Halt and Catch Fire

I just finished watching the first episode of the new AMC show called Halt and Catch Fire.  The name comes from an old computer instruction which would stop the machine immediately.  The show follows a small Texas company trying to build IBM PC Clones.  The company and the people are fictitious, but it seems to parallel a lot of what Compaq went through in the early 80s.

I’ve always been a sucker for computing history.  I enjoy movies like Pirates of Silicon Valley and The Social Network.  I like Triumph of the Nerds.  I am happy to say that I really enjoyed the pilot episode.  It does a good job with the technical aspects of the show.  There is a scene where they are reverse engineering the ROM chip and it appears quite authentic to the way this work would be done.  They do a good job explaining things without getting dull.  They went out of their way to be accurate.  This article in Wired points out the lengths they went to in order to be period authentic.  It shows. 

If you have any interest in computing history or just like techy tv shows, give Halt and Catch Fire a try.

Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore, dies at age 83

Jack Tramiel was the founder of Commodore International which produced the Commodore 64 and the Amiga computers.  It was also the company that made the once ubiquitous 6502 processor which powered the Apple // and the Commodore 64.  The Commodore 64 was the best selling computer of all time and the Amiga (which came after his tenure, but from his company) was almost a decade ahead of its time.  I learned to program with Basic on the Commodore 128 and spent a lot of my formative years using the Amiga. 

Jack Tramiel was a ruthless business person who drove a very hard bargain.  His relentless push for prices drove the first major round of the home computer revolution.  He died on Monday at age 83.  He had a great legacy and will be missed.  A great book on Commodore and Jack Tramiel's role in it is Commodore: A Company on the Edge.

Steve Jobs on the Value of Saying No

I ran across a great segment of Steve Jobs talking at the WWDC in 1997 just after he returned to Apple.  Similar to my post about pruning the decision tree, he speaks about the power of saying no to the bad ideas.  "Focusing is about saying no," he says.  His analysis of what was wrong with Apple at that time was that they had terrible engineering management.  They were doing too many things--interesting things--but had no direction.  When he took over, the decisions that had to be made were not to cut things that were bad, but to cut things that were unfocused.  A lack of focus makes the whole less than the sum of the parts.  Good focus allows the whole to become greater than the sum of the parts.

 

Two segments are worth watching.  The first is Steve Jobs explaining his philosophy:

The second is him responding to a question about why they cut OpenDoc.  The interesting observation is that OpenDoc was probably better than anything else at some things.  That, by itself, wasn't enough.  It had to be part of a larger vision or it had to go.

 

 He ends with a great observation about how you have to let the vision dictate the technology and not the other way around.

How much did Steve Jobs Mean To the Tech Industry?

 

This picture says it all.  The front page of Hacker News is completely dominated by the news of Steve's death.  Even as someone who never owned an Apple product, he had a huge influence and raised the bar.  Not just once, but at least 5 major products from him changed the state of the industry.  The Apple // was a watershed for personal computers.  The Mac for UI.  The iPod and especially iTunes for digital music.  The iPhone completely changed the phone business.  The iPad created a whole new category of devices.  His influence will be greatly missed.

Alan Kay on User Interface Design

As part of the Berkeley Webcast project, a pair of presentations by Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame) is available.  The presentation is from the early 1980s and discusses the development of user interface design from the 1960s onward.  If you ware into computer history at all, these are very interesting.

Part 1

Part 2

The entirity of CS61A is available in podcast format if it is easier to access that way.

 

Modern Computing Began 40 Years Ago Today

Modern computers all utilize the same user paradigms:  interactive computing, mouse, windows, hyperlinks, teleconferencing, etc.  Many people consider Xerox Parc to be the nest in which most of these concepts were born.  That is, afterall, where Steve Jobs got his inspiration for the Macintosh.  It is not where they were first conceived or even accomplished.  All of these were first demonstrated 40 years ago today by Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute (SRI). On december 9, 1968 he demonstrated to a crowd of 1,000 many of the things that make up modern computers.  Some pictures of the event can be seen here.  SRI is hosting an event today honoring the event.

The MUD is 30 Years Old

Back before World of Warcraft or even Everquest there existed an entity called a MUD or Multi-User Dungeon.  These were a lot like today's MMOs except that they were text-only interfaces.  Most of the concepts were the same.  Build a character, kill lots of bunnies/elves/etc. to grind out levels, get cool gear, group with your friends.  They were just as addicting as modern MMORPGs.  I recall playing something like 24 hours of game in a 2-day period during finals week.  That's when I decided I should quit.  It was my grades or the MUD and the grades won.  That's probably why I'm writing this blog today instead of asking, "Would you like fry's with that?"  The first MUD I ever played seriously was called Crystal Shard.  As most MUDs, it shared a common code base with others but was heavily customized. 

Anyway, the MUD turned 30 this week.  It was October 20, 1978 that the first MUD came into existence.  It took a while for them to make it to the mainstream...

A Little C= 64 Love

Here's a fun one for the weekend.  A retrospective of the Commodore 64 and it's place as a great game machine.  The C= 64 sold something like 17 million units and is, to this day, the single greatest selling computer model of all time.  My first computer was a Commodore 128 which was basically an expensive C64 with a lot of worthless hardware in it.  I don't think I ever did much with it other than run C64 programs.  Well, when I programmed in Basic I did so in C128 mode.  You could renumber lines there. 

More Amiga History From Ars Technica

Ars just released another edition of its history of the Amiga series.  The first deals with the purchase of the Amiga by Commodore.  I'll be updating this post as new articles in this edition are posted.

Part 4 - Enter Commodore

Part 5 - Postlaunch Blues

iWozn't Impressed

I just finished listening to the unabridged version of iWoz.  It's basically the autobiography of Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak.  I was hoping to get an understanding of the early days of Apple.  I've read several books on the subject but this is directly from someone who was there.  Alas, I was disappointed.  Less than a quarter of the book covers his time at Apple.  This is a book about Steve Wozniak, not necessarily about the time he spent changing the world.  Steve seems more interested in telling us about his pranks and his high school science projects than about the time in his life that made him famous.  Steve goes into excruciating detail about his early days and then blows by his time at Apple in short order.  He writes in a style that comes across as arrogant.  I don't think he really is, but that's the way the book is written.  He thinks very highly of himself.  Unless you really want to learn about Steve Wozniak the man, skip this book.  If you want to learn about Apple, grab Infinite Loop or Insanely Great (more about the Mac than the Apple //).

History of the Amiga

Ars Technica is running a series on the history of the Amiga.  This is the machine I grew up with.  It was way ahead of its time for graphics and sound.  It took many years for the PC (and even Mac) worlds to catch up.  Unfortunately, it was marketed by a less than competent company.  The Amiga eventually died when Commodore went bankrupt but it had a great run.  The article has two parts so far.  I'll try to update this post when more are posted.

Part 1 - Genesis

Part 2 - The birth of the Amiga

Part 3 - The first prototype

Part 4

Fred Fish Dies

Those of you who owned an Amiga were probably aware of the Fred Fish disk collection.  For those that weren't, this was a huge collection of shareware and freeware software for the Amiga.  It was organized into a series of disks which became known as Fred Fish disks.  It became the definitive way to reference shareware in that community.  If you wanted, say, Directory Opus, you could find it on disk #412.  Megaball (best Breakout/Archnoid clone out there) on disk 477.  Anyway, the guy who created the collection was a programmer named Fred Fish who lived in Idaho.  He died on April 20th.  He did a lot for the world of computing back then.  He'll be missed.

The contents of all the disks can be found here.  There appear to have been 1,120 disks in all.

Top 10 Most Influential Amiga Games

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Commodore Amiga.  It came out 22 years ago in 1985 and was way ahead of its time.  It had a GUI, ,stereo audio, hi-res color graphics, hardware-accelerated graphics, etc.  It had all this years before the PC.  I didn't jump to the PC until 1995 because it was only then that it had managed to surpass the Amiga.  It was the Amiga that first brought things like 3D rendering, digital video editing, and looped audio creation to the mainstream.

Given the great multimedia capabilities, the Amiga was also a great gaming computer.  Wired just published an article listing the top 10 most influence games on the Amiga.  I played most of these and enjoyed them.  Games listed include:

1. Defender of the Crown - Amazing graphics for its time.  Spent a lot of time playing this one.


2. Sensible Soccer


3. Speedball 2


4. Syndicate - actually the first SVGA game on the PC I was aware of


5. Lemmings - really cool platformer.  Now available on the PSP.


6. Pinball Dreams


7. Cannon Fodder


8. Shadow of the Beast - First arcade-quality side scroller on a PC.


9. Another World - One of the first vector-based adventure games.


10. Worms -didn't know this was an Amiga title.

To this list I would add:

1. Blood Money - first arcade-quality side-scrolling shooter on a PC.


2. F/A-18 Interceptor - first 3D, color flight simulator on a PC.  This game sold me on the Amiga.


3. Battle Chess - Animated Chess.  The rook eating the queen was one of my favorite moves.


4. Dungeon Master - Established the 3D dungeon genre in something other than wireframe graphics.  Ultima Underworld definitely followed this trend and arguably, titles like Wolfenstein did too.

4/13 Update - Added Dungeon Master to the list.  Definitely influential.

Showstopper!

I just finished reading Showstopper! by G. Pascal Zachary.  It recounts the creation of Windows NT starting with the hiring of Dave Cutler in October 1988 and ending with the shipping of the first version of NT on July 26, 1993.  The book puts a lot in perspective.  NT took nearly 5 years of grueling work.  The book spends a lot of time talking about the impact work on NT had on the personal lives of the team members.  Many didn't see their families much at all for extended periods of time.  It wasn't uncommon for people to pull repeated all-nighters.  We seem to have learned something from this in the past decade.

The book also calls out the contribution of the testing teams.  This is rare in these sort of books.  I've read about the creation of the Mac, the IMP, the XBox, etc. and almost never is testing mentioned.  It's good to read a book which recounts not only the work done by developers but also the heroic efforts of the testers.

If you have an interest in computing history or in the development of large systems, this book is a good one to pick up.  It puts you in the middle of the creation of the OS that runs on so many computers across the world.

I also ran across this interesting paragraph talking about the app-compat work:

The conflict stemmed from the differing priorities of the two sides.  Intent on refining their general model, programmers didn't want to distract themselves by fixing bugs.  Meanwhile, testers wanted to test.  This was a pointless activity when they saw the same bugs week after week. (p. 257)

That sounds a lot like what I was mentioning in my post about single-focus roles.  Each side is so focused on what it is tasked with doing that it doesn't take into account the needs of the other side.

Liveblogging Woz

He's talking about his childhood.  How his father managed to get him transisters and diodes because he worked at Lockheed Martin.  He did a lot of electronics.  He didn't know was a computer was for a long time because he was afraid to ask.  Eventually in high school he got a chance to program a computer.  His first program was knight's tour in chess.  It turns out the computer was too slow and would take 10^25 years to complete.  Oops.

In high school he ran across a book called the "small computer handbook" about the PDP-8.  He says he designed (on paper) a PDP-8 based on that manual.  As he learned of new chips, he kept refining the design.

He taught himself coding by sneaking into the Stanford Linear accelerator library and looking at the books and manuals and magazines.  He kept refining his paper designs.  Trying to break his old records.  Going from 65 to 64 chips, etc.

When he went to college, there were no undergrad classes about computers.  He had to take a graduate class on the subject.  In his zeal for programming, he managed to run the computer program 5x over budget for the year.

He's talking about meeting Steve Jobs now.  They went to the same High School but apparently met while Woz was in college at Berkley.  In his 3rd year he was taking all graduate classes.  After his 3rd year, he took a year off to go earn the money for his 4th year.  He ended up working for HP's calculator division.  Despite working on calculators all day, his hobby at night was electronics. 

He's now talking about seeing his first pong game.  At that point, games like pong weren't software, they were hardware.  He had no money and couldn't afford a pong game but he could design one himself. 

Steve Jobs went to Reed college (in Portland, OR) where he skipped most of his classes.  After that, he came back and got a job at Atari.  They offered Woz a job designing games there.  Woz was happy at HP and didn't want to leave but he was willing to take the challenge of designing games for them.  He designed a Breakout game in 4 days and 4 nights. 

Woz observed someone using a teletype machine on the arpanet and wanted one.  Again, he couldn't afford one but he could design one.  He used his TV as the output device.  At Jobs' prompting, he sold his design.

He went to the Homebrew Computer Club and discovered that microprocessors had advanced.  He went on to build his own computer, starting with his video terminal.  After he had one, he needed a language so he wrote a version of basic.  He says writing basic was the hardest part of the Apple I design.  He couldn't afford an assembler so he wrote by hand and then hand-translated it into the 1s and 0s.  Again, Steve Jobs encouraged him to sell his design.  The name wasn't Apple at the beginning.  Woz tried to get HP to produce the computer but they refused.  Because of that, he was able to use the design himself.

The first Apple was priced at $666.66.  They sold about 150 of them. 

The Apple // cost $250 to build and they wanted to sell 1,000 of them.  That's $250,000 in capital.  Apparently Woz tried to sell the design to Atari and Commodore and were turned down by both.  They tried venture capital but couldn't talk business enough to get the money.

They found a source of funding--Mike Markula.  He said he would give them the money but Woz would have to leave HP.  A friend talked him into it because he could stay an engineer.  Sales exploded once Visicalc came out.

That's the end of the speech.  Fun.  If you have a chance to catch him at a book signing during this tour, do it.

Waiting for Woz

Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple for those of you in Rio Linda) is on campus to promote his new book iWoz.  The room he is scheduled to speak in hold about 100 people.  The speech is supposed to start in 15 minutes and it is standing room only already.  A little before 1:00 the room was half full.  Crazy.  I guess he really is an icon.  He's an interesting personality.  A total geek.  He spent much of his interview on This Week in Tech talking about a new blue laser he had purchased.  He participates on a Segway Polo team.  He's smart too.  I recall hearing him speak at one point about how he had the whole of the Motoroloa 6502 (the chip powering the Apple //) assembly in his head when he was coding for it.  Should be an interesting speech. I'll try to blog on it later.

Pranks at Microsoft

Microsoft, like many technology companies, has been the site for many pranks over the years.  In this video, Larry Osterman and Dave Norris relate many of the pranks that have been seen on the Microsoft campus during their tenure.  On his blog, Larry describes their latest prank involving 20,000 bouncy balls.

On a side note, this interview is filmed in the lounge area just down the hall from my office.

OS/2 Finally buried

IBM finally announced the official, final death notice for OS/2.  Back before I joined Microsoft I was one of those who was attempting to jump on the OS/2 Warp bandwagon.  When I was in college I would read about it every week in PCWeek (now eWeek) and was impressed with its capabilities.  I even went so far as to purchase a copy.  $100 was a lot when Win3.1 came free on my Pentium 75.  Even after Win95 came out, I kept trying to run OS/2.  The problem I ran into with OS/2 (which is the same problem I ran into with Linux years later) was that, while the OS had lots of cool features and was, on paper at least, better than Win95, there just wasn't much software for it that could compete with the software for Windows.  Having a shiny new OS with nothing to run on it is like buying a new car but not having a drivers license.  It looks really cool but just isn't that much fun to use.  Now, a decade or so later, it's finally being officially put out to pasture. 

Information Technology Leaders

There is a local cable television station run by the University of Washington.  On it there airs a show called Information Technology Leaders hosted by a woman named Laura Shildkraut.  On the show, Laura spends an hour interviewing, you guessed it, leaders in the information technology field.  The guests are CEOs, CIOs, VPs, COOs, CTOs, etc.  Topics covered include not only what they are doing now but what they did in the past and how they got to where they are.  Laura gets some interesting guests.  For instance, she interviews all three Renegades of the Empire (Alex St. John, Eric Engstrom, and Craig Eisler), John Connors, Rick Devenuti, etc.  I find the stories fascinating.  There is also a lot to learn from people who have "made it."  If you have some time, I recommend you check out the streaming video version of the show at http://www.informationtechnologyleaders.com/video.html.