[SIGCIS-Members] Op-Ed on Obamacare

[Ceruzzi, Paul]

Thanks to everyone for their kind words about the op-ed piece. Some of you mentioned that a word "problems" was somehow dropped from the quote form the 1968 NATO conference report. Sorry. 

Too bad the Times & Washington Post cannot be persuaded to think again about their headlines and op-ed pieces on Obamacare (I sent it to the Post but they turned it down). Maybe one of us could send a note to the Times? If not to the op-ed page, then to John Markoff or Steve Lohr? I really like Andrew's last note. 

I did not have the space to mention it, but the person NASA sent to Draper Labs to look at the Apollo software was John Norton. He later worked on a TRW contract, programming a complex networking of PDP-10 computers for the Bonneville Power Administration. Among the young programmers that he mentored was Bill Gates, who I think was still in high school at the time. Gates later cited Norton as a big influence on his career. At Draper Labs, John's comments on the Apollo code were known as "Nortran." I remember him showing me a voluminous print-out of such comments, and he made sure that I understood that "we did all this on an electric typewriter, there were no word processors back then!"  To everyone's credit, the MIT programmers came around & produced code that fit in to the AGC, and that had very few "anomalies." 

Paul E. Ceruzzi