Dr. Dobb's Journal February 1998
My cousin Corbett bought an IBM workstation, but hated the monitor. He said the CPU was an RT but the CRT was a PU. Meanwhile...I got some more feedback on my confusing of "flack" and "flak" from limericist William Kilner:
I'll bet you are catching some flak
Confusing "shrapnel" with "ack ack"
(Our slang "anti-aircraft," like "flak" from Abwehr-craft) --
We purists are popping our stack!
With all the government agencies and competitors piling on poor Bill Gates, I decided that I would lay off for a while. I just can't kick the guy while he's down, I told myself.
However, a close rereading of Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry -- and Made Himself the Richest Man in America, by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews (Simon & Schuster, 1993), reassured me that the last time Bill Gates was down was during a game of bridge with grandmother "Gam" Maxwell in 1962. And he later kicked her butt good. So, I reconsidered and decided to remind you how Microsoft sometimes chokes on its own dogfood. Until recently, Microsoft's name server and MSNBC web server were UNIX-based, and when Bill forced staff to move to NT servers, I gather, they were plagued by problems.
But you know about NT's flaws, especially if you've read PC Computing's July 1997 list of ten lies about NT (fully explained at http://www.zdnet.com/pccomp/features/fea0797/nt/welcome.html), which they had the good taste not to present in Letterman count-down order:
Okay, I'll give the guy some slack and devote the rest of my column to the arts. I would now like to note some high points in the history of computer music, culled from the Community Memory list: In the spring of 1948, on the eve of its introduction to society, an ebullient BINAC plays "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow" for all the employees of Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. It is a performance marked more by enthusiasm and sentiment than by virtuosity. In 1956, the RAND JOHNNIAC performs renditions of "Happy Birthday" and "The Flight of the Bumble Bee" to a receptive audience. The musical quality is less interesting than the fact that the machine makes use of a "hoot" instruction specifically included for producing music. Its three-letter mnemonic is HUT.
In 1957, the Perseus computer (the last of Ferranti's vacuum-tube machines) solos on "The Flight of the Bumble Bee" and "Arrival of the Queen of Sheba" by diddling its error signal. "The Flight of the Bumble Bee" apparently lends itself particularly well to computer performance. Around 1959, the MIT Lincoln Lab TX-2 computer has some low order bits of its data address field connected through a D/A converter to a speaker, and develops quite a repertoire of tunes. That same year, a programmer has convinced a friend to get married in front of an IBM 704 playing "The Wedding March," but the bride balks, complaining that the machine sounds like a tin whistle.
In 1960, MITRE Corp. engineers encourage an IBM line printer to play Christmas carols, and Bell Labs releases a record of the "Illiac Suite for String Quartet." Neither achieves the popularity that year of "Alley Oop" by the Hollywood Argyles, apparently one of the first songs about object-oriented programming.
"Bicycle Built for Two," the most popular song among musically oriented computers, is performed admirably by an IBM 7094 in 1961, with two voices and accompaniment; reprised adequately by an Altair and a portable radio in 1975; and performed altogether poignantly by an ailing (Y2K bug?) HAL computer in the year 2001. You can hear a 7094 rendering "Bicycle Built for Two" in full voice at http://www.vortex.com/ (follow the "Computer History" link). "Alley Oop" has never been performed by a computer.
--Michael Swaine