Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 2:09 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. je...@merlintec.comwrote: Karl Ramberg wrote: One of Alans points in his talk is that students should be using bleeding edge hardware, not just regular laptops. I think he is right for some part but he also recollected the Joss environment which was done on a machine about to be scraped. Some research and development does not need the bleeding edge hardware. It can get a long way by using what you have till it's fullest. You mixed research and development, and they are rather different. One is building stuff for the computers of 2020, the other for those of 2012. It's true that I mixed them. Alas much development is research and much research is development :-) Karl I was at a talk where Intel was showing their new multicore direction and the guy kept repeating how the academic people really should be changing their courses to teach their students to deal with, for example, four cores. At the very end he showed an experimental 80 core chip and as he ended the talk and took questions he left that slide up. When it was my turn to ask, I pointed to the 80 core chip on the screen and asked if programming it was exactly the same as on a quad core. He said it was different, so I asked if it wouldn't be better investment to teach the students to program the 80 core one instead? He said he didn't have an answer to that. About Joss, we normally like to plot computer improvement on a log scale. But if you look at it on a linear scale, you see that many years go by initially where we don't see any change. So the relative improvement in five years is more or less the same no matter what five years you pick, but the absolute improvement is very different. When I needed a serious computer for software development back in 1985 I built an Apple II clone for myself, even though that machine was already 8 years old at the time (about five Moore cycles). The state of the art in personal computers at the time was the IBM PC AT (6MHz iAPX286) which was indeed a few times faster than the Apple II, but not enough to make a qualitative difference for me. If I compare a 1992 PC with one from 2000, the difference is far more important to me. On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 9:02 PM, Kim Rose wrote: For those of you looking to hear more from Alan Kay -- you'll find a talk from him and several other big names in computer science here -- thanks to San Jose State University. http://www.sjsu.edu/atn/services/webcasting/archives/fall_2011/hist/computing.html Thanks, Kim, for the link! I have added this and four other talks from 2011 to http://www.smalltalk.org.br/movies/ I also added a link to the Esug channel on Youtube, which has lots of stuff from their recent conferences. Cheers, -- Jecel ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
I disagree with the tone in Alan's talk here. While it is great to see what was happening in the 50-70s, he makes it sound like there is absolutely nothing worth talking about in the personal computing space in the past 30 years. Pranav Mistry's work on sixth sense technology and the mouseless mouse alone raise legitimate counterpoints to much of what is suggested by this talk. For example, Alan touches upon Englebart's fury over what happened with the mouse and how the needs of mass market commercialization trump utility. Yet, I see a future where we are far less dependent on mechanical tools like the mouse. But progress takes time. For example, the first e-ink technologies were developed at PARC in the 70s by Nicholas K. Sheridan as a prototype for a future Alto computer (not mentioned at all by Alan in his talk). Reducing the cost to manufacture such displays has been a long-running process and one I follow intently. For example, only recently has a consortium of researchers gotten together and come up with a fairly brilliant idea to use the same techniques found in inkjet printing to print pholed screens, making the construction of flexible e-paper as cost effective as the invention of inkjet printing to the paper medium. With these newer mediums we will also need greater automation in analyzing so-called big data. Today most analysis is not automated by computers, and so scientists are separated from truly interacting with their massive datasets. They have to talk to project managers, who then talk to programmers, who then write code that gets deployed to QA, etc. The human social process here is fraught with error. On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 3:02 PM, Kim Rose kim.r...@vpri.org wrote: For those of you looking to hear more from Alan Kay -- you'll find a talk from him and several other big names in computer science here -- thanks to San Jose State University. http://www.sjsu.edu/atn/services/webcasting/archives/fall_2011/hist/computing.html -- Kim ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 04:14:40PM -0300, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: Eugen Leitl wrote: It's remarkable how few are using MPI in practice. A lot of code is being made multithread-proof, and for what? So that they'll have to rewrite it for message-passing, again? Having seen a couple of applications which used MPI it seems like a dead end to me. The code is mangled to the point where it becomes really hard Yes, you're running into the limitations of the human mind. Despite being a massively parallel process underneath somewhat paradoxically the upper layers have big problems with utilizing parallelism. I actually think that the problem is unsolvable at the human end (just consider debugging millions to billions of fine-grained asynchronous shared-nothing processes) and have to be routed around the human by automatic code generation by stochastical means. Growing your code a la Darwin might be the only thing that could scale. Of course, we have to learn evolvability first. Current stuff is way too brittle. to understand what it does (in one case I rewrote it with OpenMP and the OpenMP assumes shared memory, and shared memory does not exist in this universe. It has to be expensively emulated. Cache coherency will be distinctly dead well before we'll get to kilonode country. We can already rack some quite impressive numbers of ARM-based SoCs on a mesh without the corium failure mode if cooling fails briefly. difference in clarity was amazing). Fortunately, message passing in Smalltalk looks far nicer and doesn't get in the way. So that is what I I must admit I've never done Smalltalk in anger, though I definitely loved the concept when I did my history in early 1980s. am working on (and yes, I know all about Peter Deutsch's opinion about making local and remote messages look the same - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing). If you remove the cache and use cache-like embedded memory than accessing remote locations by message passing (routed via cut-through signalling mesh) is only slightly more expensive than accessing local embedded memory. Some gate delays and relativistic latency (think of pingpong across a 300 mm wafer) do apply, of course. How can we spend money now to live in the future? Alan mentioned the first way in his talk: put lots and lots of FPGA together. The BEE3 FPGAs suffer the problem of lack of embedded memory. Consider GPGPU with quarter of TByte/s bandwidth across 2-3 GByte grains. You just can't compete with economies of scale which allows you hundreds to thousands of meshing such with InfiniBand. board isn't cheap (something like $5K without the FPGAs, which are a few thousand dollars each themselves, nor memory) and a good RAMP machine hook a bunch of these together. The advantage of this approach is that each FPGA is large enough to do pretty much anything you can imagine. If you know your processors will be rather small, it might be more cost effective to have a larger number of cheaper FPGAs. That is what I am working on. A second way to live in the future is far less flexible, and so should only be a second step after the above is no longer getting you the results you need: use wafer scale integration to have now roughly the same number of transistors you will have in 2020 on a typical chip. This is pretty hard (just ask Clive Sinclair or Gene Amdahl how much they lost on wafer scale integration back in the 1980s). But if you can get it to work, then you could distribute hundreds (or more) of 2020's computers to today's researchers. But today's computers as tomorrow's are already large clusters. The question is one of how many nodes you can afford, and what is your electricity bill. If you know how your problem maps you'll just pick the best of COTS of today, and run it for 3-5 years after which it's cheaper to buy new hardware than to keep paying the electricity bill. I'm not sure how well the SmallTalk model would fare here. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
FWIW, in my memory, my old NeXTstation felt as snappy as modern desktops but when I ran across one at the Computer History Museum it felt painfully slow. I've had similar experiences with seeing old video games and finding the quality of the graphics to be much lower than I remembered. This is just a guess, but I suspect what we remember is strongly influenced by our emotional reactions which in turn are shaped by our expectations. At the time, my expectations were lower. On 2011-12-16 Fri, at 11:14 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: Compare running Squeak on a 40MHz 386 PC (my 1992 computer) with running the exact same code on a 1GHz Pentium 4 PC (available to me in 2000). Not even the old MVC interface is really usable on the first while the second machine can handle Morphic just fine. The quantitive difference becomes a qualititive one. I didn't feel the same between my 1 MHz Apple II and the 6MHz PC AT. But of course there was a diffence - to show of the AT in trade shows we used to run a Microsoft flight simulator called Jet (later merged with MS Flight Simulator) on that machine side by side with a 4.77MHz PC XT. It was a fun game on the AT, but looked more like a slide show on the XT. I still felt I could get by with the Apple II, however. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
On 2011-12-16 Fri, at 01:38 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: How can we spend money now to live in the future? Alan mentioned the first way in his talk: put lots and lots of FPGA together. The BEE3 FPGAs suffer the problem of lack of embedded memory. Consider GPGPU with quarter of TByte/s bandwidth across 2-3 GByte grains. You just can't compete with economies of scale which allows you hundreds to thousands of meshing such with InfiniBand. Is speed really the bottleneck for making computers more useful? Personally, I don't find myself waiting on my computer much anymore. Most of my time is instead spent trying to tell the machine what to do while it sits there, idling. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
I hope I didn't say there was absolutely nothing worth talking about in the 'personal computing' space in the past 30 years (and don't think I did say that). Let us all share in the excitement of Discovery without vain attempts to claim priority -- Goethe So some recent manifestations of ideas and technologies such as multitouch, mouseless, and SixthSense, should be praised. However, it is also interesting to discover where ideas came from and who came up with them first -- this helps us understand and differentiate high creativity from low context from low creativity from high context. I don't know who did the mouseless idea first, but certainly Dick Shoup at Xerox PARC and later at Interval, conceived and showed something very similar. One of the central parts of this was to use image recognition to track people, hands, and fingers. Similarly, the SixthSense idea has much in common with Nicholas Negroponte's (and many in his Arch-Mac group at MIT) idea in the 70s that we would wear things that would let computers know where we are and where we are pointing, and that there will be displays everywhere (from a variety of means) and the Internet will also be everywhere by then, and there will be embedded computers everywhere, etc., so that one's helper agents will have the effect of following us around and responding to our gestures and commands. There are several terrific movies of their prototypes. Multitouch, similarly is hard to find out who did it first, but again Nicholas' Arch-Mach group certainly did do it (Chris Herot as I recall) in the 70s. And what Engelbart was upset about was that the hands out -- hands together style did not survive. The hands out had one hand with the 5 finger keyboard and the other with the mouse and 3 buttons -- this allowed navigation and all commands and typing to be done really efficiently compared to today. Hands together on the regular keyboard only happened when you had bulk typing to do. It should be clear that being able to sense all the fingers in some way that allows piano keyboard like fluency/polyphony is still a good idea. Musical instruments require some training and practice but then allow many more degrees of freedom to be controlled. And, though Nick Sheriden was the leader of the PARC electrophoretic migration display project, it was colloidal chemist Ann Chiang who accomplished many of the breakthroughs in the 70s. That Xerox didn't follow through with this technology was a great disappointment for me. It was really nice, and even the prototype had higher contrast ratios than the e-ink displays of today (different approach, different kinds of particles). And a few things have happened since 1980 but the talk was supposed to be about the Dynabook idea Best wishes, Alan From: John Zabroski johnzabro...@gmail.com To: Fundamentals of New Computing fonc@vpri.org Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 1:12 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU I disagree with the tone in Alan's talk here. While it is great to see what was happening in the 50-70s, he makes it sound like there is absolutely nothing worth talking about in the personal computing space in the past 30 years. Pranav Mistry's work on sixth sense technology and the mouseless mouse alone raise legitimate counterpoints to much of what is suggested by this talk. For example, Alan touches upon Englebart's fury over what happened with the mouse and how the needs of mass market commercialization trump utility. Yet, I see a future where we are far less dependent on mechanical tools like the mouse. But progress takes time. For example, the first e-ink technologies were developed at PARC in the 70s by Nicholas K. Sheridan as a prototype for a future Alto computer (not mentioned at all by Alan in his talk). Reducing the cost to manufacture such displays has been a long-running process and one I follow intently. For example, only recently has a consortium of researchers gotten together and come up with a fairly brilliant idea to use the same techniques found in inkjet printing to print pholed screens, making the construction of flexible e-paper as cost effective as the invention of inkjet printing to the paper medium. With these newer mediums we will also need greater automation in analyzing so-called big data. Today most analysis is not automated by computers, and so scientists are separated from truly interacting with their massive datasets. They have to talk to project managers, who then talk to programmers, who then write code that gets deployed to QA, etc. The human social process here is fraught with error. On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 3:02 PM, Kim Rose kim.r...@vpri.org wrote: For those of you looking to hear more from Alan Kay -- you'll find a talk from him and several other big names in computer science here -- thanks to San Jose State University.
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 6:19 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: I hope I didn't say there was absolutely nothing worth talking about in the 'personal computing' space in the past 30 years (and don't think I did say that). Let us all share in the excitement of Discovery without vain attempts to claim priority -- Goethe Certainly. We can't argue with Goethe. Yet, I don't think that applies here. You said that our field had become so impoverished because nobody googles Douglas Englebart and watches The Mother of All Demoes, and also noted that evolution finds fits rather than optimal solutions. But you didn't really provide any examples of how we are the victims of evolution finding these fits. So I think I am providing a valuable push back by being my stubborn self and saying, Hey, wait, I know that's not true. It just seemed very incongruent to the question of how we see the present: is it solely in terms of the past? And the real question is what do you want it to do for its end users? You answer this question with your own perspective, but only saying *WE* wanted children to learn profound things... There is good content in your talk, owing to your immense experience and knowledge, but it is dispersed like a spray. If I could summarize one thing to takeaway, it's that the medium is the message, and the performance of the medium changes how people think and interact with computers and each other. But even that takeaway feels buried in digressions. The other takeaways I got was: * a note to self to read E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops. * Nobody wants a coordinate system if we don't have to use one, for goodness sakes. * We still don't write computer system's that take into account the user's context * You mention that you worked on fonts, but didn't say anything about the books you read and research you did on displaying fonts Just 2 cents. Dick Shoup at Xerox PARC and later at Interval, conceived and showed something very similar. Tried googling this using various phrases and spellings. Zero results. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
John Zabroski wrote: You said that our field had become so impoverished because nobody googles Douglas Englebart and watches The Mother of All Demoes, and also noted that evolution finds fits rather than optimal solutions. But you didn't really provide any examples of how we are the victims of evolution finding these fits. Alan mentioned the Burroughs B5000 compared with the architectures that survived. In Donald Knuth's talk the same design was mentioned as an example of a mistake we got rid of (a guy who still only programs in assembly would say that ;-). So the students got to hear both sides. So I think I am providing a valuable push back by being my stubborn self and saying, Hey, wait, I know that's not true. It just seemed very incongruent to the question of how we see the present: is it solely in terms of the past? Normally Alan presents seeing the past only in terms of the present as being the problem because this also limits how you see the future. Take any modern timeline of the microprocessor, for example. It will indeed be a line and not a tree. It will start with the 4004, then 8008, 8080, 8086, 286 and so on to the latest Core i7. Interesting parts of the past, like the 6502, the 29000 and so many others can't be seen because nothing in the present traces back to them. -- Jecel ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. je...@merlintec.com wrote: Steve Dekorte wrote: [NeXTStation memories versus reality] I still have a running Apple II. My slowest working PC is a 33MHz 486, so I can't directly do the comparison I mentioned. But I agree we shouldn't trust what we remember things feeling like. -- Jecel The Apple booting up faster was not simply a feeling, but a fact owing to its human-computer interaction demands. They set fast boot speeds as a design criteria. Jef Raskin talks about this in the book The Humane Interface. Even modern attempts to reduce boot speed have not been that good, such as upstart, an event-driven alternative to init. Eugen has some very good points about human limits of managing performance details, though. Modern approaches to performance are already moving away from such crude methods. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:10 PM, John Zabroski johnzabro...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. je...@merlintec.com wrote: Steve Dekorte wrote: [NeXTStation memories versus reality] I still have a running Apple II. My slowest working PC is a 33MHz 486, so I can't directly do the comparison I mentioned. But I agree we shouldn't trust what we remember things feeling like. -- Jecel The Apple booting up faster was not simply a feeling, but a fact owing to its human-computer interaction demands. They set fast boot speeds as a design criteria. Jef Raskin talks about this in the book The Humane Interface. Even modern attempts to reduce boot speed have not been that good, such as upstart, an event-driven alternative to init. Eugen has some very good points about human limits of managing performance details, though. Modern approaches to performance are already moving away from such crude methods. By the way, slight tangent: Modern operating systems, with all their hot-swapping requirements, do a poor job distinguishing device error from continuously plugging-in and plugging-out the device. For example, if you have an optical mouse and damage it, it might slowly die and your entire system will hang because 99% of your CPU will be handling plugin and plugout events. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
Below. Abridged. On Dec 16, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Steve Dekorte st...@dekorte.com wrote: FWIW, in my memory, my old NeXTstation felt as snappy as modern desktops but when I ran across one at the Computer History Museum it felt painfully slow. I've had similar experiences with seeing old video games and finding the quality of the graphics to be much lower than I remembered. This is just a guess, but I suspect what we remember is strongly influenced by our emotional reactions which in turn are shaped by our expectations. At the time, my expectations were lower. This is an excellent point. At work I'm using a 32-bit single core machine that's 0.6ghz slower than my personal 64-bit dual core machine. Once in awhile, I notice that it's slower. I have a feeling, though, that this is a consequence of slower hardware *compounded* by expensive software, because most of the time, I can't tell the difference at all. What I'm saying is in part that the computational power of modern computers typically eclipses my personal need for computing power. When things are suddenly slow, I suspect algorithm/datastructure. Whereas: it used to be that everything seemed to take a long time. Some things are just expensive. No one has found an acceptable solution. These are things we should avoid in the infrastructure underneath a personal computing experience:) ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
Some things are just expensive. No one has found an acceptable solution. These are things we should avoid in the infrastructure underneath a personal computing experience:) Or figure out how to amortize them over time. I think recent raytracing apps are a good example of this. You can preview the image as it is rendered to see if it's just right and if not, tweak it. Another example is scraping data to build a database that will inform autocompletion and other productivity enhancing UI effects. Sometimes gather and parsing out the data to put in the database can be expensive, but it can easily be done in a background thread without any cost to responsiveness. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. wes ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] History of computing talks at SJSU
Below. On Dec 16, 2011, at 3:19 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: And what Engelbart was upset about was that the hands out -- hands together style did not survive. The hands out had one hand with the 5 finger keyboard and the other with the mouse and 3 buttons -- this allowed navigation and all commands and typing to be done really efficiently compared to today. Hands together on the regular keyboard only happened when you had bulk typing to do. Are you talking about the so-called chording keyboard? I had an idea years ago to have a pair of twiddlers (the one chording keyboard I'd seen was called a twiddler) which tracked movement of both hands over the desktop, basically giving you two pointing devices and a keyboarding solution at the same time. Now it's all trackpads and touch screens, and my idea seems almost Victorian:) ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
