Corroborated with the US Government Accounting Office’s (GAO) annual report, the Simpsons have been vilified in accusing the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS, the tax authority) of operating the “slowest, punch-cardiest” computer in the government—at least, in one sense.
Those who work for the government have enjoyed heretofore some measure of job-security in knowing that their position is justified because different, entrenched systems cannot communicate with one another and need human translators—or at least water-bearers, but often it’s not the equipment, the hardware that’s wholly off life-cycle. Those laurels can be awarded to the nuclear defence platforms running on the same mainframes since inception and cannot be taken offline for updates and payroll systems. They may not be the most sophisticated but that does not necessarily mean that a system that goes on working for decades, with proper maintenance, ought to be overhauled for the sake of efficiency or intelligibility—since they are impervious to attack (at least the lazy, automated kind) and there might be an element of self-preservation in the programming, like the Voyager space probes exploring the Cosmos as our competent ombudsmen.
Sunday 23 October 2016
legacy software
Monday 10 October 2016
tron/troff or pitch-perfect
Recently an archivist made a fascinating discovery in the form of the first programme, score of digital music from 1948. Cryptologist and polymath Alan Turing wrote the instructions to have his building-sized computer at a laboratory in Manchester perform God Save the King followed by a few other melodies.
While we do have some insight into the pragmatic drive for Turing to modify the mainframe to produce sound—wanting to untether himself from monitoring gauges and screens to check the status of a running programme, a B- of an F-note indicating whether the programme had concluded or ran into a logical glitch (the beep, bop, boop of vintage super-computers), so he could check for bugs elsewhere or attend to the engineering requirements of the hardware, we are sadly not privy to what Turing thought about electronic music or its potential, since for years Mister Turing was blacklisted and his contributions to computer science went unacknowledged.
Monday 19 September 2016
megabit, metabit
To my peril but also to my subsequent delight and emendation, my love-letters from Brain Pickings are usually dog-eared and set aside for reading that I always promise to get to at soon point, but that pile in my inbox is seething and threatens an avalanche. Happily, I was able to return to an intriguing sounding review of the life and times of a young mathematician who’s pioneering work in circuitry demonstrated that all logical operations could be reckoned by switches and relays and the just invented transistor, leading Claude Shannon to quickly and intuitively conclude that all information in the wilds—its natural habitat could be corralled and tamed, with data emerging as information thanks to the transfiguring exchange between the observer and the observed.
Saturday 5 September 2015
your princess is in another castle
Via that other intrepid adventuress, Nag on the Lake, we are invited on field-trip with the team of explorers of Atlas Obscura to Saint Petersburg to see the conservation efforts of a group of nostalgic and impassioned group of college students, which has produced a vintage arcade experience.
Visitors are immersed in an ensemble of loving restored and playable games and refreshments that capture the ethos of the Soviet Union during the ‘70s and ‘80s. This unique installation (which is presenting some major maintenance challenges) consists of gaming machines that were not only about fun and fantasy—commissioned in accordance with the wishes of the state, there was little time or tolerance for anthropomorphic mushrooms and damsels in distress and these games rather emphasised hand-eye coordination, strategy and team-work over competition. Although no one can say for certain as the provenance of the games is a classified matter, they were probably designed and programmed in the same facilities and by the same computer scientists that were charged with the maintenance of the Soviets’ nuclear weapons arsenal.
Thursday 7 January 2010
these kids today with their y2k...
catagories: ๐พ