Google and Life

Google and Life magazine combined to post thousands of images online for free. These images span the entire history of Life magazine, and chart the growth of America through the last couple hundred years. I scanned through the image archives and found a few interesting tidbits for the geekier among us. Take, for example, this IBM chip. The photo is from 1967. Amazing what technology could produce back then. Here's a link to what turns up the most geeky images in the archives.

Programming is Creative

Last Friday, I had the privilege of getting a tour of Pixar Studios, the company behind the movies Toy Story, Wall-E, and Cars. The campus is based in Emeryville, California, near Oakland where I live. It's a secluded little patch of green amidst a sea of overpasses, homeless people and a Home Depot.

The company grounds are resplendent with roses, soccer fields, a pool and all manner of fun things to keep bodies and minds fresh. It's a refreshing workplace that made me wonder if this is what Xerox Parc had been like back in the day.

At Pixar, the whimsical and the fun are encouraged. The kid in every employ is coaxed out through constant artistic renderings, radical cubicle modifcations and a stimulating afterwork schedule of things to do.

Of course, this is also the sort of workplace where people spend days at a time, working their fingers to the bone to get movies done in time for their theatrical release dates. It's also a company that produces its own rendering and deisgn software, and has a history of selling boxed products, such as Renderman and Typestyler. I actually have a boxed copy of Typestyler.

With all of these different folks smooshed together in this one magical place, it became clear to me that the writers, artists, actors, directors and software developers here all had something in common: they were all creative talents. Call them no-collar workers.

I'm nnot exactly sure how they've done it, but Pixar has fostered an environment where fun and hard work are both acceptable. In fact, they're both mandated. It's more like a college than a company.

Perhaps pulling out the beanbag chairs and setting up the ping-pong table isn't enough. You must also get your team into these acts of funness. Mandatory ping-pong tournaments, or Friday beer-bashes might be on order. The Pixar folks seem to enjoy these sorts of work-related activities. So much so that there are often after-hours parties in work areas. Internal social interaction is good for creative workers. Maybe it's not for the lawyers or accountants, but when a team is trying to build something massive together, it can only help to get everyone into the same psychic groove.

Oh, and it also helps to have good lunches made on campus every day. Tastey!

JavaFX Will be Here Soon

Sun's answer to Flex and Silverlight will arrive in the first week of December. JavaFX, formerly JavaFX Script, is set to hit version 1.0 shortly after Thanksgiving, said a spokesperson with the company. Things at Sun are a bit chaotic right now, and the release may be delayed by as much as a week if things don't come together properly. This, evidently, has less to do with the technology than it has to do with the major changes in management throughout the company. Either way, the release itself will take the form of a new installer for Java.

That new installer isn't too different from the old one: it's the basic JavaSE desktop runtime with the JavaFX libraries included. Users who already have Java installed should be able to automatically pull those packages down upon the reception of a JavaFX application embedded in either a desktop or Web app.

NetBeans is the editor of choice for dealing with JavaFX, and this morning's release of version 6.5 quietly included all of the JavaFX tooling. No patch needed.

The big selling point for Sun, right now, is that JavaFX can run browser applications and desktop applications on the same runtime. Adobe's current schizoid approach with AIR, Flex and Flash could turn out to be an Achilles heel, if you believe Sun's pitch.

The benefit to developers is less understood at the moment, because, as usual with Sun, this type of thing is entirely new. The application benefits will have to be discovered elsewhere. For now, Sun shows off an in-browser video player, and shows that it can be quickly moved out of the browser and onto the desktop.

Perhaps video is the neatest new addition to the platform, here. Java has never had an embedded video codec, and here, in JavaFX, is such a beast. It's not even proprietary: they're licensing a standard codec.

Mac users will have to wait a little bit, as the Java code there is Apple's. Sun expects Apple to add JavaFX promptly upon release, possibly even the same day.

JavaFX should be an interesting new avenue for Sun. Eventually, the company plans to offer this language on mobile platforms, and right now, the target date for that capability is next summer. The idea is to have one language to rule them all.

Wasn't that what Java was supposed to be?

Today's Vax

Today's Vax is from the Computer History Museum. It's an 11/750, which makes me think it's really just a PDP-11 with a different name tag. Again, I could be wrong. I only really write about these things because the Vax exemplifies the embodiment of Big Iron. I'm too young to have used much VMS.
Keep it tuned here for something truly horrible tomorrow; Vax Jousting.

Rich Green Moves to Greener Pastures

Rich Green shouldn't have much trouble getting another job. That's a good thing because Rich was recently let go from Sun, where he headed up the entire software division. Solaris. Java. NetBeans. Glassfish. Everything.

It's definitely hard to think of a more punishing, difficult job than making sense out of Sun's software portfolio. In a company where the guiding line, recently, is to open source everything, Sun still has a remarkable amount of closed source software that it supports and sells. That list has gotten shorter under Rich's reign, but it's by no means gotten any better.

Sun has always been known for writing very competent, technically advanced software that is years ahead of the curve. Unfortunately, it's also known for producing software that moves too slowly to keep up with the accepted curve of excellence. Such is the case with Solaris. Solaris users are ravenous, and can't understand how people get work done in other Unix environments. And yet, newcomers mostly stare at Solaris and ask "so, why is this better than Linux?"

It's like standing in a field of hedgerows, then picking the one quartered off field with the nicest grass, and an excellent caretaker, but only 10 feet square of space on each side.

In truth, the only way I see for Sun to move forward, away from the smoking heap of rubble that is its software portfolio, is to move closer to the consumer side. That means paying more attention to usability, simplicity, and penetration. Not exactly Sun's strong points. The Solaris faithful, of late, have had the throne of Murdock to worship at, and that's a good thing.

But is it too late for all this stuff? Maybe, maybe not. There are many other options than my consumer/power-user direction, though Sun's forthcoming release of JavaFX 1.0 could help there.

Another option is bringing the entire company together to confront the storage/database market. Sun's already offering solid-state drive arrays running ZFS, meaning RAID is no longer needed. A major advancement that's not offered anywhere else. If I were Mr. Schwartz, I'd be concentrating all firepower on that particular super Star Destroyer. Too bad EMC would be waiting at the door to kick Sun's shins and say "welcome!"

Anyway, here's hoping Rich Green finds a good company to work with. I think he'll do a great job somewhere that's a lot smaller and less troubled than Sun. It can't be easy to work at a company that seems to put all its effort into losing money.

Daily Vaxination

Today's Vax is an 11/780, a wall-length cabinet affair that lives at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It's always fun to see the big machines they wheel in there, quietly sitting, unplugged and unfunctioning, for the peoples of the world to stare at them and marvel at how far we've come. Elsewhere in the museum, they have a nifty set of Cray super computers, along with the advanced processors they created for those gargantuan machines.

The Vax of the Day

Today's daily Vax is of the Micro Vax variety, and the first such machine we've featured here. It's a 3, I believe, though I am probably terribly wrong about that enumeration. I do remember that starting this machine up made a sound like a jet engine spinning up. There were tons of fans in this thing, and lots of air channels and intakes. If you put your hand under the front of the thing, you could feel the sucking of the air being pulled in.

Now Loading Your Daily Vax

Today's Vax really is a 6000 series. An old beast of a machine with white metal paneling, wheels at the bottom, and a tape drive up top. This is the kind of Vax you could really make a refrigerator out of. Or a battering ram. The machine you see here is now deceased, sent off to a recycling center to be crushed up and salvaged for its base materials. Back when copper was worth lots of money, this was the right thing to do. Today, however, it would probably be better just to use it as some sort of building foundation.

Your Daily VAXination

Today's Vax comes from the Computer History Museum. Someone with better eyes than mine will have to properly identify this monstrosity. It looks to me to be a 6000 series Vax, with all the trimmings of a data cabinet and an interface cabinet as well, but these things are so old, it's hard to tell, really, from this angle. Some one out there in the world, please correct my enumeration error, if in-fact I have mis-identified this Vax.

The Mother of All Mother of All Demo Celebrations

Our illustrious leader forwarded me the info on this event. It's the 40th anniversary of the Mother of all Demos. The event is in Stanford's memorial auditorium on December 9. We'll sooooo be there.

It's about as geeky an anniversary as one could possibly hope to have. In 1968, Douglas Engelbart showcased the research work that had taken place in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute. That meant showing off the world's first modern computing environment. It's where the world first saw the mouse, windowed work spaces, networked computing, and even hypertext. There will never be a more influential computing demonstration.

Historically, Xerox PARC gets the credit for inventing a lot of this stuff. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Xerox PARC perfected the ideas first shown here. Of course, the lines between the two organizations became extremely blurry as former ARC folk became PARC folk during the 70's. Note the 5-button keyboard-pad Engelbart uses in the demo. Standard issue with an Alto.


On a personal note, Bill English will be on hand to speak about the demo. I met Bill many years ago at the ACCRC, where he'd dropped in to recycle some computers. After we spoke for a half hour or so, and I gave him a tour of the facilities, he hinted that he'd been something of a technology visionary himself, back in the day.

I asked what he'd done in his youth. He told me he had built the first mouse. Forget Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Without Bill English and the guys at Stanford ARC, we'd all be using light pens. Ick.

Enough rambling! What good is a demo without a video. Watch the Engelbart demo below. And remember, this was all done in 1968!

Your Daily Dose of Vax

As I write this today, I am sitting in the emergency room with a friend who is horribly ill with some food-borne illness. It's not a bad place to write from: relatively quiet, cool, ample power for my laptop. There is no wireless network, but I think there's one nearby I can walk to.
Now that I have been exposed to this nasty infection, I felt I needed to apply some severe VAXinations. Thus, today, we have our daily dose of vitamin V in the form of a Vax Station 3800. this poor machine is long gone, recycled and ground up into base elements to satisfy the needs of rabid commodity speculation. The DEC Stations looked just like this machine, and all of them had little plastic skirts on the bottom hiding some non-rotating wheels. Great little computers for surfing. That's surfing as in “Standing on top of it and riding it while someone pushes,” not surfing as in “can run a Web browser.”

Daily Vax Dosage

Doctors recommend that aging computer geeks gets their daily allotment of vitamin V. Or is that vitamin DEC? Either way, here is your daily dose of Vax: an 8600.
It sure was a beast, wasn't it? This particular beast is out of the private collection of Sellam at Vintage dot org. He runs the Vintage Computer Festival as well, but this year the event had to be skipped due to economic woes. Next year, however, there should be a great VCF, for all that have gone longing for Amiga, Atari and Amstrad enthusiasm.