[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

[Murray Turoff]

Dear Chuck, your message made me think of another item some of you might
enjoy.
I was a  phd student at Brandeis doing a huge model of a planetary nebula
which took three hours on the "big" ibm machine at MIT (1964)   I could
only get access once a week at midnight on friday or saturday night.   But
also becoming the graduate student at Brandeis doing programs for the
physics professors at Brandeis, i was at mit quite a bit for seminars and
such.  One amusing story that set a future tradition in softwareD
development was when the big IBM batch multiprogramming operational system
was when it developed a bug where if someone left off the special end card
that had to be added to your fortran deck, it would wipe the memory of the
system and cause a need for a restart.  It was report as a standard bug to
IBM but a month later it happened again and someone at mit phone ibm and
complained about the bug again and asked why didn't they fix it.  The chap
at ibm said to go look at a recent page in the current volume of fixes of
which there were many.   They did and found:  "As an added advantage if you
wish to clear memory in the computer leave off the end card from Fortran
program."

This became common practice in a lot of complicated software systems where
bugs were redefined as features!






On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Chuck House <housec1839 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Re your last 'throw-away' line, Murray, my sentiments exactly.
>
> Jennifer Light gave a terrific talk at last fall's SIGCIS meeting,
> describing 'our world' as about 400 professional computer historians,
> arrayed in five non-intersecting (somewhat disdainful) circles whilst all
> about us the practitioners are dying and taking their wonderful unrecorded
> stories with them.
>
> When you're in the fray, say writing GE 225 BASIC, and being fired, you're
> not focused on recording the story.  And you likely don't view it as having
> any historical significance.
> The problem later on is "If not you, who?  And if not now, when?"
>
> Practitioners, at the least, have to become more aware, more motivated,
> and more involved in 'our collective history' even if it is only their
> small spot in the sun.
> Not easy to imagine
>
> Best, Chuck
>
> From: Members <members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org> on behalf of Murray
> Turoff <murray.turoff at gmail.com>
> Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 6:30 PM
> To: "Ceruzzi, Paul" <CeruzziP at si.edu>
> Cc: "members at sigcis.org" <members at sigcis.org>
> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?
>
> Too many of these early events are unrecorded.
>
>
>
>


-- 





*please send messages to murray.turoff at gmail.com <murray.turoff at gmail.com>
do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu> addressDistinguished Professor
EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff
<http://is.njit.edu/turoff>*
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