See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The real world
Each year while I was in school I looked for summer internships, but had no luck. The economy sucked. In my final year of school I started looking for permanent work, and I felt almost totally lost. I asked CS grads about it. They told me “You’ll never find [...]
Archive for the ‘Technology and Software’ Category
My journey, Part 4
Posted in History, Programming, Technology and Software, tagged Alto, Apple, career, computer history, Macintosh, Smalltalk, software development, Xerox PARC on January 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The state of PCs
Posted in Squeak, Technology and Software, tagged Circuit City, Mac, Macbook, PCs, Windows on November 11, 2008 | 5 Comments »
My 4-year-old Windows laptop died on me about a week ago. I think it was the hard drive controller. I set up my Windows desktop machine which I haven’t used in a year or two. That took some work, getting it set up the way I wanted, getting all the security updates, and updating drivers. Anyway, I’m shopping for a [...]
The computer as medium
Posted in Education, History, Programming, Squeak, Technology and Software, tagged alan kay, chris crawford, computer, culture, etoys, gutenberg, History, media, medium, printing press, Programming, societal influence, Squeak, squeakers, squeakland, writing on September 14, 2008 | 13 Comments »
In my guest post on Paul Murphy’s blog called “The PC vision was lost from the get go” I spoke to the concept, which Alan Kay had going back to the 1970s, that the personal computer is a new medium, like the book at the time the technology for the printing press was brought to Europe, [...]
Is OOP all it’s cracked up to be?: My guest post on ZDNet
Posted in Analysis, Programming, Squeak, Technology and Software, tagged .Net, C++, History, Java, OOP, Smalltalk on June 2, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Paul Murphy saw fit to give me another guest spot on his blog, called “The tattered history of OOP”, talking about the history of OOP practice, where the idea came from, and how industry has implemented it. If you’ve been reading my blog this will probably be review. I’m just spreading the message a little [...]
A history of the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga
Posted in History, Technology and Software, tagged 16bit, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, History, ST on May 16, 2008 | 2 Comments »
A while back I wrote my “Reminiscing” series of posts talking about the history of the machines I used growing up, as I remembered it. I came upon a few materials on reddit over a period of about a month that gave more authoritative histories of the Atari ST and Amiga. They’re really neat to look [...]
CompUSA saved, kinda
Posted in Technology and Software, tagged computers, PC, retail, software on May 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’m now back home after a long trip (though my busy-ness has not ended), and I noticed that my local CompUSA store, as far as I can tell, is still here.
This is old news, but I happened to look for information on the fate of CompUSA, and I found an article saying that the store chain was bought [...]
What happened to the PC vision?: My guest post on ZDNet
Posted in History, Information Technology, Technology and Software on March 10, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Hi guys. Just FYI, a little more than a week ago I wrote a comment on one of Paul Murphy’s blog postings, called “The worst PC myth of all”. Murphy is a blogger on ZDNet. He liked my comment a lot, and he and I agreed to have it as a guest post on his blog, called “Managing L’Unix”. I changed it a bit [...]
Java: Let it be
Posted in Analysis, Programming, Technology and Software on March 6, 2008 | 31 Comments »
Joshua Bloch, Chief Java Architect at Google, gave a talk entitled “The Closures Controversy” at Javapolis in December 2007. I found it online through reddit, and it intrigued me, because I think it illustrates a disconnect between what we as an industry are doing and the goals we have. Bloch also makes what I think [...]
GNU Smalltalk to support Seaside
Posted in Programming, Squeak, Technology and Software on February 26, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I found this item on reddit. An entry in the GNU Smalltalk FAQ, under the heading “Does GNU Smalltalk run Seaside?” says that it will support Seaside in a release scheduled for March 8th. Now, the FAQ posting that says this is dated June 20, 2007. I’ve asked about this on reddit. Has the release date slipped any [...]
Presenting the XO Laptop
Posted in Education, Programming, Technology and Software on February 21, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The XO went into production late last year, and I’ve been looking for interesting material on it to talk about here. David Pogue of the New York Times did a review of the XO last year, but I just found the video for it.
I think he does a really good job [...]
