White Papers from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center on the Internet Archive

Tom McMahon is putting a variety of historical materials on the Internet Archive where it may, perhaps, survive the collapse of our civilization.  For a variety of technical reasons, it seems that the search engines do not crawl that corner of the Internet universe and so this is an experiment to see if we cant use my blog to add these documents to the larger collective unconscious. 

This particular collection is of white papers from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).  Many years ago, when I was probably working at the RAND Corporation, I saw my first Alto.  You can not imagine what an impact it had on me.  This is the future, I thought to myself.  As it turns out, the hardware and the software that they conceived is everywhere, but the idealism and intelligence which lay behind it got lost in the mad rush to steal the ideas by Apple and the others.  

Find the white papers, courtesy of Tom McMahon, here on the Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/alto-a-personal-computer-xerox-parc-august-7th-1979-copy

The Pernicious Impact of Frivolous use of Ancient Computers (JOSS #1)

draft

JOSS was the RAND Corporation's internally developed timesharing system to permit one computer to be used by many people (researchers) in their work and in a way that was more convivial than punching cards or paper tapes with machine code.   JOSS stands for "Johnniac Open Shop System".  In researching this important early system, I came across this beautiful description of an unexpected and, in the eyes of a key developer, an undesirable effect of making JOSS more available to researchers at RAND.

The researcher wrote:

In the summary and conclusions section of RM-5270-PR

Aesthetics, Computing and the Internet

draft /. a friend has pointed out that the development of lisp needs to be elaborated upon here and I agree with him.   So that will be written sometime soon, I promise....

They say that the internet is a bold new paradigm. They say that you can not judge the internet by what came before because it is totally new and those who attempt to judge it by past criteria are just not with the program and are whining uselessly. Well, indeed they might be whining uselessly, that much is true.

There are trends, patterns in aesthetics whether you know it or not, or care or not, and computing is about aesthetics from beginning to end. Like architecture, the aesthetics happen to hit the hard wall of engineering reality more often than other art forms, and indeed the engineering or construction aspects are fundamental, required, de riguere, both real and not real, but mostly real.

Nevertheless, we can perceive patterns in the aesthetics of this people's art of writing HTML just as we may see patterns in fine art, if we care to look.

In the following, we are going to discuss some of the history of ideas, which I know is very offensive to some of you more practical types. Either take a pill and calm down or go away.

Once upon a time, a generation of programmers grew up with the implied aesthetics of an experimental operating system from Bell Telephone Laboratories, an elite center of excellence in our country which no longer exists, the center that is, destroyed as it was by our government and the so-called “free market”. But at that center of excellence, an OS, later called UNIX, was developed with a minimal OS approach. A bit of the “less is more” theme going on here. True, some of the minimal nature was imposed on the work because of limited resources, but isnt that often true in art? Time passed and Unix got out into the world and then morphed into its bastard younger brother Linux, for better or for worse, that is what we are stuck with. I happen to like Linux and think it is better than we, collectively, deserve, but that is another topic.

One of the tricks about Unix was that it was designed by some of the best and brightest that our country had to offer.

Another aesthetic, which was a little busy for my tastes, was one we might call the MIT Lisp Machine style of software. This was written, it seemed to me, by hundreds of MIT graduate and undergraduate students cranked on speed, and it had many nuances, options, and so forth. Half the time it baffled me. But ultimately it was functional, well documented, and you could tell that while they might have been a little wordy and option-happy by the standards of a Unix fellow, there was no doubt that the people involved in writing, using and documenting this technology were very smart. Very smart indeed.

But now we enter the Internet age where we have vast software packages, their associated frameworks, and group sourced semi-documentation. This technology is to the Lisp machine what Lisp was to Unix, it is busy beyond belief. Every option has an option and every options' option has an exception. Whereas Linux and Lisp was designed by the best we had to offer, most of the Internet stuff, a bastard child of another project of excellence, but long ago, the Arpanet, is motivated not by excellence but by the most important philosophical principles of our great country: naked greed combined with arrogance, stupidity, ignorance and hypocrisy. There is no need to document, they say, it is all documented by the group mind. Not that there are not good parts to the infrastructure and conventions and languages and frameworks of the Internet, indeed there are. They are there along with everything else.

In other words, lest this sound too negative, the Unix and Lisp movements were movements by an intellectual elite, as was the Arpanet, whereas the Internet is a true people's movement. Rough, inconsistent, good, bad, horrible, insane, and all within a few characters of each other.

There is no order nor can there be, nor could there be, any order. It is the group fuck raised to the 1000^th power. Let us embrace the new aesthetic. It may be insane but it is our insanity.

The Ancient Past of Early Computer Animation (draft)

This is all just going to be rewritten.

A friend of mine, Terrance Masson, hosted an event at SIGGRAPH 2014 to tell some of the stories behind the early work in computer animation.   I was invited because it is thought that I know quite a few of these stories, and I do.  But instead I wrote up some notes as to why it is very difficult for people to look at the early work in computer animation and make much sense of it or know why these projects are important, if indeed they are.

Although I am going to try and explain some of the factors behind these projects.  But it may still be very hard to understand.   

I may say that I walked through the snow five miles each day to go to school and you may believe me.  I may say that if we wanted to do computer animation we had to build our own computer and you may believe me.  I may tell you that the electronics for a 512x512 frame buffer (graphics display) without the monitor might cost you about $30K.   Or that a major production studio had about 1/2 gigabyte of disk total.

It is extremely difficult to look into the past and really understand what people were thinking and why they did what they did.  If you are going to understand history, even the history of people still living, then you are going to have to realize how recent certain things really are, how much smaller the community was, how much less money was involved, and how much of this was essentially an outsider activity.

The projects I am referring to were created and premiered, generally at SIGGRAPH, between the years 1995 - 1993 or so.   By 1995 at the latest, it was a completely different world.

So here are some things to consider when viewing an early computer animation project (in no particular order):

1. The further back you go in time, the more likely it is that they wrote their own software or someone on the team was writing software.   What!  Write one's own software!?  How technical!  Yes, thats right, to do computer animation you had to know what a computer was.

2. As far as we know, no one in authority thought this was really going to work. No mainstream entertainment organization believed that they were going to be making movies with computer, that 3D animation would take over from 2D to a large degree, that visual effects would use synthetic imagery, etc.

3. With the exception of Lucas and possibly Disney, so far as I know none of the major studios paid for any of this technology until it was all proven to work and make them money.

4. Some people were being paid to do the projects you know about, some were not.  Those who were paid were often expected to do a real job as well, or in some cases their management permitted people to work on the project you are looking at rather than their real job.

5. Computers were unbelievably slower and more expensive.  A 12 bit 512x512 frame buffer (e.g. color display) cost about $30K in 1976 dollars.  Note that is 12 bits, e.g. 4 bits each R, G and B.

6. Some of the best motion graphics was done between 1976 and 1978.

7. All of the projects that we are talking about here were labors of love.

8. Attending the "film" show was an intellectual activity, as my friend Andy Kopra has pointed out.  It was the ideas being demonstrated that made the project important.  If you did not know what those ideas were then you would not be able to understand the piece.  So for example, imho, "Luxo, Jr" by Pixar was about demonstrating that a character could be brought to life in classic Disney character animation terms using 3D graphics.  The film was about proving that such a thing was possible, and only secondarily about a lamp playing ball with another lamp.

9. Although there were people who were interested in the commercial applications to the entertainment industry, there were also many people who were interested in abstract filmmaking, electronic and video synthesis and other, completely non-commercial uses in the visual arts.

... to be continued

Rashomon (1950) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/

Anti-Social and Criminal Behavior in Social Media

What to do when people attack you on the Internet?   There are many techniques possible including revenge, laughter, threats of violence (which are illegal by the way) and so forth.  

One solution is to help your enemies by telling them what has already been tried so that they do not waste your time.   That is the technique of Ms. Fitzpatrick who has written a letter to her attackers describing what has already been tried and what effect it had.  

The kind of behavior that she is responding to is amazingly bad.  We are talking juvenile, delusional, psycho-pathological, paranoid, vindictive, violent, anti-social, hateful, racist, sexist, vicious, obsessive and criminal.

Just an average day on the Internet, I suppose.

Here are the first three paragraphs of her post:

      Did you come to my blog because you saw something I wrote on an Internet forum or Twitter 

      which you didn't like?

      Are you now frantically Googling my name and trying to "come up with something on me" so 

      you can try to discredit my ideas along with me?

      Let me help. Save yourself some time, and realize that you don't have to spend hours 

      Googling and drilling needlessly on the Wayback Machine, because there's no scandal here.
      If you're trying to silence my legitimate speech and criticism by trying to "come up with 

      something" on me, give it up. Use words, if you have an argument against my blogs, and don't

      try to harass me with "doxing," vilification, smearing, etc. It's not going to work.

Ms. Fitzpatrick's advice to her enemies is very long but worth reading if you have the time.

I come from the period of early online communities. I remember programs like Talkomatic on Plato, and I have used various text based MUDS or whatever they were called.  I participated in early email lists on the ARPAnet like everyone else until I got tired of the flames and the time it took to participate.  I helped test an early version of the Warner Bros multi-person online game "The Palace".   I sponsored and helped implement one of the early versions of a networked-multiperson game, Mazewar. I screwed around with Second Life and once had a very pleasant makeout session with a beautiful virtual woman. Unfortunately my browser got caught in some sort of infinite loop while we were smooching and nothing ever came of it.

It all seemed to me to be playful, entertaining and certainly not harmful beyond the usual problems of distracting young people from their homework or household chores.

But obviously the world has changed and from the slime pits of online social networking we have real-world groups such as Wikileaks, Anonymous and the delusional and narcissistic actions of would-be freedom fighters who work to destroy their country on behalf of the most oppressive governments of the world.  (1)

In fact most of the attacks on Fitzpatrick stem from her non-politically-correct opinions about Snowden and his collaborators.

You may also wish to examine the case of the XX Committee and the actions taken to destroy the reputation and career of its author because of his very literate and compelling posts on the Snowden Operation.   The link for that is also at the end of the post.

This shit isn't funny anymore.

Advice to Google Witch Hunters

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/google_witch_hunters.html

In Solidarity with John Schindler @20Committee

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2014/06/in-solidarity-with-john-schindler-20committee.html

__________________________________________

1. This is just reality, kids.  You may not like it, but nothing Snowden or Greenwald has exposed was against American law.   You may disagree with the policies that led to those activities that were exposed, and if so I recommend you elect different representatives to Washington.   All of it, and I mean all of it, was under control of the President, the national security apparatus and the courts.   It was thus all under the control of your legally elected representatives.  If you believe in changing our government by illegal means,  Snowden and Greenwald may have value.   They have certainly collaborated with foreign, hostile intelligence services, independent of whether or not those services sponsored and controlled their activities from the beginning. They are certainly in the service of foreign intelligence today.    Do not think for one moment that the activities of Snowden and Greenwald was legitimate whistle blowing because it wasn't.  They are pursuing a radical political agenda of their own and using illegal means.   There is another discussion that one can have about whether illegal means are legitimate in the context of such events as the Bush coup d'etat of 2000, but that is a separate discussion and even if we decide that they are legitimate, and I do not necessarily do so, I still would not agree with or approve of the Snowden Operation.

The Mystery of Tom Bombadil and Symbolics

When Craig Reynolds sent me a link to Tom Bombadil's Facebook Page I did not at first realize why he asked about this person.

Tom Bombadil is of course an enigmatic character from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series who is the only one in all middle earth who is not affected by the One Ring and seems to be indifferent to the power of Sauron in some way.

Then I looked more closely at this Tom Bombadil and saw the Symbolics 3600 component boards. The 3600 was one of the original Lisp Machines that came from the MIT AI Lab and was commercialized by two different companies, Symbolics, Inc and LMI, Inc.

Look closely at the top of the picture

Only a member of the inner elite would have access to one of these or understand its significance.

Therefore we can ask, who is Tom Bombadil?

So I sent an email to Tom and asked him about himself and what was up.   He replied immediately from Germany.

Its nice to know that we had a positive impact on someone.   Those were back in those naive and idealistic days when we thought that inventing computing and computer animation was going to help the world, not merely provide more opportunities to steal and support corrupt governments.

Tom Bombadil on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Bombadil

A Modest Proposal for Restricting the Use of Computers to Only Those Who Are Worthy

It seems certain that a mistake has been made on the public policy issue of who uses computers and what they are permitted to use them for. The naive egalitarianism that so many of us espoused may have been foolish in retrospect. We seem to have unleashed a vast madness of unthinking and even puerile consumers whose only thought is to text about underage sex partners, vapid consumerism and the next iPhone. The mistake, I believe, was to allow just anyone to use computers. That idea, that openness, was surely noble, but look where it has led.

Just for discussion, I want to propose the idea of limiting the use of computers and computing to an elite. This elite would have had to study and learn something about the history and philosophy of computing and perhaps also have their moral character evaluated by a qualified board. The requirements would not necessarily be much, what I have in mind could easily be learned by pretty much anyone of average intelligence in a few years, certainly less than five. And a background check could determine if the potential computer user was a rapist, a member of an organized crime syndicate, an abuser of children, or a potential computer company or entertainment industry executive.

Given the moral hazards involved in certain professions, members of those professions would no doubt have to be vetted with special care. These would be fields where the risk of criminal involvement and contempt for the law has resulted in the overt and appalling exploitation of innocent people in order to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor. These fields would certainly include parts of the finance industry, politicians at the local and national level, and of course computer animation executives of any rank.  

What would they study? Oh this and that, about where computers came from, what the ideas are, that sort of thing. Here is one potential paper on the reading list: its the report that Dr. John von Neumann wrote about what may be the first stored program computer at the U of Pennsylvania for his client, the US Army, that paid for the work. I can't imagine that anyone who used computers would not be fascinated by this paper. Here is one paragraph from the introduction.

You see, its not just all boring capacitors and resistors, there are, or at least were, some ideas behind these devices. Unlike today, of course, where the only ideas that can be discerned is to steal money from the consumer and annoy them with advertisements while collecting personal data without their knowledge or consent. What a dismal fate for such a high-minded invention!

If the requirements up front seem a little stiff to people, perhaps we could find a more incremental solution. Perhaps every toaster oven and smart phone or other device could come with a paper from the reading list that the consumer would have to read before the device could be activated. Different devices could come with different papers, perhaps. Given the obsolescence built into most of these devices, such that they are worthless within 18 months or so, over a short number of years the consumer would have certainly read a couple of dozen relevant papers or texts. I do not like this idea as much as simply having an elite, I think any effort to let just anyone use computers is doomed to failure and will ultimately just bring us right back to where we are.

The entire paper can be found at this location.

http://www.virtualtravelog.net/wp/wp-content/media/2003-08-TheFirstDraft.pdf

I have included the title page and table of contents below.

Alan Turing Set to Challenge Lego for Boxoffice Fame

[Update 2-11-2014  My correspondents in Berlin tell me that Harvey and Bob Weinstein are on the very top level of the Hilton .... whereas my correspondents are forced to endure on the lower levels.   More news as we have it from Berlin]

Turing.   A man whose work seems to be ripped from the pages of today's newspapers Internet news sites.   Is there a more glamourous name in all of Mathematics?   Secret counter spy, a life filled with illicit sex, known eccentric, colorful suicide, cut off before his time, whose work famously set the stage for the second half of the 20th century and beyond. 

Now Hollywood has discovered Alan Turing.

Serendipitously coming across an important Internet-based Hollywood journal,  Deadline Hollywood, it is jam-packed with important and exciting news from the glamourous and rewarding entertainment industry. I realized as I read this drivel that I was falling deeper and deeper under its spell with important news about at least two different 3D animated films I knew nothing about, not to mention the new "Dreamworks Press" which is to market in print the "Dreamworks Classics".   Classics? Already? How old does it have to be to be a classic?  Does 10 years old make something a classic?  Are there standards for such things?

But the most exciting news was the "heat" generated at the Berlin film festival, the Berlinale, by none other than Alan Turing and his film The Imitation Game (2014).  Although famously dead, his legacy lives on.   The Weinstein Company, the Deadline breathlessly tells us, bought the rights to this film for 7 million ($US) based on a 15 minute compilation reel of scenes from the film. In other words, the film itself is not finished, so the filmmakers put together a 15 minute "show reel" and used it to sell the Weinstein's for all they were worth.   Thats Hollywood. Thats the kind of crazy stuff that makes Hollywood so entertaining.  (1) 

None other than Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing.

A great picture of Cumberbach as Turing with his computer

The real Alan Turing 

To recap, Alan Turing was the mathematician famous for his work at Bletchley Park during WWII doing what the British have always done: reading other people's secret communications.   In so doing he also casually invented computer science (with a few other people) and threw challenges down to other fields which continue to this day (see "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis",  link below).  A long-distance runner, he was also famously homosexual (or bisexual) who committed suicide young rather than submit to a barbaric medical regime by court order to "cure" his homosexuality.  His chosen method of killing himself was by painting an apple with arsenic and taking a bite from it.  

Just the average life of the Cambridge mathematician.

It was an amazing tragedy and Great Britain has formally apologized for their scandalous behavior with a pardon from the Queen and a formal apology from the Prime Minister.  Better late than never, I suppose.  (A BBC article on the pardon is here)

With A Beautiful Mind (2001), Pi (1998) and now this, The Imitation Game (2014), we have three movies based on the exciting and tragic lives of mathematicians, admittedly one of them fictional. Does this bode a whole slew of films about tragic and exciting mathematicians? Are there enough tragic and exciting mathematicians around to supply this new craze?

The Competition looks worried.

"Will Alan Turing be able to compete against movies about Lego?", the Deadline site breathlessly asks.  This and other vital questions will be answered in our lifetime, it is hoped.  I am putting my money behind Turing and holding my breath.

_______________________________________________

"The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" can be found at the following URL:
http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing.pdf

See the article here in Deadline Hollywood here: 

http://www.deadline.com/2014/02/berlin-record-deal-harvey-weinstein-pays-7-million-for-alan-turing-wwii-tale-the-imitation-game/

The Imitation Game (2014) on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/

A Beautiful Mind (2001) on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268978/

Pi (1998) on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

The Berlinale Web Site
http://www.berlinale.de/en/HomePage.html


1. Of course 7 million dollars seems a little low in the context of a Facebook valued at over 100 billion.  

Upcoming Seminar on the History of Cryptology, Oct 17 - 19, 2013

Every once in a while (maybe every year, for all I know), the NSA (1) has been sponsoring a symposium on the history of Cryptology. This symposium is mostly for scholars but I am going to presume that people who are interested in this will make the effort to find out whether or not they can attend.

Special Note:

But for all you silly people who got your panties in a bunch because of Snowden, you are suggested to attend.  What a wonderful opportunity to learn something about the field and the people in reality instead of the very weird beliefs that so many of my peers seem to have.

The program is on the www.cryptome.org site at the following URL, but I have at great personal expense converted the PDF to jpeg for your convenience.

http://cryptome.org/2013/09/nsa-symposium-2013.pdf

This promises to be a very exciting conference. Here are some talks and speakers that I noticed off the top of my head:

1. David Kahn (2) chairing a panel on new work on Alan Turing and his work on cryptology.

2. Work in progress by Whitfield Diffie on the ECM Mark I

3. Crytology in ancient Greece and China

4. Preparation for WW 2 and WW 2 Cryptology Operations including the attack on Japanese naval cypher JN25.

5. East European COMINT in WW 2

I am not sure I can attend but I might be able to show up for a half a day. I wish I could attend the whole thing, it looks great.

______________________________________________

1. Nichren Shoshu of America www.nst.org

2. David Kahn is a well known author on cryptology, considered to have written some of the best books on cryptology and the people who do it in the open literature.

How Mazewar Escaped from a Lab at MIT in 1977

[6/28/2013 See comments at end from MIT Alumni that fill in some details here]

This is the story of how an early multiperson computer game, way ahead of its time, escaped from a lab at MIT and ended up on networked computers on the West coast and from there out to the rest of the world.

This is also an example of how difficult it is to understand events that happened in another time, another period of history, when the technology was different than we are used to. When this story took place, people used minicomputers or ran batch on mainframes, there was very little graphics, local area networks were research projects, and on and on.

I was taking a break from college and worked at the RAND Corporation and had been on the ARPANET since 1973 which is about as early as you can be on the ARPANET. I had made a lot of friends at MIT at the AI Lab and what we then called the Architecture Machine Group.

RAND sent me on a trip to Cambridge and I stayed a few extra days and slept on Lee Parks' couch at the Architecture Machine. It was on one of these tours that I saw the Spatial Data Management System at the Architecture Machine, or "Put that There". Seth Steinberg was working with Bob Frankston and working on their product after Visicalc, something called TK Solver! which was spectacular.

For some reason, Charles Frankston, who was at the AI Lab then, took the time late at night to show me a multiperson game called Mazewar. Mazewar ran on a PDP 10 computer that had a bunch of graphics computers attached, something called an Imlac. An Imlac was a 16 bit computer all its own that could do dozens of vectors a second, barely. I remember a room with a dozen or so Imlac's against a wall, so I am guessing that this was a graphics lab at MIT of some sort.

The basic game was this: you were in a maze. You can see whatever direction you were facing, down the maze, at a wall, whatever. If you saw another player, you could see them as well, represented as an eye and the eye had a direction so you could see which way the player was facing. If they were facing away from you or at right angles it was quite possible they had not seen you. Using the keyboard (there were no mice), you could navigate (forward, backwards, to the sides), or turn right or left, or stop, or fire straight ahead. If the bad guy was ahead of you, and you fired first, you won. The other player would be reincarnated somewhere else in the maze. In modern terms, it was an early 1st person shooter.

This was probably 1977.

I return to LA and go back to school to get my degree, and my friends leave RAND and move to Xerox where they are working on a secret project. I get a demo of some of their technology, called the Alto, and I am blown away. This is the future. It is the Alto that Steve Jobs was shown when he came up with the idea for the Macintosh, so they say.

The Alto was perfect for Mazewar. It had the screen, the user interface (keyboard/mouse), the network to communicate. It did not have a central computer like the PDP 10 so we came up with a distributed architecture for the game played over the network. Jim Guyton at Xerox did most of the programming. I described the game (Jim had never seen it) and figured out how to make the graphics efficient. Jim releases the game inside Xerox.

My friend Marc Cantor, founder of Macromind aka Macromedia, sees it and does a Mac implementation. Jim is asked to write an article about the Alto implementation for Byte magazine and he does in 1980. This turns out to be one of the first, if not the first, network distributed multi-person game with various points of view, in the public literature.

I am sure we were not the first. But apparently we were close to the first to talk about the ideas in print. Jim now becomes an expert witness to break weird patents on networked games. So do I.

Anyway, Mazewar has a loyal following, it even had a 30 year reunion that I did not know about.

The point is, that back then, people helped you, you shared ideas, it wasn't about making a fast buck, it was about showing these ideas would work when no one but us believed it would.

Now of course, things are different.
________________________________________

We got the following comments from MIT Alumni:

From Tom Knight on 6/24

That would have been in the Dynamic Modeling group Imlac installation, on the second floor of 545 Technology Square.The Imlacs were connected by serial lines to the Dynamic Modeling PDP-10, running ITS, one of three KA-10 ITS systems on the 9th floor of Tech Square at the time. JCR Licklider, who ran DM, didn't like those new fangled bitmaps. In my opinion (and that of many others) the Imlacs were a programming and support nightmare. The epitome (with the possible exception of the similar GT-11) of the catch phrase "There is a special name for a little bit of intelligence. It is stupidity." Cleverness in the console program led to unending complexity and failure in the mainframe.

From Ed Schwalenberg on 6/24

Fascinating!
Here are a few things I remember:
The Imlacs were owned by the Dynamic Modeling group of MIT LCS, headed by Al Vezza.  Vezza was not fond of Maze, because randoms like you would come in at midnight, pound on the keyboards and break them.  So the installed version of Maze was typically neutered; you had to have a guide like CBF to know where to find a good copy.  Also, there was a screensaver for idle Imlacs; one of the images was a Maze playing position where user AV (Vezza) was directly in front of you, his eyes directly on you.
The cognoscenti also knew how to activate various cheat modes. A regular shot had a propagation delay to the target; control-mumble-cokebottle eliminated that delay.  Another patch activated keystrokes that would let you remove walls in your copy of the maze.  A third would show you the positions of others in the overview.
SAIL had some Imlacs, notably one at John McCarthy's home; I wonder if that was the first "home computer"?  I also wonder whether he ever played Maze on it.
Dynamic Modeling or Dynamod was located in what was then NE43 aka 545 Technology Square. I well remember (from midnight tours led by KLH) the room with a bunch of Imlacs, but I don't remember the room number.  That building has been engulfed (the east wall is now the west side of an enormous atrium) and renumbered 200 Tech Square; it's now Novartis.
Dynamod the research group, and DM the machine, played another role in gaming history, employing the hackers who wrote the original Zork.

Kris Karas adds

Imlacs not withstanding, DM was also home to MDL, a wonderfully cuspy
language, if anybody remembers it.  (I still have my MDL software
reference, forlornly gathering dust on a bookshelf.)  I probably owe
some personal success in the field of software to MDL, MACLISP, and DM.
I taught myself elements of good software structure and design from that.

Bill York adds

I remember that as an early MIT student, getting in to the 2nd floor of 545 TS to play Maze was one of the rarest of privileges, and as others have said I owed my access and my Maze training to Charles.
As Ed mentioned, the key gameplay difference between the standard Maze game and most FPS games was that you weren't so much firing a gun as dropping a time-delay grenade in the hallway. This made for very challenging game play, allowing you time to avoid getting killed if you could manage to duck into a side passage in time, or to doom an opponent by baiting him into chasing you into a corridor where you had left a nasty present waiting.
In addition to Zork (which I lost much more time to than Maze) the DM group (or at least individuals) also produced one of the first wide-area multi-player games, an ongoing trivia contest based on user-submitted content. I believe that there were players from all over the ARPAnet-connected world. I think that Peter David Lebling (part of the Zork creation team with Tim Anderson and Mark Blank) wrote and maintained it. He also perpetually occupied the top ranking slot with a commanding lead over the rest of us peons, though I held down 2nd place for a while. Anyone else remember this?

________________________________________

Mazewar page on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War

Xerox Alto on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

Imlac PDS-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imlac_PDS-1

The Failure of Moral Progress: The Tragedy of Javascript

From hope to despair, then to hope, then to despair again, is that the fate of all civilizations? To give in to sloth and decay, their monuments to reason covered with the slime of intellectual and moral weakness? To sink again and again into corruption, incompetence, venality and death ? Is hope for progress mere pablum for the weak minded to keep them enthusiastically at their tasks until it is too late and their fate is sealed?

Something has been revealed to me recently that would make me think so.

A computer language is many things but one of them is a (usually formal) specification of a grammar and a syntax that is useful to the bipeds in expressing their ways of doing things, what are sometimes called algorithms, named for the jazz trio of Johnny von Neumann, Alan Turing and Alonzo Church whose band, The Algorithms, dominated avant garde jazz in the 1930s up into the 1950s and whose influence is still heard today. Although writing computer algorithms is a very personal and idiosyncratic form of expression, the notation that the individual artists (and groups of artists) use to express themselves will subtly affect the elegance of the algorithm and can by its nature guide and channel what can be expressed. They may all be Turing equivalent at some theoretical level but they "feel" very different.

There is no one such formal language, there are many, and there will be many in the future. Like music and music notation, they will evolve and some will be appreciated by an elite, and some will be used by the masses. Some, like SNOBOL are esteemed but not in current usage. Others like C++ (pronounced "C Double Cross") are as common as flies on shit and just as attractive.

As in all things there is the matter of taste and the issues of elite style vs common style. The avant garde must by its very definition be avant, changing and moving forward.

Even so, we can look on in horror or at least puzzlement when something that is fundamentally flawed, something that we know is just not going to be good, becomes established and then through the vicissitudes of the uncaring fates explodes onto a hundred million computer screens to become encrusted into just as many computer programs and taught to our children and then to their children in perpetuity.

I have just looked more closely at HTML 5 which is already everywhere and soon will be truly everywhere. One day there will be an HTML 6 no doubt but until then it is HTML 5 that will be used to mark up what our civilization has to say about itself. HTML 5 is a synonym for Javascript, as Javascript is integrated into the very essence of HTML 5. There can not be one without the other. Where you find HTML 5 you will find Javascript.

The more I learn Javascript the more I realize that Satan and the Illuminati, another band from the 1930s, must be chortling with glee at the little joke they have played on our world. For Javascript is a pastiche which pulls a little from column A and column B and column C and Java and Scheme and C and blows smoke in our face. It is a tale told by a billionaire, Mark Andresson, who was in a hurry at the time and would we have done any better if we were in his shoes?     I would hope that we would, but it is very hard to know until we are tested, and we probably never will have that opportunity.   It is what it is, however.

Javascript is not the best we, the computer community, can do in a perfect world.  But it is not a perfect world, and at least Javascript is not the worst that there is out there.    At this point, it is just a fact of life.

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HTML 5 Working Group
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/

HTML 5 on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5

System 360 and the Light of Ancient Computing

Once upon a time, a long time ago, April 7, 1964 to be exact, IBM announced the System 360 family of computers.  (1) It was a bold move, to create a unified line of computing from small to large, with a compatible operating system and set of peripherals. It was fabulously successful and used in industry, research and education throughout this country and the world.

The IBM logo of the period which was also designed by Paul Rand as is their current logo.

This was so long ago that computers were not mere vehicles of commerce, shallow consumerism, crime and government oppression and surveillance, as they are today.

Back then, computers could be seen in a more naive and positive way, as a force of positive social change. Of course, IBM was not seen as a force of social progress back then, not at all. It would take a real idealist to see them in that light and only a few did. But there were a few who recognized and appreciated their role as part of a larger movement that might one day help to change the world. I doubt anyone serious could hope for a positive role for computing today, with its squalid consumerism and oppressively bad design, but back then there was an elite who hoped for and worked for that day, a day which never came.

The front panel for the IBM 360 Model 75

Say what you will about IBM and its role as a pillar of Decadent Western Capitalism, as we used to affectionately call it, they knew a thing or two about design and a lot of good research and development took place on their computers which set the stage (in part) for other well-intentioned initiatives of our so-called civilization.

I remember that one day in the 1970s, leftist radicals took over the Computing Center at UCSB to protest something or another. They were so stupid that they thought that by turning off the main console that they had turned off the computer. Those of us who knew better used remote consoles in Physics and elsewhere to keep working while Campus Security was negotiating the removal of this would-be revolutionary vanguard.

Had our well-intentioned lefties only noticed the big glowing bank of lights on the IBM 360/75, they might have deduced that in fact they had not turned off computing for the campus as they had hoped, but that the work of the military-industrial complex, as the 360/75 symbolized to them, went on, uninterrupted.

Today, no working IBM System 360 is said to exist.

I doubt that this is completely true, but it is true that only a few remain, the rest being melted down for their copper or otherwise disposed of, their bulk making them very difficult for all but a few to store for the long term. Perhaps we will find a few front panels stashed in the garages of the world, waiting like arrays of diamonds in the night to be rediscovered.

An antiquarian has collected for us an array of symbolic representations of the System 360 front panels. Each model had its own front panel, which represented the internal implementation of that particular design in some abstract manner.

You may find his web page with its various graphics representations here:

http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/pan04.htm

The front panel of the 360 / 75 that I have included above is from his page.

Today, the front panel is a concept of the past, destroyed by manufacturing principles of cost reduction. Gone without discussion. Gone beyond any hope of retrieval, like our hope that these technologies of which they were a part would be used one day to help people and not merely oppress them.

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A good introduction to the System 360 can be found here:

http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/engineer/comphist/ibm360.htm

The Wikipedia page on the System 360:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360

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Notes: 

1. The Press Release from IBM for the System 360 may be found here:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PR360.html

Modern Historically Correct Computer Phonetic Alphabet

v 0.1 Beta  3/10/2013

[in progress]

Tired of being told words over the phone that you can not spell correctly and have the person on the other end fail to enunciate what they mean and too lazy to use an approved phonetic alphabet for voice communication?  Then consider the following new, rationalized, technology appropriate phonetic alphabet.  The words suggested below are intended to be highly redundant and recognizable words that are unmistakable for any other word on the list, and either have some value in a computer historical sense, or allow the speaker to get out some of their frustration using good Anglo Saxon idiom.

Each comma separated phrase is as good as another, there is no particular expressed priority between the terms. In other words, Burroughs is as good as Burnout.

A -- Alpha, Alphabet, Analog, ASCII, ARPANET

B -- Burroughs, Burnout

C -- Collossus, Channel, Cantaloupe, COBOL

D -- DEC, Dogshit, Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation

E -- Echo, Enigma, EBCDIC

F -- Fuck, Fuckit, Fucking

G -- Geheimschreiber

H -- Hacker, Honeywell, Hollerith

I -- Idiot, IBM

J -- Jerk

K -- Kernel

L -- Lemonade, Lichtenstein

M -- Moron, MIT

N -- Negative, Nebula

O -- Ohbaby, Orion

P -- PDP, Penis, Process, Punched Card

Q -- Quasi, Quack

R -- Ramo, Rancid, Rogue

S -- Stupid, Spacewar

T -- Turing, Teletype, Tron

U -- Ubetcha, User

V -- von Neumann, vector

W -- Woolridge, Whirlwind, Washedup

X -- Xray, Xanadu

Y -- Yessir, Yes Maam

Z -- Zebra, Zork

Examples

Bolt := Burnout Ohbaby Lemonade Teletype
Scumbag := Stupid Cantaloupe Ubetcha Moron Burnout Alphabet Geheimschreiber

References

Category of Phonetic Alphabets on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Phonetic_alphabets

Nato Phonetic Alphabet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet