed, I assume that one funny,
interesting acquaintance (probably not an employer of
slave labor), was one of the Paperclip gang. It’s a complicated
world. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NELS
MUSES Item: With the recent occurrence of what used to be Columbus Day, we’ve been hearing a lot about “indigenous peoples.” The implication of most of that discussion is that the folks whom Columbus and his ilk treated in such vile fashion were always where they were discovered by self-important Europeans, but it’s increasingly difficult as we learn more from DNA studies to believe that any people were always where they are. Having just watched a report of the invasion of the Salish by the Haida in the 1840s, I rather suspect that things have been tense among most groups of people for a long, long time, and “indigenous” really means “we came here before you did.” Along the same lines, we hear a lot about “indigenous” species of plants, and the ravages of invasive species. (We’re often over our heads in tumbleweed… Russian thistle…after a windstorm.) Hawaii seems particularly touchy, but guys…when those heaps of lava broke the ocean’s surface to become islands, there wasn’t any hibiscus growing on them; everything that grows in Hawaii is “invasive.” When the island of Surtsey popped up off Iceland in 1963 birds started visiting almost at once, bringing seeds that grew into plants…very visible and looking indigenous by the ‘70s. Well, grump, grump, grump. Item: The Correspo has more than once mentioned the Hear-a-Lite that was developed back in the 1950s to aid the blind. Look at what people are doing these days. Item:
Somebody is producing a new musical instrument that is an “AI piano teacher” and a digital Theremin. Da mind is boggle. The theremin is interesting. It’s an electronic device that produces a tone that rises in pitch when you move one hand close to it, and rises in volume when you move your other hand close to it on the other side. A skilled arm-waver can produce eerie music with it. The memorable music by Miklós Rózsa for the 1945 movie Spellbound featured a theremin. The guy who invented the instrument in the mid-1920s, Lev Terman aka Leon Theremin was long-lived (97), traveled the world, was married multiple times, and won a Stalin Prize from the USSR for developing technology for the NKVD/KGB that was effective in spying on the British, French, and US embassies in Moscow. My college roommate built a pre-digital Theremin that didn’t work quite as he hoped; the best it could do was a full-volume screech that would loosen the paint from the walls if allowed to persist. It might be fun to play with one that works. _______________________________________________ ITEM FROM THE PAST This item from 1995 is recalled just because the Holiday Season is creeping up on us. The Dutch tulip growers sent a nice cheese to the chief
gardener at a California estate at Christmas each year in appreciation of his
purchases of thousands of bulbs. When the expected cheese failed to
appear one year, the chief asked if any of his men had seen the round, red,
wax covered cheese. Indeed, one of his new men had planted it, looking
forward with excitement to the blossoming of this immense bulb. With
some difficulty, they relocated the cheese, exhumed it, and consumed
it. It was just fine. This was a triumph of packaging on several
counts. Ah, Gouda. Ah, Edamse Kase.
The “California Estate” was in fact “Belmont” so named by William Chapman Ralston. The town of Belmont is named after the estate and its main drag is Ralston Avenue. Ralston was an
interesting guy, an important figure in turning San Francisco into a major city in the wild times when the gold rush came along. In recent decades, Belmont has become home to major companies like Oracle…not in the Ralston avenue part that runs up through a canyon to the hills, but the area down on the salt flats lining San Francisco Bay. One wonders how often sea lions wander into those big buildings. The
estate has become the campus of Notre Dame de
Namur University, with which I
had a trivial connection back in the 1950s when it was still called the College of Notre Dame. Friend David Hardie, who was a ballet dancer (he’d discovered that there were lots of attractive girls in ballet), was
directing and appearing in a performance at the College of Notre Dame when one of their male dancers failed to show up. David desperately needed a replacement for him in one scene, and couldn’t find anyone but me who was handy to the location and might be silly enough to do it. I didn’t have to dance, just lead a procession on stage as a king, and sit to watch others dance. Feeling like a fool in my crown
and tights and fancy vest, hoping nobody would recognize me, I did it. David had not warned me that the ladies would occasionally dance back to where I was sitting, and stamp on my toes (probably more to their consternation than mine) but we all survived, and I slunk away as rapidly as possible. The minor point of reciting this dopey story from sixty-some years ago is that the performance must have taken place in the ballroom of Ralston Hall, which is described breathlessly in the link above. I wasn’t paying much attention to that at the time. --------------------------------------------------------------------
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