Dale Miller

So I haven’t been good about posting my reading list. It’s been over a year now (May 2008) since I updated. So, here is what I’ve read since that time:

I want to write something. I’m not sure what to write, or even if I *should* be writing, but I want to write.

I’m still alive, still healthy, still looking for a job, and going slightly further into debt every month. I’m playing kickball again this fall, and trying to have a good time on Sundays. I’m spending much of my time at home, and actually relaxing a bit. This is the longest unstructured period I’ve had since I started kindergarten at the age of five.

I’m reading an incredible number of books, and watching more television than I have in years (recorded, not on-air). I have not managed to lose any weight, but I haven’t gained either so that’s good.

There’s not much exciting happening in the world of Dale, but I need to start writing more just because I can.

Mark is in Las Vegas at DefCon at the moment. He called me to say that they have a display of older systems made by Digital. One of the systems had a front panel, and he asked me why one would use such a thing. I explained about writing and debugging programs by depositing and examining memory locations, single-stepping through a program and examining registers, etc. I mentioned that front-panel programming was a lost art. He disagreed with me and said that it had passed into the realm of “lore”, in that people only know of the existence of front panels by hearsay, and many people, even in the computer industry, don’t even have that level of knowledge.

I realized that he was right. I’m actually among the youngest of the people who used front-panels professionally. Most of the serious users are retired and/or dead by now.

When I started programming as a student, it was on punched cards. By my first employment, all programming was done on CRT terminals. Cards persisted for several more years as a data-entry medium, but generally not for programming. I have also watched magnetic tapes change from a data-storage medium into a backup medium, and may be around to see them phased out altogether in favor of big, cheap disks.

So what else in computers has passed completely into lore? Using drum storage as main memory comes to mind. It was before my time, and I’ve never even seen a machine that used it. Plugboard programming is another. I have seen machines that used plugboards, but I never had a chance to work with one. My first home computer could punch and read paper tape to store programs. Again, I am among the youngest to be able to say that. Of course, there was the entire generation of computers prior to the stored-program model, Eniac for instance, that had passed into lore before I ever punched my first card.

It makes me wonder what is cutting-edge today that will not merely be considered quaint in fifty years, but will be completely forgotten.