I wonder whether Alan Kay is the author of an article I read during the late '70s in PC Computing; the name sounds familiar. I made copies and kept them for a while, but I've lost track of them now. In that article the writer spoke of teaching students who came not knowing much about computer programming but being strong and certain on one point, that computer people were rigorously logical. Then he had to disillusion them.
He mentioned their dismay at learning of the existence of TWO schemes, ASCII and EBCDIC, with different sort results. Another of his points that sticks in my memory is a description of a chip that used 5 bits for instructions and had 32 different instructions. "Maybe it isn't immediately obvious, but that's an error in design. It means that every possible bit combination is a valid instruction, so when your program has an error, the probability of it ending anywhere near the error point is nil." I've often bewailed the loss of that article; many of its observations are still relevant today. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* I know everyone thinks Republicans aren't funny. But if you get a bunch of us together, we can be a real riot. -Nancy Mace at Washington Press Club */ ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Rupert Reynolds <rreyno...@cix.co.uk> Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2024 2:39 PM Alan Kay described computing as a 'pop culture' and I see his point--we don't often learn from history and we often re-invent things and 'solve' problems that have already been solved before :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
