09 April 2004

Big Blue Marks Birth of Big Iron. The mainframe computer came into the world 40 years ago this week, and techies gather to mark the occasion. Daniel Terdiman reports from Mountain View, California. [Wired News] This article is pure nostalgia, dealing with the event that defined my early years in the IT industry, the announcement of the IBM System/360 on April 7, 1964.  A truly historic event commemorated: Indeed, author James Collins has written that the System/360, along with Ford's Model T and the Boeing 707 jet, were the three most important business innovations of all time. I spent seven or eight unforgettable years installing and supporting those early mainframes in mining companies in South Africa and banks and other international businesses in Greece.  In those days there were no "IBM compatible" vendors, no consulting firms or independent software suppliers, in fact the guys who founded firms like SAP, Computer Associates and the like still worked for IBM.  IBM Systems Engineers like me did the whole spectrum of customer support:  training the customers' embryo IT departments (then called DP, of course), educating and informing management of the potential, doing the systems programming while that profession was being invented, writing application software,  problem solving and debugging and having a whole lot of fun, working with unforgettable people and making lifelong friends. The pictures accompanying this story are a must for anyone who remembers those years;  nice to see the grey-haired old guys who were responsible for the project smiling and reminiscing - even a reproduction of the indispensible System/360 Green Card, which was always in our pocket or briefcase, referred to constantly while doing Assembler Language programming, debugging a core dump, or entering code directly through the switches on the system console. Meanwhile, this picture of an upright 1960's style upright tape deck, brings back a memory of IBM's Test Centre behind plate glass windows on downtown Rissik Street, with eight such tape drives arrayed majestically around the system unit, where one had to book time to be the single, sole user of the system.  Working on a customer benchmark, I set up a large sort (a major feature of all sequential, batch-based systems in those days), to use all 8 tape drives, one input, one output and six work files, and then retired to watch the entertainment with colleagues and other sundry onlookers from across the street, as the reels spun endlessly back and forth in some weird choreography.  The Wired caption says: Today, the System/360 more closely resembles something out of an early Star Trek episode than one of the most important business innovations of all time. Star trek?  Much better than that, in my opinion! IBM's rather tame tribute on their website is here, while CNET's anniversary review focusses more on the mainframe market of today than on nostalgia. The Computer History Museum is worth a visit, and their System/360 page is here. The classic IBM Systems Journal article on System/360 Architecture, by Gene Amdahl (yep, he was one of the fathers of System/360), Fred  Brooks and G A Blaauw. Wikipedia entry on System/360.  More pictures and nostalgia at The Gallery of Old Iron. and one more History Site. 2:28:26 PM    comment []

The Top Influential Political Blogs Just so I know whether I am reading the right opinions, here is a ranking of the most influential weblogs (most linked) at the moment. 1:28:28 PM    comment []

Anti-Americanism Explored and Explained A review of a book by a French writer and student of the subject, on a topic that has long interested me:  why does there appear to be an ingrained anti-American instinct in Europe?  It is particularly strong in Greece, as I have earlier stated, but even before the election of George W Bush and the Iraq war which caused a fresh eruption, and undid all the good work done by President Clinton, there seemed to be an instinctive anti-American instinct at work in Europe. Jean-Francois Revel is a distinguished French writer who has, for nearly all his working life, chosen the rockiest path any intellectual can choose: the path of true non-conformity (as distinct from the ersatz, self-described non-conformists one finds on any university campus in the Western world). Specifically, Revel has chosen to confront directly - not only in this volume, but in several earlier books that touched on the issue - the entrenched anti-Americanism of an entire generation of European intellectuals, particularly French ones. Like his countryman Emile Zola (whose explosive article "J'accuse" attacked French society's handling of the Alfred Dreyfus affair), he has dared to defend an unpopular scapegoat and, in so doing, has probably done more to earn the gratitude of Americans than any Frenchman since General Lafayette, who came to the aid of the American revolutionary cause. Another review in Foreign Affairs magazine.  An excerpt is here.  And here is a 2002 article from The Observer, warning the Left against anti-Americanism, and finally Paul Johnson in Forbes Magazine. All of this recent and topical interest sparked by an opinion piece by a German writer, Peter Schneider in the IHT a couple of days ago, "Separated By Civilization".  Excerpt: These growing divisions - over war, peace, religion, sex, life and death - amount to a philosophical dispute about the common origins of European and American civilization. Both children of the Enlightenment, the United States and Europe clearly differ about the nature of this inheritance and about who is its better custodian. 1:19:10 PM    comment []

Howzat? Awful, actually. Media: Musician Katherine Shave on what it's like to be caught up in a sleazy tabloid 'exposé'. [Guardian Unlimited] The Sunday Mirror's dirty tabloid methods exposed.  Very unpleasant reading, and unpleasant effects on the victim's professional and personal life.  Another example: last weekend's Mail on Sunday has a large teaser on the front page with a picture of "Posh 'n Becks" and the headline "Beckham:  I'm getting drunk and pulling a different girl every night".  When you open the paper to the "full amazing story" on page 3, one finds that this story relates to his activities at the age of 16 in the early 1990's.  I guess they had to do something like that when one of their competitors was breaking a current Beckham scandal. 11:46:05 AM    comment []