Tekkie

This is sort of a follow-up to the My journey series. In that, I talked about learning programming on 8-bit computers, and progressing onto much more powerful systems in college, and in the work world, and then coming to feel like I’d been led to a place that was very unsatisfying. I recently became curious […]

The first video below is from 2021. It helps answer a question I’ve had for a long time re. what I’ve seen go on in schools and universities for the past 12 years. I used to have the impression that what I was seeing re. an anti-intellectual atmosphere was just certain classes, at certain schools. […]

*** Warning: This post contains spoilers *** I guess since it’s been so long since “Tron Legacy,” there really isn’t much continuity between it and this movie. There’s a reference to characters in “Legacy” in the opening sequence, and a few notes re. “Flynn Lives,” but that’s it. I wasn’t expecting to like this sequel. The […]

Jackson Tyler produced another really good documentary, this time on NASA’s first space program, Project Mercury. I figure most people, if they’re conscious of NASA at all, have a perception that it started with the Apollo program, to go to the Moon. Mercury tends to be less well-known. Apollo had more of a world impact, […]

I have been asked on a couple occasions about how to do this, and I get the impression that the answer I give doesn’t satisfy the people asking, because I basically tell them, “You’re trying to do it wrong.” I try as succinctly as I can to give them some ideas on how to do […]

I learned about STEPS from the ViewPoints Research Institute (VPRI) in about 2008. It’s goal was to create a usable office system, from the ground up (including the basic system software to support it: kernel, memory access, I/O, storage, networking, and graphics system) in 20,000 lines of code. This benchmark was based on the lines […]

I searched for many years for something that felt like a baseline, that I could present as a basis for learning and exploration re. system programming, and system design. I got into the Forth programming language on the Atari 8-bit a couple years ago, using APX Forth. As I remember, what really inspired me to […]

I saw a question on Quora asking something like, “Why did Alan Kay’s OOP always fail, and the OOP that was implemented as C++, Java, Delphi, etc. always succeed?” I wrote an answer for this, but the question was deleted before I could post it. I sometimes have the experience as a writer of realizing […]

Many years ago, I heard Alan Kay talk about software that’s commonly used as being “a broken wheel.” I had trouble understanding what he meant by that, but answering a question on Quora recently helped clarify what I think is the realization that programmers talk about, “when you learn Lisp.” It is a kind of […]

This is a follow-up to my post On improving a computing model. My posting to this blog has slowed down a lot over the last few years. One reason for that is I’ve noticed some significant problems in “our world” that had been off my radar for many years, and I decided to carve out […]