View of Bring on The Real Computer Revolution http://ojs.stanford.edu/ojs/index.php/intersect/article/view/703/617

Observations on Modern Computing (The Last 10 Years Were a Misstep) “ ~ajroach42.com ” I’m Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. … http://ajroach42.com/observations-on-modern-computing-the-last-10-years-were-a-misstep/

KolibriOS - The art of small https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/kolibrios.html

Low Fat Computing http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm

Chuck Thacker, “Personal Distributed Computing”The Alto and Ethernet Hardware” - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9n2J24Jg2Y

Xerox Alto Source Code | @CHM Blog | Computer History Museum http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/xerox-alto-source-code/

RetroWeb Vintage Computer Museum http://retroweb.maclab.org/?emulator=xerox-star

RetroWeb Vintage Computer Museum http://retroweb.maclab.org/?emulator=salto-alto

GitHub - livingcomputermuseum/ContrAlto: This repository contains the source code for Living Computers: Museum+Labs’s Xerox Alto emulator, ContrAlto. https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/ContrAlto

DigiBarn Computer Museum: Why Alto? Butler Lampson’s Historic 1972 Memo http://www.digibarn.com/friends/butler-lampson/index.html

Why Doctors Hate Their Computers | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers

Shiba Computer https://shiba.computer/essay/on-weaponised-design/

Bad idea of the day: a social network where post literally fade because the contrast is computed with the inverse of time. A spinoff where bugs slowly eat away at posts.

How to Teach Computer Ethics through Science Fiction | August 2018 | Communications of the ACM https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/8/229765-how-to-teach-computer-ethics-through-science-fiction/fulltext

In one sense, ‘the computer revolution is over’ because the period of exponential growth behind the tech ended 10 years ago. In another sense, it hasn’t begun: we have sheltered ourselves from the social and intellectual ramifications of computing. Documents are still simulations of paper, & capitalism still exists. So it’s like that period where printing presses existed but everybody used a faux-calligraphic font.

View of Bring on The Real Computer Revolution http://ojs.stanford.edu/ojs/index.php/intersect/article/view/703/617

“Shaping our children’s education in computing” by Simon Peyton Jones - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-xgWLYQc4g

THE MEDIA BUSINESS: Encountering The Digital Age – An occasional look at computers in everday life.; Potboiler Springs From Computer’s Loins - The New Yor… https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/02/us/media-business-encountering-digital-age-occasional-look-computers-everday-life.html

MiniBSD laptop computer | Hackaday.io https://hackaday.io/project/643-minibsd-laptop-computer

Hotter take: ‘ambient computing’, ‘internet of things’, and ‘ubiquitous computing’ all pale in comparison to my favorite goofy term for this tech: ‘everyware’

Hot take: ambient computing is actually a cool & good idea, as long as no for-profit entities are involved in it. It only becomes horrible when you add business.

Computers Reading Computers’ Writing http://zachwhalen.net/pg/pres/elo18/

Announcing a Competition for Ethics in Computer Science, with up to $3.5 Million in Prizes - The Mozilla Blog https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/10/10/announcing-a-competition-for-ethics-in-computer-science-with-up-to-3-5-million-in-prizes/

Pet peeve: on my work computer, 80% of my lobste.rs comments double-post because of some kind of missing deduplication logic. Then, I have to periodically go through all my threads to delete the duplicates. Sometimes one copy of the post will have 2 upvotes & the other 3.

Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer. - The Boston Globe https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-machine/

David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architectures and Software Languages - IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/hardware/david-patterson-says-its-time-for-new-computer-architectures-and-software-languages

Book idea (high effort, dunno if I’ll do it): a survey of alternative computing systems in the style of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. What should I include other than smalltalk, colorforth, oberon, templeos, and menuet?

Computability theory but for telos:↵* What can be achieved with certain overarching goals like Survive, Understand, and Profit?↵* How would a society balance them to get off this rock?↵* And how would you deal with something like Profit emerging?

PoundArt – about Random Computer Comics http://www.poundart.com/art/randcomix/about.html

This is a very hot take and also not a new one but here we go: the goal of a properly functioning software engineer is to obviate themselves, not by solving the customer’s specific problems but by blurring the line between using a computer and programming one to the point where users can solve their own problems.

Decentralising the web: Maintaining the momentum https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3036546/decentralising-the-web-maintaining-the-momentum

Video: Grand Central’s Hidden Sub-Basement Has A 102-Year-Old Computer: Gothamist http://gothamist.com/2015/10/15/grand_central_computer_video.php

story idea: after computing the cenusus, an unexpected conclusion – about 10% of the population is gone, with no explanation

Hot take: the ‘with AI’ part of the ‘Making X do Y with AI’ is redundant when X is a computing device and Y is a task associated with intelligence, since anything doing that would be called AI

Hot take: the big problem in generative art is not that computers aren’t creative but that computers don’t have taste. We’ve solved that problem by building taste into the mechanisms of generation instead of building filters.

Computers/Commuters - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw_h2KOMQFk

BBC Computer Literacy Project Archive https://computer-literacy-project.pilots.bbcconnectedstudio.co.uk/

The Texas Instruments 99/4: World’s First 16-Bit Home Computer - IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/the-texas-instruments-994-worlds-first-16bit-computer

Building the Commodore that should have existed, an interview with Stefany Allaire - SnapEDA Blog http://blog.snapeda.com/2018/06/06/building-the-commodore-computer-that-should-have-existed-an-interview-with-stefany-allaire/

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Quantum computing for policymakers and philosopher-novelists https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3848

The constant freezing gale from the night side forces most life on the edge into well-lit wind shadows, but also powers mills, musical instruments, even computers based on Kármán vortex logic

Why reliable, unchanging, boring, mechanical interfaces are important in big-computing contexts: https://medium.com/@caseorganic/why-do-we-keep-building-cars-with-touchscreens-alt-the-hidden-lives-of-touchscreens-55faf92799bf

Alan Kay Thesis: The Reactive Engine http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/pdfs/kay.htm

Sound Blaster: How Sound Cards Took Over Computing https://tedium.co/2018/05/10/sound-blaster-history/

Vintage Computer Festival East – Vintage Computer Federation http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-east/

Oracle’s Network Computer: Larry Ellison’s Too-Early Idea https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-history/

Observations on Modern Computing (The Last 10 Years Were a Misstep) – ~ajroach42.com – I’m Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This… http://ajroach42.com/observations-on-modern-computing-the-last-10-years-were-a-misstep/

Band name of the day: cosmetic computing

Gerry Sussman - We Really Don’t Know How to Compute! - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU

Bad idea of the day: a program that computes the degree to which the response to a query meets gricean maxims and, if beyond a threshhold, produces potential implicatures, on a synthetic logic-based language and an ontology