Device enables patients to play mind games
Thursday, 10-Jun-2004 2:50PM Story from United Press International
Copyright 2004 by United Press International (via ClariNet)

ST. LOUIS, Miss., June 10 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers have developed an electronic grid that collects motor signals from the brain, enabling patients to play computer games using only their minds.

Researchers at Washington University placed a grid atop subjects' brains and recorded brain surface signals directly instead of taking information through electrodes outside the skull in standard, electroencephalographic techniques.

The study has promising implications for biomedical devices that control artificial limbs, researchers said, allowing patients to move a prosthetic arm or leg just by thinking about it.

Neurologists implanted the grids in the brains of four epilepsy patients and connected them to a computer program that recorded their brain activity as they performed a range of motor and speech tasks.

The patients then played a simple computer game after a brief training session, and could control the cursor with their brains with 74 to 100 percent accuracy, said Daniel Moran, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering.

"The previous EEG-based systems are equivalent to a Wright brothers airplane in regards to speed of learning to achieve control. ... We're flying around in an F-16 jet," he said.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Having read this I have a few questions :

1. Is there any new development on this?

2. If so have they developed to the point of being able to use emulators?

3. Have they advanced beyond the grid system to say a tiny chip device, and if so what is the memory capacity? If so is it large enough for say, the entire collection of theoldcomputer.com roms and systems?

and finally......

4. Is the on/off button controllable by mind as well. Would really hate to be walking around looking for an on/off switch embedded under the skin.

whoops one more......

5. If all the above conditions are beyond the alpha stage, what is the cost, or is it freeware, shareware?

I would really be interested in their product if it were beyond the simple game stage, just think of the money saved on systems, physical games, electric bills for the additional peripherals to run the systems to the max. Hmmm forgot to ask if they had sound....

(As seen through the eyes of Nelson Ford, founder of PsL.) PsL = Public Software Library

Two Guys Invent Freeware

Prior to the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, user groups and BBSs for other computers (CP/M machines, Radio Shacks, and Apples) passed around user-written software for which the programmers did not expect any payment, mainly because the programs were small, simple programs that could not be considered marketable and for which the authors offered no support. Pre-1980 user groups and BBSs were also notorious passers-around of pirated commercial software.

In 1982, a couple of programmers, Andrew Fluegleman and Jim Knopf (dba: Jim Button), had written a couple of major applications (a communication program and a database program, respectively) on their new IBM PCs. Not wanting to invest the time and money in trying to get these applications into stores, they decided to take advantage of the pirate distribution networks by allowing their programs to be copied, but putting a request in the program's on-disk documentation for the user to send money to the author to finance the ongoing development and support of the programs.

Fluegleman called this Freeware and trademarked that name, meaning that nobody else could market their software as Freeware without his permission. This wasn't very good for the new industry, but the name Freeware wasn't quite appropriate anyway since the software wasn't really intended to be free.

As had been done with the public domain software distributed in the 1970's, Fluegleman also distributed the source code for his program and pretty much lost control over it when dozens of programmers distributed "improved" versions of Fluegleman's PC-Talk.

While Fluegleman did little to continue to develop and promote PC-Talk, Knopf did a lot more with PC-File and eventually built his database program publishing into a multi-million dollar company.

Meanwhile in 1983, another programmer, Bob Wallace, came out with a word processing program, PC-Write, which he also developed and promoted into a very successful business.

While there were numerous smaller programs and utilities, such as Vernon Buerg's wildly popular LIST program, these three major applications were popular with many major businesses and established the credibility of Freeware as a source of high quality, well supported software.

They paved the way for other, even more successful programs (and tens of thousands less successful programs) to be marketed the same way.

Freeware Becomes Shareware

In 1984, I had a column about Freeware and public domain software in a popular computer magazine. While the Freeware name was widely used, it was trademarked and could not be legally used by others. The alternative phrase at that time was User Supported Software, which was too cumbersome.

We had a contest in the magazine to find a new name for Freeware. The most popular choice was shareware, which was a name Bob Wallace had applied to PC-Write.

With shareware being the most popular choice, I asked Wallace if he had any exclusive claims on the term and he said no, that he had picked up the name from a column in an old, pre-IBM-PC computer magazine column.

So the announcement was made that shareware was the winner. Eventually, as PC-Talk was no longer being distributed, the term freeware lost its original meaning and in the following years, it fell into popular usage to mean software for which no shareware fee was asked, although such software was not necessarily public domain.

Although some people refer to freeware (and even shareware) as being public domain, the reality is that none of the shareware and very little of the freeware is truly public domain. Since a copyright automatically accrues to any software which is distributed, for a program to be public domain, the programmer has to specifically label it as such.

Freeware, then, includes some public domain software, but most freeware is software which can be "freely" used without payment to the author, but for which the author retains the copyright to the software.

The Beginning of Shareware Disk Vendors

In 1982-1983, distribution of freeware/shareware programs was free - done by swapping disks at user groups and by downloading from free BBSs.

In early 1982, we started a user group called HAL-PC ("Houston Area League of PC Users"). During 1982 and most of 1983, we tried numerous methods of giving free copies of our shareware library to members.

But as the volume of programs to be reviewed, tested and organized grew and the number of user group members and BBS callers also grew, both software librarians and BBS sysops began charging to defray the costs.

In California, a fellow by the name of Richard Peterson, got a copy of the software library of a local user group and advertised it in PC Magazine for sale for $6 per disk. User group members and BBS denizens thought this was the equivalent of charging for free air, but people without access to local user groups or BBSs welcomed the opportunity to get the software. Peterson called his company PC-SIG. This was the first company to nationally advertise shareware disks for sale.

About the same time, my shareware column in a computer magazine had prompted a lot of people without access to user groups or local BBSs to write and ask for the programs, for which we also asked a disk copy fee. When the magazine folded in late 1984, we continued to get requests for programs and continued to fill them under the column's name of The Public Library, later adding (software) to the middle of the name to avoid confusion with our local book library. We also began publishing the first magazine about shareware, PsL News.

PsL News is a subscription-based publication containing reviews of all the new and updated freeware and shareware program released each month. PsL News was printed monthly from the end of 1984 until March 1996. By that time, shareware diskette sales had been replaced almost entirely by CD-ROM sales and the printed magazine was converted to a magazine on disk using the program reviews from the Monthly PsL CD-ROM.

In the early '80s, we also provided a software library service for HAL-PC. (It eventually grew to over 10,000 members - presently the largest user group in the world - with its own offices and library.)

The idea of anyone charging for "free" software infuriated many of the old pre-PC people, and some authors (including Jim Button) did not allow distribution of their programs by anyone who charged for them (although our group was granted an exception by Jim).

However, enough other programs came along to allow shareware vendors to prosper and eventually, programmers recognized that the vendors were getting the programs out to a lot of people who otherwise would have never seen them, resulting in substantial additional income to the programmers.

In 1985, Public Brand Software was the next major distributor to start up and was the best of the high-volume vendors who saturated the market with catalogs. Other high-volume vendors that followed were Software Labs and Reasonable Solutions. These companies poured hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars a year into advertising shareware.

In order to put out catalogs which could be mailed economically, most high-volume dealers had only a few hundred programs in them.

At PsL, we had always accepted any good working program, no matter how tiny the niche it fit into. We had a huge catalog of thousands of programs. This resulted in a catalog too large to mail out, so PsL reached fewer customers, but we gave exposure to thousands of programs which were not included in the catalogs of the other dealers. In addition, PsL's comprehensive collection made PsL a popular source of shareware for BBSs and other shareware vendors, both of whom extended PsL's reach by redistributing the programs to their users.



So both high-volume/small-catalog dealers and low-volume/large-catalog dealers (pretty much limited to PsL) had their place in the shareware market.

While PsL and the high-volume dealers dominated the shareware distribution market, during the late '80s, hundreds (if not thousands) of small shareware vendors sprang up. With no real computer knowledge or other expertise required, anyone with a few bucks could buy shareware disks from another vendor, print out a "catalog", and sell copies of those disks to others. Most of these "shareware vendors" sold at computer shows and flea markets.

The Association of Shareware Professionals

During 1985, I surveyed shareware programmers regarding the formation of a trade organization. Based on their response, during 1986, I organized a conference for early 1987 in Houston, Texas of virtually all of the top shareware programmers (including Bob Wallace of PC-Write, Tom Smith of Procomm, and Jim Button of PC-File who went on to become the first ASP Chairman of the Board), vendors (PC-SIG and Public Brand), and BBS sysops.

From that meeting was formed the Association of Shareware Professionals, a trade organization of shareware programmers which later expanded to include vendors (distributors) and BBSs.

Thanks to a lot of effort by everyone involved, the ASP became very successful and played an extremely important role in the evolution of shareware.

About the time of the formation of ASP, fast-buck shareware distributors were springing up daily, most of whom advertised "Get Free Software", much to the chagrin of authors who expected users to pay, and to the dismay of the users who only found out about the expected payments after paying the distributor's disk fees to get the software.

At the same time, programmers had problems of their own making. Many programmers crippled their software to the extent that users could barely try it. Some documentation indicated a belief that all users were cheats and thieves out to steal the software. Some used silly and unprofessional tactics such as "putting a hex" on people who used the software without paying. And many programmers lost interest and quit supporting their programs if they got poor initial response, leaving users wary of sending payment to ANY programmers. Finally, users had no where to turn when faced with an unsurmountable dispute with a programmer.

ASP members got their own house in order first, agreeing not to cripple their shareware versions, to treat users with respect, to promise a minimum level of support and a money-back guarantee. In addition, users who saw the ASP logo on a program could be more assured that the author of the program was actively supporting the program and responding to users. Also, users could turn to the ASP Ombudsman if a dispute with an ASP member could not be resolved.

Another thing that ASP did was to protect the shareware industry in a way that individual members could not have done as effectively, if at all. In one case, ASP stopped PC-SIG from getting a trademark on the word shareware. In another case, ASP got a change in the wording of a bill before Congress which would have been detrimental to shareware programmers.

Next, ASP members turned to doing something about vendors who were misleading customers about shareware being "free". ASP created a vendor membership with rules for vendors regarding fair disclosure to customers about shareware and regarding respecting the rights of programmers.

As benefits, ASP vendors could distribute ASP programmers' software and received other benefits such as a CD-ROM with the programs on them.

Additional benefits to programmers included the ability to exchange information about shareware marketing on the ASP's forum on Compuserve, a free link to the member's Web page on the ASP's Web site, a monthly newsletter, and a low-cost way to get members' software to vendors and BBSs.

The Credit Card Revolution

One problem that programmers had was the difficulty in small mail-order companies getting credit card merchant accounts. That meant that programmers could only accept payment through the mail by check or money order. In those pre-ASP days, a lot of users had the experience of mailing checks to register shareware, only to never receive anything or at best, to receive the check back in the mail.

This made users wary of sending payment for shareware. Shareware users in big companies had another hurdle - getting a check request approved to pay for a program you already have is a lot harder to do than to get reimbursed for an expense on your credit card.

Even if all shareware programmers had been able to get credit card merchant accounts, most of them had other, full-time jobs and could not afford the staff to take phone orders all day. In other cases, some very successful shareware programmers preferred to continue working on their programs rather than get involved in day-to-day business operations.

In 1989, PsL began offering a credit card order service with an 800# and other means to take orders (FAX, email, etc.) for a small fixed transaction processing fee.

This service, now used by the authors of over 2000 shareware programs, vastly increased the orders programmers received. Now people could call PsL to order with the security of a credit card instead of blindly sending a check in the mail. Plus, many business people could easily order by credit card when getting a check request approved by their company could be a real roadblock to registering shareware. In addition, the authors of over 1000 shareware programs allow registration of their programs via PsL's Web order service.

Just as anyone could become a "shareware disk vendor" in the '80s, we are seeing that everyone with a credit card merchant account and a Web site is getting into shareware order processing. Many of these have already disappeared, taking the programmers' money with them, but several have prospered, although some offer only Web-based ordering, which can be automated and requires little or no staff or investment, unlike 800# ordering which requires a significant outlay for operators, office space, etc.

The End Of Shareware Disk Vendors

In 1993, at PsL we saw a rapid decline in shareware diskette sales and responded by producing a monthly shareware CD-ROM. We started this enterprise with great trepidation because other vendors and BBSs had been spending as much as $1000 per month (or more) to get all the new programs from us each month on floppies, and we were offering the same thing on a subscription basis for under $20.

To our relief, the CD turned out to be a big hit even though this was before everybody had CD-ROM drives as most people do now. In comparison, PC-SIG had been selling a CD-ROM (not a monthly and not subscription-based) for hundreds of dollars and it still managed to be one of the top-selling CD-ROMs on the market.

Our timing was good as floppy sales continued to drop drastically for all vendors and other vendors were closing down or going bankrupt. PC-SIG shut down abruptly and without explanation, leaving their magazine subscribers in the lurch. Public Brand sold out to Ziff-Davis who put out a few more catalogs before giving up on diskette distribution of shareware.

Between the spread of CD-ROM drives among users and the availability of countless low-cost shareware CD-ROMs plus the increasing impact of the Internet, companies distributing shareware on diskettes have disappeared, although at PsL, we continue to distribute on diskette to the few individuals who do not have CD-ROM drives.

Changes In Shareware

In the early to mid 1980's, experience indicated that to make money writing shareware, you had to create a major application for businesses, such as a word processor (PC-Write), communication software (PC-Talk), or a database program (PC-File).

Obviously, being the first to name your program something starting with PC- was considered a status symbol. But other programmers followed with similar programs with very good success, most notably the communications program Procomm, whose publishers later took the program out of shareware and made a fortune. Meanwhile, authors of games and utilities met with relatively little success throughout most of the 1980's.

In the early 1990's, competition in the retail software market was forcing down the prices of major business applications while the prices of similar shareware programs had been increasing over the years.

With the growing popularity of Windows and with major companies like Microsoft offering suites of applications (integrated word processing, graphics, spreadsheet, database) at relatively low prices, the shareware publishers of business applications watched as their sales shrunk.

PC-Write, PC-File, and other major DOS-based business apps virtually disappeared from shareware while the publishers of games and utilities became the new leaders in the shareware industry.

Scott Miller of Apogee Software popularized a method of marketing games as shareware that made games the leading money-makers, not just in shareware, but in all the software market.

The method involved releasing an action-adventure game as shareware with only the first few levels of play. Additional levels of play could only be purchased from the software publisher, not acquired through shareware channels.

Unlike some programmers' attempts to cripple their software to force payment, leaving users frustrated and angry about supposed shareware which could not be completely used and evaluated, the shareware versions of Apogee's games were complete and playable so that users got hooked on the games and wanted more.

Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake are the most successful of the games marketed this way.

Meanwhile, members of the Association of Shareware Professionals, whose members had agreed not to cripple their programs, modified their stance to allow time-limiting and other limitations which would allow users to fully try their programs, while not allowing them to use the programs indefinitely without paying.

Not all programmers felt the need to limit their programs, however. Some of the most successful programs, such as WinZip, prospered with nothing more in the way of prodding users than a shareware startup screen in which the shareware concept is explained and ordering information given.

Internet's Impact On Shareware

Online services like Compuserve and America On Line never seemed to have any impact on shareware distributors and BBSs. Given the slow modems and higher online costs of the 1980's, it was cheaper and easier to get shareware on diskettes or from a local (preferably free) BBS, if you were lucky enough to have one of any quality in your town.

But the combination of cheap high-speed modems and even cheaper Internet access has caused a significant impact on shareware. (Although the ever-increasing size of files has offset a lot of that impact. It is not uncommon to see 5MB-10MB or even larger files on the Web.)

Internet users are getting the same kind of free ride as did owners of those large satellite dishes before broadcasters began encrypting everything and charging them for it.

While not totally free, $10 or less per month for unlimited access is the next best thing, and is possible only because the whole Internet system is built on computer systems and public phone systems for which Internet users do not have to pay the true, proportionate cost of their use.

While some former disk-based shareware distributors and pay-BBSs have tried setting up shop on the Web and charging for access, they are competing with popular sites who distribute the same programs and charge nothing for access. (Which would *you* use to get the same program - one you have to pay to join or one you can get onto for free?)

The free sites hope to make money from advertising on their sites, the income from which is based on the number of visitors to the site. A recent issue of Net magazine says that such sites have found advertising revenues to be less than stellar. For example, just recently a site called Best Zips, which had hoped to generate enough ad revenues to support a shareware download site, had to give up and shut down.

Still, consumer demand appears to be growing for online ordering with the ability to immediately get an unlock key or a registered version online without having to wait a week for the mail. And once a user has tasted that instant gratification, how are they ever going to be satisfied again waiting weeks for software to come in the mail?

Source :

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http://web.archive.org/web/20010113030300/http://pslweb.com/index.html

NIMROD was a computer built for the Festival of Britain in 1951, and it had only one purpose: To play Nim. Later in the same year it was an exhibit at the Berliner Industrieausstellung, the German minister of economy Ludwig Erhard played against it and lost every time. A replica of NIMROD has now been built for the new Berlin museum of computer games.

NIMROD is older than A. L. Samuel’s Checkers program, and it was a far bigger project (a dedicated computer vs. a program running on an IBM 701), but it seems to be less known. Guess the role of the UK in the history of computer games, and computing in general, is still underestimated quite a bit.


It's 1951...
and the Festival of Britain opens its doors.

One of the many venues of the Festival — which extends across much of Britain — is the Exhibition of Science in South Kensington.

Here, amongst other wonders, you will see the Ferranti NIMROD.
This is the first digital computer designed specifically to play a game — truly the very first "Computer Game"... In the process, it illuminates principles of binary arithmetic and digital logic.

So, leave Lara Croft and her friends behind for a while, and journey back to the years BT (Before Transistors), where just to see a computer is an adventure, and to actually control it is the ultimate thrill!

Welcome to... NIMROD!

For the adventurous souls out there you can challenge Nimrod here:

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http://www.goodeveca.net/nimrod/GAME/index.html

And for a plethora of information :

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 http://www.goodeveca.net/nimrod/

The etymology of Doom cheat codes

Find out what iddqd and other cheat codes really mean



Why Doom has an inside joke to Usenet, or
How I helped create a cheat key code.

By Seth Cohn

Doom came out Dec 10th, and first I did was go looking for cheat keys for it.Didn't find any, but I came close. My brother Dale and I had a funny feeling (call it a hunch) that somewhere in the game SPISPOPD was embedded. We didn't find it in the code, but turns it it was there after all.

What is SPISPOPD? Well, to make a long story short, due to all the Doom hype on the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action Usenet newsgroup, someone posted a suggestion to id that the next game be named something less likely to be used as a subject header (ala When is DOOM coming out? The DOOM beta is so cool, and the ever popular DOOM FAQ) They suggested the unlikely name of Smashing Pumpkins into Small Piles of Putrid Debris. Of course, someone else immediately posted that they wanted the beta of SPISPOPD and where was it? I joined in the fun, along with a long list of others and started to DESCRIBE this fictional game. We all got into the fun, and it was in part a healthy humorous response to the pressures of such a long wait for Doom.

I probably posted more SPISPOPD stuff then anyone else at first, and when someone else posted a signature spoofing DOOM FAQ author Hank Leukhart's saying "SPISPOPD FAQ 1.0 coming soon" I flamed them and stole the idea. I claimed to be the REAL FAQ author and asked for submissions. I got a number of good ones, and
taking these and all of the posts up to the first mention of SPISPOPD (I saved them all, think it was a great thread) I created a really funny spoof of the DOOM FAQ. In the process, id became ego for one reason: I was afraid of getting sued. I mailed Jay Wilbur and asked what he'd prefer out the range of options (id was doing SPISPOD, wasn't, etc..) and the only answer I got from him was... well... I used it as his quote in the FAQ. <Big grin>

I got LOTS of mail including congrats, flames (such as GET A LIFE!), more submissions, and my favorite, people asking where they could get a copy of the game.

The best for me was getting a note from David Taylor at id, one of the Doom coders, saying how much he enjoyed the FAQ. Little did I know...

To make the matter more confusing, a bunch of guys at Cal-poly decided they liked the idea, and ignoring whatever features they didn't want to write into it (and I don't blame them... some of the FAQ was truly outlandish), they wrote a game called SPISPOPD. This game is cute, and using VGA and SB, is actually
playable and well worth downloading. I am amazed they wrote it in 48 hours...

So, I logged on Dec 15th having beaten the game a few times, and lo and behold, someone has posted the cheat keys, and idspispopd is one of them. Someone (Patch) suggested I write a little explanation of just how and what SPISPOPD is, to help all those folks who don't know the inside scoop.

And as Paul Harvey would say, That's the REST of the story....

(I'm also including a copy of the FAQ, posted separately. This is MUCH funnier if you have a copy of DOOM FAQ 2.X around...)

SSSS PPPP IIII SSSS PPPP OOOO PPPP DDD | Official SPISPOPD FAQ Author
S P P II S P P O O P P D D | Seth Cohn
SSSS PPPP II SSSS PPPP O O PPPP D D |
S P II S P O O P D D | FAQ 1.1 coming soon! SPISPOPD Feb 29!
SSSS P IIII SSSS P OOOO P DDD | Easter Ernie May 94! WAY Cool!

[Please feel free to include this article in any media, so long as it's not altered in any way]

--
Seth Cohn - Warning - I use CAPS to emphasize, not to yell |If you read
email preferred - I consider spelling errors and grammar |RUOW, Honk!
Net Junkie since 89 to be secondary to the meaning itself |Orange Rainbow
[Space for rent] - I take unpopular positions & get flamed|Spirits R #1!

Official SPISPOPD FAQ ;

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http://web.archive.org/web/20081110071615/http://www.johnromero.com/lee_killough/history/spispopd.faq

Stardock’s OS/2 History

February 1, 2001



By Brad Wardell, Founder, Stardock Corporation.



Well yesterday was the last day that Stardock can effectively be called an OS/2 ISV. While we will be releasing Stellar Frontier still for OS/2 and providing updates to it, the selling of OS/2 software on our website is going to be going away within the next 24 hours.



It's really pretty sad. The whole reason why I personally got into software development was for OS/2. That's why I learned how to program. It was the promise and coolness of OS/2 that steered me away from a career in hardware (I wanted to design CPUs) into the software arena.



I remember in 1997 when we were looking at the OS/2 revenue sales and realizing that NT 4.0 had killed OS/2. When Windows NT 4.0 came out, that pretty much did in OS/2, people migrated from OS/2 to NT incredibly fast. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that about half of the active individual OS/2 user base switched from OS/2 to Windows NT 4.0 within 6 months of its introduction. And IBM, unbeknownst to any of us, had decided to kill OS/2 before OS/2 Warp 4. Warp 4 was in the pipeline already. Gerstner, feeling betrayed by PSP (Personal System Products, a division of IBM) for the PowerPC debacle had ordered PSP eliminated and its assets split up amongst the other divisions, none of which particularly cared about OS/2.



That left us in the situation of trying to decide what to do.



We could:



A) Stick with OS/2 and go down with the ship, eventually becoming a small group of consultants. (This is what several OS/2 ISVs have done).



B) Move to develop Linux software. An OS in which software is expected to be free. Having to deal with the fact that anything we developed would be expected to be open source and free to users thus depriving ourselves of any revenue.



C) Develop for Windows where our limit to growth would always be Microsoft coming in and competing with anything worthwhile we might create.



If you're a commercial software developer, the choices were pretty grim. So we chose the least of the 3 evils -- C. We designed our primary product to be delivered as a subscription in which new features could be introduced into it immediately rather than having to wait for the next major version. Thus, if Microsoft or Symantec or Mijenix (now Ontrack) or some other large utility vendor decided to compete with us, we could stay ahead of them. So we adopted the slogan "Innovation on demand" and went forward. That is why Object Desktop has constant updates being made to it.



Those who stayed with OS/2 and saw these events could be divided into 4 groups:



Group 1 were Stardock OS/2 customers who understood why we had to do what we did. They would stay on OS/2 but think fondly of us.
Group 2 were Stardock OS/2 customers who felt like we owed them and that we took their hard earned money and used it to betray them by writing for the “enemy”.
Group 3 and 4 were people who hadn't bought our software and divided by whether we were a bunch of money grubbing traitors that should have stayed on OS/2 because it was a good market (they didn't have any idea what they were talking about) and hoped we'd soon go out of business and on the other side the people who didn't buy our software but were conscious of the market realities faced by all companies.



While some Windows and Linux users may gloat over OS/2's downfall, what they don't realize is that all people lose out. OS/2 had some wonderful innovations in it and it was when it was competitive with Windows that Windows was most rapidly moving forward. As we've discussed in another discussion, Microsoft, bereft of OSes to compete with is now left with having to copy off of shareware and freeware utilities to "innovate". Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 saw some incredible (for Microsoft) innovation. OS/2 became largely a non-factor before Windows 98. And so between Windows 95 and today there was Windows 98 (1998), Windows 98SE(1999), and Windows ME(2000). Regardless of how you feel about those OSes, the change from Windows 3.1 (1992) to Windows 95 (1995) was pretty immense and the 5 years after that has seen mainly very incremental improvements.



Before I am accused of holding Microsoft to too high a standard, one only has to look at Linux's progress in the same time frame. While Linux gets a lot of hype, it is always hype that has a score of qualifications (It's really good for being an open source project...). Still no DDE type functionality across all apps. Still nothing like OLE across apps. Heck, still unreliable clipboard support in many apps. Little drag and drop support. KDE is left basically trying to rip off the Windows 95 shell which in itself (other than the Start bar) was borrowed from OS/2 and MacOS.



My point isn't to slam these OSes btw, it is just that with OS/2's passing, all people should be aware of what is lost. What sorts of very cool stuff we might have today if not for the loss of OS/2 as a competitor.



And finally, my last point is that from a software developer standpoint, if you want to stay in the desktop market, Windows really and truly is the only market still. I get email regularly from OS/2 and Linux users urging us to get off of Windows. Whenever there is a story about Microsoft lifting one of our features and putting it into the next version fo Windows (no matter how minor) the email flows in telling us we need to get onto Linux (or come back to OS/2). The reality is, there just isn't enough of a market. From an ISV standpoint, the only real options are either Windows, PocketPC, or Palm and Palm isn't exactly innovating right now. We write for Windows because there's not that much choice and because there are great market opportunities for developers who create things to "decrease the suckitude of the OS".



Anyway, to those still using OS/2, thanks for all your support over the years. We will be keeping up our OS/2 software support news groups and discussion groups. Email support will continue for another 90 days free. Stellar Frontier will be released to those who pre-ordered it but it will not be sold on OS/2 anymore.



Good luck and have a great day!



Brad Wardell

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http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/endofos2.html

Interesting articles about OS/2:

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http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/

Title : 25 Years of IBM’s OS/2: The Strange Days and Surprising Afterlife of a Legendary Operating System

Big Blue's next-generation operating system was supposed to change everything. It didn't. But it's also never quite gone away

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http://gizmodo.com/5898623/ibms-failed-os2-is-25-years-oldbut-it-still-powers-atms-and-checkouts

Title : IBM's Failed Operating System OS/2 Is 25 Years Old—But It Still Powers ATMs and Checkouts


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nLGwpH86zNw[/youtube][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PY8WbTe1G0Q[/youtube]

Sad ending for a company that had ethics.

Almost 20 years ago, a machine arguably as significant as both the Nintendo Wii for its innovative and revolutionary controls and peripherals and as powerful as a Sony PS3 or Microsoft Xbox 360 for both sound and graphics capabilities was being produced by a small Joystick manufacturer in Wales in Great Britain.

This website details the epic struggle of this manufacturer led by its charismatic and visionary boss Wyn Holloway to secure funding to take his concept of revolutionary controls paired with the amazing power of Flare Technologies 'Flare One' computer concept and their attempt to take on the might of Sega and Nintendo to try to launch what could have been the best Games machine in the world.

If they had succeeded, the face of video games could have changed forever.

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http://www.konixmultisystem.co.uk/index.php?id=power_chair_discovery

More here :

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 http://www.konixmultisystem.co.uk/index.php?id=introduction

Should have been fitted, commodore cheaped out, well they where fitted to some of the Vic II chips that had a metal cage around them, anyhoo...

Picked up another Breadbin machine with a 1984 board, so I thought I'd get the coolers on like the others I have, simple job and prolongs the life of the hotter chips that fail more often (PLA, Sid Chip & Vic II).

Really is a good idea to do this, especially if your running the micro for extended periods, one of mines on now annoying the wife with fuzzy warbles of the Sid chippery kind.

I make mine out of cheap and cheerful U shaped Aluminium lengths, yeah you can buy them and the are prettier, but then I dont get to play with a Dremel

I've seen other ways of attaching the coolers, but a few mm of ultra thin double sided tape at the ends and a smear of Arctic silver in the middle and none have fell off yet

All done and lot cooler, next job build a better power supply, the next worst killer!.

July, 1975 Dick Heiser opens Arrowhead Computer Company "The Computer Store" in Los Angeles selling assembled Altairs!
Nov. 1975 John French opened Computer Mart, selling the IMSAI!
The BYTE SHOP ->

Paul Terrell started his Byte Shop in December 1975. By January he was being approached by people who wanted to open their own stores. He signed dealership agreements with them, whereby he would take a percentage of their profits, and soon there were Byte Shops in Santa Clara, San Jose, Palo Alto, and Portland, Oregon.

In March 1976, Terrell incorporated as Byte, Inc.

By March 1976, one could identified 4 big retailers; Terrell, Heisers, Peachtree in Atlanta, and Dick Brown. Brown opened his outlet "The Computer Store" like Heiser's in 1975 along Route 128 in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Paul Terrell in his BYTE SHOP

He also was interested in selling Apple I's. Without Paul Terrell and the Byte shop Apple may have never gotten anywhere.

Book excerpt

In 1974, when Paul Terrell was running a sales representation company in Northern California, he got a call from friends who said they had seen a microcomputer in Popular Electronics for only $439. Terrell knew that no one could even get an 8080 chip on a PC board for that price, much less a power supply and a chassis and the rest. "My comment was that it was a paper tiger and forget about it," he said. "And a couple of months later, they called me back and told me to come on over and help them unwrap their paper tiger."


The Altair impressed Terrell. He contacted MITS in Albuquerque to see if it needed a sales representative in Northern California. MITS said it was primarily a mail-order company, but if he cared to meet MITS representatives at the National Computer Conference in Anaheim, California, that June, they'd be happy to talk. Terrell cared.


MITS showed up at the NCC with the MITSmobile. "You walked in and it had a refrigerator and a stove and a couple of computers set up," Terrell recalled. He talked with Ed Roberts and MITS's marketing manager. They got along well. Terrell felt Roberts did not really understand the sales representation business, but Roberts listened. In the end, they signed an exclusive sales representation contract whereby Terrell would promote the Altair and in turn receive a 5 percent commission on every MITS product shipped into Northern California, whether he had sold it or not.


After NCC, the MITSmobile toured the clubs in the Los Angeles area, meeting various people who had written in. Then it went north to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Terrell booked space in the Edwards Room at Rickey's Hyatt House in Palo Alto. The room held about 80 people. Between 200 and 300 showed up.
The following month, in July of 1975, Roberts called a sales representatives meeting in Albuquerque. Terrell and his partner, Boyd Wilson, along with the ten or so other Altair representatives in the country, flew to New Mexico, where Roberts showed them his shopping center factory, explained something of the history of MITS, and indicated the direction he wanted them to take.


Roberts also mentioned something else. "One of the principal things that came out of the meeting was that Ed had identified a crazy man in L.A.~Dick Heiser-who had approached him to try to retail computers across the countertop," Terrell said. Roberts wanted the sales representatives to find similar


crazy men in their own territories. The retail idea was worth pursuing, he thought. Terrell asked what kind of deal retailers would get. Roberts said he would give them a 25 percent discount, no matter how much they sold. When they got back on the plane, Terrell and Wilson discussed this arrangement. "It was an easy task to figure that 25 percent plus 5 percent was 30 percent-a helluva lot more money than we were making as representatives," he said. They decided to open their own outlet.


Terrell and Wilson commenced the process in August. Soon after, Byte magazine appeared. "I told Boyd that this magazine is real significant," Terrell said. "There's a real following here. So let's be the Byte Shop, and we'll sell a helluva lot of Byte magazines in addition."
Friends told him retailing computers wouldn't work. And some people, Terrell later mused, said it never snowed in Silicon Valley. Terrell recalled his friends' warnings as he watched the snow falling on December 8, 1975-the day he opened his Mountain View store in the heart of Silicon Valley.


Like most Altair dealers, Terrell quickly ran headlong into the MITS exclusivity policy. Terrell ignored it. He was selling all the Altairs he could get, about 10 to 50 per month, plus everything he could obtain from IMSAI and Proc Tech. The MITS edict, he concluded, was not only pointless, but, if he followed it, financially harmful as well. One day David Bunnell, then the MITS vice-president of marketing, called to cancel him as a dealer. Terrell argued that MITS should see the Byte Shop as rather like a stereo store, which carried many different brands and could turn a profit for them all. Bunnell waffled. It was Roberts's decision, he said. At the World Altair Computer Conference in March of 1976, Terrell approached Roberts directly. Roberts remained firm. Terrell was out.


At the time, Terrell was selling twice as many IMSAIs as Altairs, and he realized the MITS strategy of excommunication would ultimately hurt Roberts more than himself. He was still selling whatever he could get. He saw himself and John French, Heiser's Computer Mart competitor in Orange County, as conducting most of IMSAI's early business. They used to do battle for the product. Terrell would rent a van and drive it over to the back dock of IMSAI's manufacturing site in Hayward to collect his own and French's orders. Check in hand, he would ask, "You want cash on the barrelhead, boys?" It was hard-ware war.


Terrell had started his Byte Shop in December 1975. By January he was being approached by people who wanted to open their own stores. He signed dealership agreements with them, whereby he would take a percentage of their profits, and soon there were Byte Shops in Santa Clara, San Jose, Palo Alto, and Portland, Oregon. In March 1976, Terrell incorporated as Byte, Inc.


This was a hobbyist industry, and Terrell found the clubs critical to his business. They provided his customer base. Many of the hobbyists who attended meetings had not bought their machines yet, and those who had often wanted accessories. Club members proved particularly receptive to Terrell's message.

From the book Fire in the Valley. By Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine.

Source :

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http://web.archive.org/web/20031125063830/http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/

blinkenlights: /blink'@n�li:tz/, n.
[common] Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a dinosaur. Now that dinosaurs are rare, this term usually refers to status lights on a modem, network hub, or the like.

This term derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world. One version ran in its entirety as follows:


������������������ACHTUNG!��ALLES�LOOKENSPEEPERS!

Alles�touristen�und�non-technischen�looken�peepers!
Das�computermachine�ist�nicht�fuer�gefingerpoken�und�mittengrabben.
Ist�easy�schnappen�der�springenwerk,�blowenfusen�und�poppencorken
mit�spitzensparken.��Ist�nicht�fuer�gewerken�bei�das�dumpkopfen.
Das�rubbernecken�sichtseeren�keepen�das�cotten-pickenen�hans�in�das
pockets�muss;�relaxen�und�watchen�das�blinkenlichten.


This silliness dates back at least as far as 1955 at IBM and had already gone international by the early 1960s, when it was reported at London University's ATLAS computing site. There are several variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do end with the word ‘blinkenlights’.

In an amusing example of turnabout-is-fair-play, German hackers have developed their own versions of the blinkenlights poster in fractured English, one of which is reproduced here:


������������������������������ATTENTION

This�room�is�fullfilled�mit�special�electronische�equippment.
Fingergrabbing�and�pressing�the�cnoeppkes�from�the�computers�is
allowed�for�die�experts�only!��So�all�the�“lefthanders”�stay�away
and�do�not�disturben�the�brainstorming�von�here�working
intelligencies.��Otherwise�you�will�be�out�thrown�and�kicked
anderswhere!��Also:�please�keep�still�and�only�watchen�astaunished
the�blinkenlights.


See also geef.

Old-time hackers sometimes get nostalgic for blinkenlights because they were so much more fun to look at than a blank panel. Sadly, very few computers still have them (the three LEDs on a PC keyboard certainly don't count). The obvious reasons (cost of wiring, cost of front-panel cutouts, almost nobody needs or wants to interpret machine-register states on the fly anymore) are only part of the story. Another part of it is that radio-frequency leakage from the lamp wiring was beginning to be a problem as far back as transistor machines. But the most fundamental fact is that there are very few signals slow enough to blink an LED these days! With slow CPUs, you could watch the bus register or instruction counter tick, but even at 33/66/150MHz (let alone gigahertz speeds) it's all a blur.

Despite this, a couple of relatively recent computer designs of note have featured programmable blinkenlights that were added just because they looked cool. The Connection Machine, a 65,536-processor parallel computer designed in the mid-1980s, was a black cube with one side covered with a grid of red blinkenlights; the sales demo had them evolving life patterns. A few years later the ill-fated BeBox (a personal computer designed to run the BeOS operating system) featured twin rows of blinkenlights on the case front. When Be, Inc. decided to get out of the hardware business in 1996 and instead ported their OS to the PowerPC and later to the Intel architecture, many users suffered severely from the absence of their beloved blinkenlights. Before long an external version of the blinkenlights driven by a PC serial port became available; there is some sort of plot symmetry in the fact that it was assembled by a German.

Finally, a version updated for the Internet has been seen on news.admin.net-abuse.email:


��������������������ACHTUNG!�ALLES�LOOKENSPEEPERS!

Das�Internet�is�nicht�fuer�gefingerclicken�und�giffengrabben.�Ist�easy
droppenpacket�der�routers�und�overloaden�der�backbone�mit�der�spammen
und�der�me-tooen.��Ist�nicht�fuer�gewerken�bei�das�dumpkopfen.�Das
mausklicken�sichtseeren�keepen�das�bandwit-spewin�hans�in�das�pockets
muss;�relaxen�und�watchen�das�cursorblinken.


This newest version partly reflects reports that the word ‘blinkenlights’ is (in 1999) undergoing something of a revival in usage, but applied to networking equipment. The transmit and receive lights on routers, activity lights on switches and hubs, and other network equipment often blink in visually pleasing and seemingly coordinated ways. Although this is different in some ways from register readings, a tall stack of Cisco equipment or a 19-inch rack of ISDN terminals can provoke a similar feeling of hypnotic awe, especially in a darkened network operations center or server room.

The ancestor of the original blinkenlights posters of the 1950s was probably this:


WWII-era machine-shop poster

We are informed that cod-German parodies of this kind were very common in Allied machine shops during and following WWII. Germans, then as now, had a reputation for being both good with precision machinery and prone to officious notices.

Source : The Jargon File
(version 4.4.7)

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http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html

Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL
Ed Post
Graphic Software Systems
P.O. Box 673
25117 S.W. Parkway
Wilsonville, OR 97070
Copyright (c) 1982

(decvax | ucbvax | cbosg | pur-ee | lbl-unix)!teklabs!ogcvax!gss1144!evp

Back in the good old days -- the "Golden Era" of computers, it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones that understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones that didn't. A real computer programmer said things like "DO 10 I=1,10" and "ABEND" (they actually talked in capital letters, you understand), and the rest of the world said things like "computers are too complicated for me" and "I can't relate to computers -- they're so impersonal". (A previous work [1] points out that Real Men don't "relate" to anything, and aren't afraid of being impersonal.)

But, as usual, times change. We are faced today with a world in which little old ladies can get computerized microwave ovens, 12 year old kids can blow Real Men out of the water playing Asteroids and Pac-Man, and anyone can buy and even understand their very own Personal Computer. The Real Programmer is in danger of becoming extinct, of being replaced by high-school students with TRASH-80s!

There is a clear need to point out the differences between the typical high-school junior Pac-Man player and a Real Programmer. Understanding these differences will give these kids something to aspire to -- a role model, a Father Figure. It will also help employers of Real Programmers to realize why it would be a mistake to replace the Real Programmers on their staff with 12 year old Pac-Man players (at a considerable salary savings).


LANGUAGES
The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use FORTRAN. Quiche Eaters use PASCAL. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of PASCAL, was once asked, "How do you pronounce your name?". He replied "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'." One can tell immediately from this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the IBM/370 FORTRAN G and H compilers. Real programmers don't need abstract concepts to get their jobs done: they are perfectly happy with a keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, and a beer.

Real Programmers do List Processing in FORTRAN.

Real Programmers do String Manipulation in FORTRAN.

Real Programmers do Accounting (if they do it at all) in FORTRAN.

Real Programmers do Artificial Intelligence programs in FORTRAN.

If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.


STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING

Computer science academicians have gotten into the "structured programming" rut over the past several years. They claim that programs are more easily understood if the programmer uses some special language constructs and techniques. They don't all agree on exactly which constructs, of course, and the examples they use to show their particular point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure journal or another -- clearly not enough of an example to convince anyone. When I got out of school, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program, use five different computer languages, and create 1000 line programs that WORKED. (Really!) Then I got out into the Real World. My first task in the Real World was to read and understand a 200,000 line FORTRAN program, then speed it up by a factor of two. Any Real Programmer will tell you that all the Structured Coding in the world won't help you solve a problem like that -- it takes actual talent. Some quick observations on Real Programmers and Structured Programming:

Real Programmers aren't afraid to use GOTOs.

Real Programmers can write five page long DO loops without getting confused.

Real Programmers enjoy Arithmetic IF statements because they make the code more interesting.

Real Programmers write self-modifying code, especially if it saves them 20 nanoseconds in the middle of a tight loop.

Programmers don't need comments: the code is obvious.

Since FORTRAN doesn't have a structured IF, REPEAT ... UNTIL, or CASE statement, Real Programmers don't have to worry about not using them. Besides, they can be simulated when necessary using assigned GOTOs.
Data structures have also gotten a lot of press lately. Abstract Data Types, Structures, Pointers, Lists, and Strings have become popular in certain circles. Wirth (the above-mentioned Quiche Eater) actually wrote an entire book [2] contending that you could write a program based on data structures, instead of the other way around. As all Real Programmers know, the only useful data structure is the array. Strings, lists, structures, sets -- these are all special cases of arrays and and can be treated that way just as easily without messing up your programing language with all sorts of complications. The worst thing about fancy data types is that you have to declare them, and Real Programming Languages, as we all know, have implicit typing based on the first letter of the (six character) variable name.


OPERATING SYSTEMS

What kind of operating system is used by a Real Programmer? CP/M? God forbid -- CP/M, after all, is basically a toy operating system. Even little old ladies and grade school students can understand and use CP/M.
Unix is a lot more complicated of course -- the typical Unix hacker never can remember what the PRINT command is called this week -- but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game. People don't do Serious Work on Unix systems: they send jokes around the world on USENET and write adventure games and research papers.

No, your Real Programmer uses OS/370.
A good programmer can find and understand the description of the IJK305I error he just got in his JCL manual.

A great programmer can write JCL without referring to the manual at all. A truly outstanding programmer can find bugs buried in a 6 megabyte core dump without using a hex calculator. (I have actually seen this done.)

OS/370 is a truly remarkable operating system. It's possible to destroy days of work with a single misplaced space, so alertness in the programming staff is encouraged. The best way to approach the system is through a keypunch. Some people claim there is a Time Sharing system that runs on OS/370, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they are mistaken.


PROGRAMMING TOOLS

What kind of tools does a Real Programmer use? In theory, a Real Programmer could run his programs by keying them into the front panel of the computer. Back in the days when computers had front panels, this was actually done occasionally. Your typical Real Programmer knew the entire bootstrap loader by memory in hex, and toggled it in whenever it got destroyed by his program. (Back then, memory was memory -- it didn't go away when the power went off. Today, memory either forgets things when you don't want it to, or remembers things long after they're better forgotten.) Legend has it that Seymour Cray, inventor of the Cray I supercomputer and most of Control Data's computers, actually toggled the first operating system for the CDC7600 in on the front panel from memory when it was first powered on. Seymour, needless to say, is a Real Programmer.

One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for Texas Instruments. One day, he got a long distance call from a user whose system had crashed in the middle of some important work. Jim was able to repair the damage over the phone, getting the user to toggle in disk I/O instructions at the front panel, repairing system tables in hex, reading register contents back over the phone. The moral of this story: while a Real Programmer usually includes a keypunch and lineprinter in his toolkit, he can get along with just a front panel and a telephone in emergencies.

In some companies, text editing no longer consists of ten engineers standing in line to use an 029 keypunch. In fact, the building I work in doesn't contain a single keypunch. The Real Programmer in this situation has to do his work with a text editor program. Most systems supply several text editors to select from, and the Real Programmer must be careful to pick one that reflects his personal style. Many people believe that the best text editors in the world were written at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for use on their Alto and Dorado computers [3]. Unfortunately, no Real Programmer would ever use a computer whose operating system is called SmallTalk, and would certainly not talk to the computer with a mouse.

Some of the concepts in these Xerox editors have been incorporated into editors running on more reasonably named operating systems. EMACS and VI are probably the most well known of this class of editors. The problem with these editors is that Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as bad a concept in text editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor -- complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.

It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text [4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse -- introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.

For this reason, Real Programmers are reluctant to actually edit a program that is close to working. They find it much easier to just patch the binary object code directly, using a wonderful program called SUPERZAP (or its equivalent on non-IBM machines). This works so well that many working programs on IBM systems bear no relation to the original FORTRAN code. In many cases, the original source code is no longer available. When it comes time to fix a program like this, no manager would even think of sending anything less than a Real Programmer to do the job -- no Quiche Eating structured programmer would even know where to start. This is called "job security".

Some programming tools NOT used by Real Programmers:


FORTRAN preprocessors like MORTRAN and RATFOR. The Cuisinarts of programming -- great for making Quiche. See comments above on structured programming.
Source language debuggers. Real Programmers can read core dumps.
Compilers with array bounds checking. They stifle creativity, destroy most of the interesting uses for EQUIVALENCE, and make it impossible to modify the operating system code with negative subscripts. Worst of all, bounds checking is inefficient.
Source code maintainance systems. A Real Programmer keeps his code locked up in a card file, because it implies that its owner cannot leave his important programs unguarded [5].

THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT WORK

Where does the typical Real Programmer work? What kind of programs are worthy of the efforts of so talented an individual? You can be sure that no real Programmer would be caught dead writing accounts-receivable programs in COBOL, or sorting mailing lists for People magazine. A Real Programmer wants tasks of earth-shaking importance (literally!):

Real Programmers work for Los Alamos National Laboratory, writing atomic bomb simulations to run on Cray I supercomputers.

Real Programmers work for the National Security Agency, decoding Russian transmissions.

It was largely due to the efforts of thousands of Real Programmers working for NASA that our boys got to the moon and back before the cosmonauts.

The computers in the Space Shuttle were programmed by Real Programmers.

Programmers are at work for Boeing designing the operating systems for cruise missiles.

Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they can to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation, such as hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, and repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.

One plan for the upcoming Galileo spacecraft mission is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/- 3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.

As you can tell, many of the world's Real Programmers work for the U.S. Government, mainly the Defense Department. This is as it should be. Recently, however, a black cloud has formed on the Real Programmer horizon.

It seems that some highly placed Quiche Eaters at the Defense Department decided that all Defense programs should be written in some grand unified language called "ADA" (registered trademark, DoD). For a while, it seemed that ADA was destined to become a language that went against all the precepts of Real Programming -- a language with structure, a language with data types, strong typing, and semicolons. In short, a language designed to cripple the creativity of the typical Real Programmer. Fortunately, the language adopted by DoD has enough interesting features to make it approachable: it's incredibly complex, includes methods for messing with the operating system and rearranging memory, and Edsgar Dijkstra doesn't like it [6]. (Dijkstra, as I'm sure you know, was the author of "GoTos Considered Harmful" -- a landmark work in programming methodology, applauded by Pascal Programmers and Quiche Eaters alike.) Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.

The real programmer might compromise his principles and work on something slightly more trivial than the destruction of life as we know it, providing there's enough money in it. There are several Real Programmers building video games at Atari, for example. (But not playing them. A Real Programmer knows how to beat the machine every time: no challange in that.) Everyone working at LucasFilm is a Real Programmer. (It would be crazy to turn down the money of 50 million Star Wars fans.) The proportion of Real Programmers in Computer Graphics is somewhat lower than the norm, mostly because nobody has found a use for Computer Graphics yet. On the other hand, all Computer Graphics is done in FORTRAN, so there are a fair number people doing Graphics in order to avoid having to write COBOL programs.


THE REAL PROGRAMMER AT PLAY

Generally, the Real Programmer plays the same way he works -- with computers. He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays him to do what he would be doing for fun anyway, although he is careful not to express this opinion out loud. Occasionally, the Real Programmer does step out of the office for a breath of fresh air and a beer or two. Some tips on recognizing real programmers away from the computer room:

At a party, the Real Programmers are the ones in the corner talking about operating system security and how to get around it.

At a football game, the Real Programmer is the one comparing the plays against his simulations printed on 11 by 14 fanfold paper.

At the beach, the Real Programmer is the one drawing flowcharts in the sand.

A Real Programmer goes to a disco to watch the light show.

At a funeral, the Real Programmer is the one saying "Poor George. And he almost had the sort routine working before the coronary."

In a grocery store, the Real Programmer is the one who insists on running the cans past the laser checkout scanner himself, because he never could trust keypunch operators to get it right the first time.

THE REAL PROGRAMMER'S NATURAL HABITAT

What sort of environment does the Real Programmer function best in? This is an important question for the managers of Real Programmers. Considering the amount of money it costs to keep one on the staff, it's best to put him (or her) in an environment where he can get his work done.

The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a computer terminal. Surrounding this terminal are:


Listings of all programs the Real Programmer has ever worked on, piled in roughly chronological order on every flat surface in the office.

Some half-dozen or so partly filled cups of cold coffee. Occasionally, there will be cigarette butts floating in the coffee. In some cases, the cups will contain Orange Crush.

Unless he is very good, there will be copies of the OS JCL manual and the Principles of Operation open to some particularly interesting pages.

Taped to the wall is a line-printer Snoopy calender for the year 1969.

Strewn about the floor are several wrappers for peanut butter filled cheese bars (the type that are made stale at the bakery so they can't get any worse while waiting in the vending machine).

Hiding in the top left-hand drawer of the desk is a stash of double stuff Oreos for special occasions.

Underneath the Oreos is a flow-charting template, left there by the previous occupant of the office. (Real Programmers write programs, not documentation. Leave that to the maintainence people.)

The Real Programmer is capable of working 30, 40, even 50 hours at a stretch, under intense pressure. In fact, he prefers it that way. Bad response time doesn't bother the Real Programmer -- it gives him a chance to catch a little sleep between compiles. If there is not enough schedule pressure on the Real Programmer, he tends to make things more challenging by working on some small but interesting part of the problem for the first nine weeks, then finishing the rest in the last week, in two or three 50-hour marathons. This not only inpresses his manager, who was despairing of ever getting the project done on time, but creates a convenient excuse for not doing the documentation. In general:


No Real Programmer works 9 to 5. (Unless it's 9 in the evening to 5 in the morning.)

Real Programmers don't wear neckties.

Real Programmers don't wear high heeled shoes.

Real Programmers arrive at work in time for lunch. [9]

A Real Programmer might or might not know his wife's name. He does, however, know the entire ASCII (or EBCDIC) code table.

Real Programmers don't know how to cook. Grocery stores aren't often open at 3 a.m., so they survive on Twinkies and coffee.

THE FUTURE

What of the future? It is a matter of some concern to Real Programmers that the latest generation of computer programmers are not being brought up with the same outlook on life as their elders. Many of them have never seen a computer with a front panel. Hardly anyone graduating from school these days can do hex arithmetic without a calculator. College graduates these days are soft -- protected from the realities of programming by source level debuggers, text editors that count parentheses, and user friendly operating systems. Worst of all, some of these alleged computer scientists manage to get degrees without ever learning FORTRAN! Are we destined to become an industry of Unix hackers and Pascal programmers?

On the contrary. From my experience, I can only report that the future is bright for Real Programmers everywhere. Neither OS/370 nor FORTRAN show any signs of dying out, despite all the efforts of Pascal programmers the world over. Even more subtle tricks, like adding structured coding constructs to FORTRAN have failed. Oh sure, some computer vendors have come out with FORTRAN 77 compilers, but every one of them has a way of converting itself back into a FORTRAN 66 compiler at the drop of an option card -- to compile DO loops like God meant them to be.

Even Unix might not be as bad on Real Programmers as it once was. The latest release of Unix has the potential of an operating system worthy of any Real Programmer. It has two different and subtly incompatible user interfaces, an arcane and complicated terminal driver, virtual memory. If you ignore the fact that it's structured, even C programming can be appreciated by the Real Programmer: after all, there's no type checking, variable names are seven (ten? eight?) characters long, and the added bonus of the Pointer data type is thrown in. It's like having the best parts of FORTRAN and assembly language in one place. (Not to mention some of the more creative uses for #define.)

No, the future isn't all that bad. Why, in the past few years, the popular press has even commented on the bright new crop of computer nerds and hackers ([7] and [8]) leaving places like Stanford and M.I.T. for the Real World. From all evidence, the spirit of Real Programming lives on in these young men and women. As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs, and unrealistic schedules, there will be Real Programmers willing to jump in and Solve The Problem, saving the documentation for later. Long live FORTRAN!


ACKNOWLEGEMENT
I would like to thank Jan E., Dave S., Rich G., Rich E. for their help in characterizing the Real Programmer, Heather B. for the illustration, Kathy E. for putting up with it, and atd!avsdS:mark for the initial inspriration.

REFERENCES
[1] Feirstein, B., Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, New York, Pocket Books, 1982.
[2] Wirth, N., Algorithms + Datastructures = Programs, Prentice Hall, 1976.

[3] Xerox PARC editors . . .

[4] Finseth, C., Theory and Practice of Text Editors - or - a Cookbook for an EMACS, B.S. Thesis, MIT/LCS/TM-165, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1980.

[5] Weinberg, G., The Psychology of Computer Programming, New York, Van Nostrabd Reinhold, 1971, page 110.

[6] Dijkstra, E., On the GREEN Language Submitted to the DoD, Sigplan notices, Volume 3, Number 10, October 1978.

[7] Rose, Frank, Joy of Hacking, Science 82, Volume 3, Number 9, November 1982, pages 58 - 66.

[8] The Hacker Papers, Psychology Today, August 1980.

[9] Datamation, July, 1983, pp. 263-265.