I grew up in the early years of personal computers and was a young adult in the early years of the web/internet, with most of my career in the age of mobile phones and wireless connectivity. I’ve never had to run a company without having a computer-based spreadsheet for computations. I remember adding machines with paper tapes, but never owned one. And until this week had never seen and NCR Class 2000 Accounting Machine.
Oh my! Watching that video makes me love spreadsheets even more.
While reading about nostalgic computing on the Chip Letter, I came across the following picture of hand-written assembly code for the IBM S/360. What caught my eye wasn’t the paper spreadsheet, but the ah ha moment of clarity explaining why assemblers assume anything in the first column of text is a label, i.e. why assemblers require mnemonics to be prefixed by a space or tab. I’m an...
I came across the word “transmogrify” today and wondered if the author first learned it reading Calvin & Hobbes, as I don’t recall ever seeing the word before that. Luckily for us denizens of the 21st Century, we can ask Google’s Ngrams the popularity of a word back a few centuries: Turns out no, the word isn’t new to Calvin & Hobbes. It was used to describe...
Ars Technia published a lovely history of the changes in market leadership in computers, tables, and smartphones. My takeaway is another reminder of how much more difficult foresight is than hindsight. Especially when I was reading the prospectus to the Apple IPO, where the risks were about the TRS-80, Atari 400, Commodore PET, and other competitors of the day. We all think of Apple today as a...
I always through the company name Intel was a just the first five letter of “intellegent” or “intellegence”. Wrong. It’s a portmanteau of INTegrated ELectronics. This was one of the many tidbits of knowledge that have shown up in The Snowball, the “other” biography of Warren Buffett. Turns out Warren had the opportunity to invest $100,000 into the initial...
Do you remember my journey down the 8-bit computing rabbit hole? Well… if you are going to do something for fun like designing an upgraded 1976 CPU and writing a 1979 personal computer operating system, you might as well go all the way and write the accompanying book too, in the matching late-1970s style. I read a lot of fan fiction in my free time, but I don’t recall ever seeing much...
