Secret Ops.
The move, whether original or not, from Xerox to Area 51 was clearly not publicized, affected few people and budgetry considerations were swallowed easily and whole by Military spending. No-one at the time gave it much of a thought.
Transferring files over distance needed to be given much more resource and priority and this happened across the whole of the electronics world. File formats, hardware development were taken care of by private funding interests ( Companies & Corporates ), but the first Hard Disk Drive storage coupled to the RJ415 / 11 ADSL net connector incorporating the Silicon wonder was put to practical and prolonged use in an office at the side of a Runway on a secret plane test facility. Little green men were not involved though; supposedly.
Great inovation and technological advancement occurred post WW2, with design lagging behind engineering capabilities enough to delay implementation. Many people working in Car design turned up to the large innocuous Europe based building to find the word 'FIAT' displayed high up and to the side of the front entrance in very large letters. Things were similar in the US. When letters saying 'XEROX' began appearing as letterheads, on usable machines and the building/s, people knew this was the beginning of the end. Happily the floating point additions worked out a bit better rather than worse through some very clever hard work and the industry took much more interest in staffing and keeping people happily engaged. Not least "happily engaged", because the small and large screen needed filling with lots and then more interesting and well presented information about the Computer age.
Back at Area 51, one of the first rack mounts were introduced, dismantled, put back up, moved and then considered hidden with all the new leads, terminal ( single, then *2 or 3, then single again ) & Hard Disk Drive/s. Programming was taking place everywhere and some sort of rationalization would have to take place before initializing/instigating more widely, but the look was nothing less than fantastically futuristic to say the least; and compact. Various more than capable pilots and staff used what was there as a matter of course as front end users and for the first time Computers moved away from boffin control and towards practical user led innovation. Of course with this setup any program could be loaded and debugged remotely and in fact all the Data stored offsite, but I have absolutely no idea if this was or was not done, who it was or where they were. Some boffin or other in charge of a load of other boffins happily adding up all the bits to make BYTES were clearly responsible.
Could the Ruskies see painted or chalked outlines or heated areas from space? No-one knew. The CIA maintained diplomatic relations with Moscow and would not admit to having spies in place anywhere in the World, let alone amongst a collectivized amalgamation of Nuts and Bolts merchants trying to add up with the Rubble ( Rouble , Ruble, Do-upp ? ? ? )
Later then .......
What_to_Do
You have more Computering power now than before. You have more processing power than most will know in a lifetime. What are you supposed to do with it all could be up for suggestion.
One thing you could do is make sure you protect the work you put out or come up with using Passwords.
Here's a freeze from a screen that makes generating random bits easy followed up by a line you can use as a good password.
Developing Software has to be a story of slow methodical plodding towards a perceived end result held only in the mind's eye of the Computerer. One aspect of held Data and presented Data that the person and the Machine can at least come to terms with is the tabulated form. What might be recognised as the Spreadsheet.
Setting parameters on the disk to hold selected number/s of Bits proved more and more impossible with the Silicone wonder confounding restrictions and plonking the information it selected anywhere it liked on disk, or that was the reasoning behind all the explanations as to why keeping Data retrievable was proving the biggest ongoing problem.
Matching the data set to the correct program proved too much of a difficulty for enough involved to make for a big problem as well. Taking the output and then putting this directly back in as input was done at least once and this was certainly once too many.
Why Bash Terminal? I mean, why not call it the Nice Command Line Interface? Notepad as GUI ( Graphical User Interface ) was already established as the main way forward and what would anyone like to call such a thing anyway.
Looking at finished text files from initiation through to publication you might like to think about using a progression of text editors. Something in the order of - touch, cat, vim, nano, Geany/Sublime, Notepad, Libre Office Write, Microsoft Word and Publisher. I'm not sure if you might appreciate the number of orphan characters generated and Computer gumph included that might have to be manually removed from the finished item to finally bring about a readable .txt file that could be managed by the preferred Microsoft Notepad GUI, but ............. ( NULL CHars. )
Testing something through to destruction/failure can and does provide information and a way forward in any project. HANDLE WITH CARE became a more prevalent print and distribution using the English Language. Good Fun? a Computer? Hell, Yeah man.
Plain text entry at the CLI is preferred by most and some sort of agreement between Computerers is needed. The only reason for file saving is to store information for future use, but what should it be called at the Terminal and how could it be possible to arrange the files saved for a person then be able to differentiate between them. 8 from ten Characters in upper case was decided on for the giant Database applications. Not up for question and this would be like this from now until the end of the known and unknown Universe.
Of course things like this might be subject to change and collected and then recorded data was nothing if not for using.
............... not finished, incomplete
This has certainly been later .............
Do it? Or no.
UNIX was the way forward. A bit Norse-like, these 4 letters stood for breathable Air, life itself and a semblance of order. Worries and concerns were justifiable, but files could be transferred and other computers accessed using ssh.
Networking. How was it to be arranged? In amplification, as in the Music festival, a Master amplifier could control ( be strung to / feed ) many Slaves and this might be a good starting point. After not too much elapsed time a Server could be there for many Clients.
More front end was needed. As though not enough was there already, an initial prog. had to be there to tell the thing in no uncertain terms from the off it was an input and output device and not an artificial play-Brain or constant wonderment and amazement machine. On and off, function and not, hit and miss; all of it was becoming much more miss than anything else for the third time. The PC was about to get BIOS.
Purists didn't like it. Punched cards didn't require such a thing, you pushed a button and very fast stuff happened straight away. Perhaps they were ignoring the tremendous amount of time it had taken to collect and order Cards in the first place, but Tape storage only needed some leader tape and then some leader 0's and 1's before becoming a bit more complex and then a program could be run and data sorted.
Bash as a programming language didn't sit on much, A text editor was needed anyway, so their's Vim and then vi to save and edit your Bits. No-one knew what ASCII might be. Clearly someone had come up with something, but it all was just working and written language could be saved and retrieved by Terminals and this was fantastic enough to bring on innovation.
............... could be more to write
More later than previously .......
More to do, and then some
Besides having a deep knowledge of how to be an amazement and wonder machine, the ability to occupy all of it's processing power and become very hot, very quickly was another well practiced string to it's bow. ( written figuratively ). This was all the more accentuated with the introduction of the temperature sensor that could easily facilitate getting upto mind-bending temperatures astonishingly quickly while registering maximum CPU utilization while about it. When reminded that the thermometer was there to turn the Fan on and thus diffuse any heat generated the marvellous machine switched the cooling effect on seemingly whenever it felt like it and many of us live with these sorts of difficulties with Computer Science to the present day. Impossible to persuade the thing its' main function was not to overheat constantly, I admitted defeat.
The purists of Computering were often correct and proved right. They were used to starting from first principles about everything frequently. One of the most important of these might be 'I am right and everyone else is wrong,' along with 'I should be the only one allowed to be on the Computer'. The first files written to RAM ( as Disk ) and then physically carried to another Computer was so surprisingly successful anyone could have been forgiven for anything, even the purists.
Written more.
More laters .......
Did more, some of it accurate
Wrote more; not all of it programming language.
Continued Writing, if not continuous .........
Lambda seems to be all the rage in some areas, but what is it? From Nordic to Greek, anything but English and modern American seems to be the flavour. As far as anyone can make out, Lambda is a Greek Letter that addresses the Hardware you use. It's a general term for the Machine you type on.
A Home Computer can and does run a lot of devices. Keyboard, Mouse, Display Units, Storage Drives, Printers, other Computers etc. The most fickle device it runs is the Human. Error prone, full of mistakes, unresponsive and uncooperative and very slow at input. The person ( as in , you ) should be replaced and preferably not with another person. Everything runs extremely well except Man.
You might imagine the conversation. 'I didn't save that typing the same as last time because the Cat had decided to take a nap on the keyboard and the time before that because of the cleaning.' Infuriating, quite definitely.
Back to my thermometer and the glee with which the Computer presented its' now fantastic ability to radiate and conduct heat was not objected to by me. As long as it could compute, I would use it and of course the temp. dropped.
Less understood might be the insistence on continuing the output when the Electricity was turned off. Logically ( as well as Mathematicaly ) inventing Electricity to continue with computations did prove too much.
Candidly though, if it had been left up to me there would be a minus zero. ( -0 ) ( - 0 ) ........ Not my decision, and I was glad not to make it.
Why Linux? Someone has been having too many OggliOggli Nuts.
Given Browsers and the World Wide Web, we have to admit that the response to any search is very quick. Given the fantastic amount of possibilities from single keystrokes we're very happy with it all.
The phone network moved to operatorless use, but how? The answer turned out to be some electronics and then some physics. Each terminal ( phone ) has an alocated number, when someone dials that number the only phone that can possibly ring is the one that matches the designation. The connection is instantaneous and reliable. Of course the quality of the line might vary because of atmospheric conditions, electricity, components and tired throats, but there we are. The phone companies did all the hard work for us.
We find the authorities assigning Country codes and then we're all supposed to dial by region, but what might make more sense would be to alocate Numbers to Sky broadcast regions; that is if you're intent on doing things this way at all. The total number of Countries varies and the Borders referred to by Country changes, each and every person having a Computer Code makes the most amount of sense to me; but that might just be me alone with no backup...... Think I'll forget about it.
I've been a 2 or 4 finger typist / fumbler for a long time. The reasoning here being my speed of thought was the rate at which I should write. With voice recognition the rate will and has changed, but somewhere to talk to yourself like this might not be so easy to come across; something that has not changed much.
Running and maintaining a Glorified Typewriter has never been easy. The Ladies from the typing pool rely on a great O.S. and people trying to use a glorified typewriter require extremely competent users. The touchscreen keyboard layout with microphone voice recognition and of course the autocomplete, could have been a good way forward not least for us typists and the thoughtful writers.
The original Mouse/Mices/Rodent/Individual Rodential only had one button. Not to be putting too finer point on it, in the office enviro. a middle and right click is just too much. The whole of the kbd. to go at for a shortcut with your click and you have all the options you might require. I look at my screen and have to think for ages about how it might be customized a bit more before remembering the Mouses right click. Multiple options are needed for the modern fandangled Computers, not least to emulate a game controller you might or might not have plugged in or something, but the original business machines like Apricot could have been put aside for single clickery-bit.
Algol 60, Algol 68 and now the ultra-modern Algo Heading_Title, it was all getting way too much. I went back to writing in proper English.
Continues in Horses_Courses
The Title for this page is lifted from a self indulgent piece I typed up and printed out, but had no intention of spreading about the place.
Historically accurate or inaccurate
Programming would be with text file. I mean, there were alternatives.
From Machine code and Assembler we had a huge jump to very high level programming languages. What might come inbetween and serve as the mid-range programming facility had not been decided. Cards had Begin and End written on them, so why not that? Special Characters might have been worth an implement, meaning that Programmers would be the holders of the only correct interpretation. Plain words might be better all round.
Having decided txt, tx, tex, t_x or something like that, would be good to denote a text file with varying degrees of importance everyone else abandoned it! Left on mi own to look at the latest Hardware selection I was having to go back to my Pen more and more often with the failures. The first of 2 really bad system-wide failures / crashes was coming. Bad times.
The right Mouse click became unresponsive, the Function keys would not recall the assigned functions. The whole thing became a Powdercake in a short space of time that seemed unimaginable the day before. The architecture was keen to write its own drivers for devices and this kept the Powder Cake afloat a bit longer, but soon all the Canteens were filling up with despondent looking Humans and others in search of a Pen.
The most bizarre instance of a Computer not working has to have been when all the components worked perfectly when not in the case. Everything put back in there and .... nothing. Put to one side other bits and bats were tried and the case tested & passed about a bit for examination, but again the problem persisted. Some of the electrical contacts were just not making it.
Unusual and unique, could everyone be about to give way to superstitious nonsense. Melt it down and this bad Hocus Pocus might spread. Perhaps storing safely long term with the Nuclear waste might be a good idea, but who wanted to start ringing up the Nuclear scientists. Not me for one.
I had vented my Eyes on this thing long enough. The instance of the Engineer's finger was solved in America by a programmer, the guilty hardware could stay in Britain and be solved by a Brit, eventually.
The Qubit has to be one of the strangest things that could possibly very nearly exist. Taking the temperatures down to close to Absolute Zero and then firing up some serious computations has given rise to the Cubit.
If I take my 3 dimensional square, i.e. the Cube and arrange each corner with either a 0 or a 1, rather than imagining a Qubit having a superposition of somewhere between nought and one, you can see a point within the 3D of the cube defining a more complex superposition. Something to think about anyyhoo.
I have digressed.
The post-war baby boom was well and truly over and all the Nation States set about Trade with little interest in the Cultural leap, like using Computers. Investment was again transitory with Governmental backstops in place. Most of the World's real currency was the product of the Armaments factory rather than the Paper printing press.
Me and my friend were left trying to keep the Electrons afloat after plugs had been pulled and decisions made by inhabitants of Ivory towers & people much more interested in the Govnt. print than Silicon wonderment.
Gathered around him was half a floor while my friend played the last working machine at Chess. Diligently the play was made with the final clunk signalling the end of the whole of the Computers at the company. Perhaps one day I might ask him if he is actually any good at Chess.
As you may have noticed, files have characters then a dot (full stop) and then 3 characters. The starting point for this was that all files would have 8 characters a dot and then another eight characters.
Reasoning for this was the copying of files. Not only did transferring data between machines turn out much better than might have been thought, the Comp. could also be stopped from copying multiple files endlessly very easily and could do this just once or the number of times stipulated. For all anyone knew a program appending a file, copying it and then making another append and copying it again could have been the greatest thing for a programmer since Cheese came with holes in it. Turns out this facility was very limited in use and would not be needed. Pheww!
Fairly useful to have the dot and then 3 characters. With * working well as a wildcard, searching for and listing files becomes easy. Filetype is easily identifiable for Command files ( .com ) and Executable files ( .exe ). These 2 types are about the same, but again it was not immediately clear if the command interpreter would be running the files or be replaced by the compiled completed, runnable program. An Executable ( Eggs - eck - yut - ab - ull ) might have been defined as such as a file run by a command file rather than taking the whole thing into a memory block.
A machine with Gb.'s of RAM had not been built, let alone run and problems & difficulties couldn't be guessed at. I mean the Earth might not be flat at all, but Cubular by definition and/or nature. Or worse than this, we could have even more disagreement about the existent nature of 'Wildcards'.
Looking at what had been achieved at XEROX, from a Government perspective the whole thing was hopeless. The world was chock full of weapons and little Money. Here were a fantastic array of Computer Scientists with not enough $'s between them to blow a small hole in the back of a Cash Register. Everyone could get to the nearest office and discuss whatever-it-was without having to use a phone let alone eMail or some-such. Coinage is impossible in the Military, you could be decapitated by a fairly hefty chunk of loose metal in a Fighter Aircraft and footsoldiers would prefer any Metal melted down for a Tank in support over loose change anyday. So there we were, little or no Data to crunch and the Banks / institutions etc. not overly interested by the innovation because reliable, fast Maths and accompanying Data storage was there already.
Only one thing for it, everybody would have to become Film Stars.
I am forever claiming that it's the most important thing to me so let's talk about, or maybe write about Typewriters.
The speed of watching and then trying to understand something like the Golf Ball typer and printer is just incredible. No way can a person replicate anything going on here to any degree. The modern comp. kbd. setup is something similar. When you look at the accuracy of Computer controlled Rocket landings, the precision is comparable to how your keyboard decides on what key you've depressed.
Some, and by now most, modern Computer Keyboards just have one plate and then where the contact has been made to complete the circuit is decided by the time difference from sensors at either side. And from what I understand only 2 of them. Absolutely phenomenal.
When you look at an old Apple arrangement and some more uptodate engineering, each key has its' own electrical contact to trigger; hold up your Trousers with both Belt and Braces, they should not fall down.
Linux listed files come with 10 sorting definitions. rwx, 3 times with the definition as to whether the file is a Directory or not at the fore.
This then read, write and execute for the user, the root user or the logged in user.
What a plus sign ( + ) at the end as the 11th. signifier is; I have no idea, or what an l might mean; or an s.
Thinking about this, and of course if you were to add a ( b ) to one of the places, this could denote that Biometric data is required to access or alter the selected file.
Glad for the opportunity to clarify that I would never be employed at a top security software site with an identity card and so on because I am a terrible Tail-gater who's tried to become full time at it.
O.K. let's take and consider 'Days of the Week'.
Everybodies week is started on a Monday, except that it isn't. Anyone of a religious order can happily ignore days of the week in absolute, mostly. For myself I like to startoff with a day off. Thinking about it I might like to finish in the same sort of manner.
Looking at things like this gives Sunday as the first day in a week making the cal and ncal invocations from Bash much more relevant.
Spyware. We know how to define and redefine what is important and then take account. Priorities are easier to decide with correct up-to-date information. { placeholder }
Spyware invariably leads to damageware.
Some from Memory, might be partly conjecture.
Historically accurate or inaccurate
Computers will of course do one thing spectacularly well, and that is Mathematics. Before, or that might be previous, to letting the Adder-Uppers loose on the fantastic new devices they might have to be in a better shape.
Back at the Typewriter all this innovation would represent a great opportunity to put in a more ergonomic arrangement of keys. That is the physical layout of the main input device for the Visual Displays could be brought up-to-date with the statistics and notes about typing.
Beside the obvious difficulty that no-one knew if someone might be in a position to make a decision like this, their would be ongoing questions of which of the layouts might be best for the new implementation.
eol ( End of Line ) - reach out, ratchet, Clattery Bang. Some sort of adjustment if necessary.
The typewriter was about to be done away with, completely replaced with the pinnacle of Human achievement - The Computer.
Anyone looking in as an outsider at the Typist's office would clearly at first look be understandably dumbfounded as to what might be happening here. In modern times we would be at least mildly amused that at the end of what might be judged to be the end of the line a fairly hefty 'ding', 'Clattery Bang', 'possible adjustment' with occasional synchronisation and time consuming error correction was going on with anything from 3 to 103+ participants.
Clearly the carriage return was to be done away with, but the arrangement of keys could stay as it was for the Majority because everyone was happy with it and a change might not be required. The marginal speed gain for the person using would soon give way to 'auto-dictate' given the speed of implementation thereby doing away with the keyboard in absolute.
Digressing a little, at this stage the only security available was the physical kind - where the equipment was and who had access to it all. Everyone working on these machines knew that with the advance and use of Spyware and the Security facility would be coming along as well very soon. No-one was in a hurry about any of this side of things and of course the Mathematicians were going to be at the Processors next.
On a perfunctory examination of everything that existed in terms of data input, storage and transfer, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Carriage return lever was there to make a Clattery Bang noise as a healthy comfort device for the express use of the Ladies who lived in a typing Pool.
It was decided to replace this medieval torture mechanism with a simple, elegant and larger than the other keys, return / enter key and little alteration to the rest of the shibang. A brave, forthright and sensible epoch changing decision.
The Enter/Return key was to achieve 2 things then. Return the cursor to line start and advance one line down and run as a program starter when depressed after an instruction to.
Not going to be as easy as first thought this.
When we get to programming the number of basic programs with the name 'start' written and then executed by all of the programmers/scripters/users a large number can be thought about.
With the introduction of ASCII we now have notation for these symbols. In HEX we have 73 74 61 72 74, Binary 01110011 01110100 01100001 01110010 01110100, DEC 115 116 97 114 116, alphaset start.
Repeatedly we have these strings entered and then the Return key pressed and a program run. The likelihood of these bits loaded into memory and then another key other than the Enter key getting pressed was remote.
Given a little bit of time we have the first word on the Command line as the main program ( The Programming Language ) and the second closed string of letters as the program to run under the auspices of the first. Now people were demanding the Computer magically understand the small phrase 'start start' and do something other than function as a Return entry at the first space encountered. I realised my limitations with Assembler, but start start did work for me for a while, but this string and others as well meant lots of keys could now be a Return key press.
The Political situation everywhere was pretty much as it is now, terrible. Sounds much better in French that, Terr-ee-bul, Terr-eee-bil, Ter-ee-blay, Ter-ib-eel. Were we suddenly to get the speech to text within a good timeframe, all the gear would be needed, the time to do this and a fairly sound-proof room as well. Their was going to be little chance of this lot coming together and much like today again, the loudest voice that spoke last will likely walk off with the key to the storage cupboard.
Video play had been considered and almost immediately dismissed. Why try to stream content when the Television is always going to be a more efficient device. ?? Of course it would come eventually, but for the moment taking a pic, saving it and then transferring this either physically or over the Network was more exciting than anything their's ever been before.
Time and again when faced with a failing computerized information system we observe the screen as a serious of pictures that change on the Mouse-click or the Enter key press. What went so badly catastrophic can only be guessed at, but all the Data has been dumped off and secured leaving these hulks of tin and components for the disapointed Minions to try to make sense of.
Much is made of Computer learning and A.I. and rightly so. But much of the time all that has happened is that the electric has burned a path through the device including the Chip and then has been forced to use a different route. In these instances our mind has pasted over the facts, projecting intelligence onto the Machine that just is not there.
All keystrokes are important. That could be rephrased to say all keystrokes are of some import. I think we all know by now that some are of more import than others and what seems to hold up is that the timing of these can be of some 'import' as well.
If I found my limitations with programming I was not going to find them with Hardware considerations. Chip design? No way, not for me. Wouldn't go near anyone doing it. I sat in on some Engineering application sessions and decided I might prefer to believe in the Magic of it all. Other workspaces I would stay away from as well, someone mistaking me for someone who was in charge ( or indeed someone who knew what they might be doing ) was not on my list of priorities I was thinking of publishing generally.
Occasionally forgetting how to plug a USB drive in properly, wiring plugs up wrong and buying the wrong peripheral are just some of the achievements I can list in the Computer Hardware sphere, I think I'll stay away. I would be totally Rubbish as an Engineer and I shouldn't really pretend anything else.
I noticed with electrical engineers that they seem to have a distinct way of thinking about things, but after using machines for a little while I changed my mind and decided that they are like this due to the amount of electrical current they have subjected themselves to.
Networked micros are more useful, less costly and better controlled than a Mainframe. No options for Networked Micro's was available at that time and not considered really. Mini Computers might be a good idea though, but would come with all the attached problems. The Mainframe is there as the No. 1 option for the serious Computerers.
Computer Security. Hmmmmm. Past the physical location and access to these things other securities have been questioned. The main leaks are always going to be someone looking over someone else's Shoulder either in person or by remote Camera.
If you want another opinion, you will not find a more efficient Server prog. than Debian. As to the security here, people do weigh up the necessity of having working Computers vs. unauthorised access.
You can reduce entire Operating systems down to a single file and run the whole thing from there? You can run programs over a local Network seamlessly? These are things that YOU can do.
Of course easing Manufacturing, Storage and Supply is and continues to be a great use for the Computers and expanding on this theme sees us using more Computers in better practical settings, but this might be the end of the line. Fact is the increased communication between interested parties, that is those with the ability to swap information over distance, will or can only lead to problems and difficulties with ever more dangerous and complex solving strategies putting the person/human back in a controlling or dominant position. DIFFICULT.
Solution to this? There isn't one really, but you could keep your diary up-to-date and enable others to update the chosen Calendar and be nicer to your Bank and Bank Manager.
With questions and then later answers about unauthorized access, it should be pointed out that well over 99% of the population take no interest in what someone else might find interesting or concerning. Even given Intelligence Quotient the overlap might not be as big as you might expect. Spy agencies always have difficulty recruiting enough people that might fit the National need.
National questions aside, as long as Politics pays better than Spying we're in a safer place.
Make a stop here. Might continue somewhere else, same subject.