My dad just emailed me to let me know that his co-researcher at Rand Corporation in the 1960s, Dr Ginsberg, has confirmed I did indeed play 'hangman' with the Johnniac, as noted in the reminiscence below. I'm sure he won't mind if I post his comments, which add a bit more background on this machine:

The Johnniac may have been “decommissioned” at some point but I remember clearly that we were using it for time sharing using Teletype terminals well into the late 60’s if not into the early 70’s.  By that time we had IBM mainframes, but the JOSS time sharing (for Johniac Operating System or something like that, which formed the basis for the BASIC programming language invented by John Kemeny at Dartmouth)) kept on ticking for quite a while.  And yes, it start by saying “Hello” and if you made an error, all it could do was say “Huh?”  Also, I have heard that there were actually two Johnniacs – one at RAND and one at Princeton where Von Neuman was.  There’s no doubt that was the machine Karlin played on since that was the only time sharing system we had in those days.

7:08:59 PM  #   your two cents []

Boston Globe: Blogs shake the political discourse. [Scripting News]
6:38:30 PM  #   your two cents []

SJ Mercury: Studios demanding too much in their copyright campaign. Dan Gillmor: "The cartel believes -- and basically says -- that fair use is something copyright holders may provide or withhold at their whim. This stance tells customers they have no rights, except to spend or not spend." [Tomalak's Realm]
6:38:10 PM  #   your two cents []

Roland Piquepaille has a great mix of articles on his site at the moment. From chemical scissors to snip nanotubes in two, to 'geeplogging', to a survey that finds online chatrooms are a major source of marital breakdown, Roland's got 'em all! Recommended.
6:36:43 PM  #   your two cents []

As promised, two images for the Arthur C. Clarke and William Gibson fans, from the pictures I took at my wonderful tour of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. First: HAL. According to my tour guide, the odd-looking computer below is the 60s-era IBM machine that was used as a model for HAL, the computer that tries to do nasty things to poor beleaguered astronaut Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey (a film that confused me utterly as a child because I kept waiting for something to happen. I liked the manic apes, all the space station bits, and the music, though).

The story behind this IBM mammoth is that Clarke went round to IBM and they gave him a close look at this one-off, an odd model in that it has these pull-out panels of circuit boards (the vertical sections are clear here). They slide right out and can be easily changed. Now this was an unusual approach to computer-building and wasn't pursued, but Clarke saw it, thought this was the latest in computing and how computers would operate into the future, and voila: the famous scene in 2001 when Dave tries to shut down HAL -- and HAL sings "Daisy" -- involves Dave pulling out lots of panels as he tries to disengage HAL's memory. Most readers probably know that the name HAL was supposed to be a slight distortion of IBM -- a step earlier in the alphabet for each letter of IBM poduces HAL.So meet HAL:

Then: for those who have read the latest William Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition, this picture will be self-explanatory, as these little guys figure in a slantwise way in the plot development. These barrel-shaped devices, which are about the size of a somewhat obese pepper grinder, are Curta Calculators, hand-cranked calculating devices and forerunners of electronic calculators. They were designed by Austrian Curt Herzstark, and were manufactured from 1948 through 1970 and still available until about 1972 -- when electronic calculators appeared on the scene. Collectors are apparently very into them. There's lots about them out on the net, and they have a very lively history, but I'd recommend reading Gibson for the lowdown (of course).

9:53:32 AM  #   your two cents []