Computer History Museum: Maurice Wilkes and struggles at DEC

July 18, 2011 Posted by Karl Beecher under Off-topic
No Comments

If you’re not familiar with the Computer History Museum, they have a YouTube channel that is a treasure trove of interviews, presentations, documentaries (both contemporary and historical) and many other videos for any computing enthusiast.

One of their latest videos is a tribute to Maurice Wilkes (who died recently) in the form of an interview with one of his colleagues, David Hartley. There are excerpts from Wilkes’s memoirs and personal recollections of Hartley. Some things talked about include:

  • Wilkes’s friendship and personal tension with his contemporary Alan Turing.
  • The complete freedom granted Wilkes by his university to pursue whatever he wanted, which he used to build the revolutionary EDSAC. Oh, for that level of academic freedom today!
  • Being the (co-)discoverer of debugging.
  • Footage of Wilkes’s final ever presentation.

I also can’t resist pointing you to this gem called DEC’s PC Challenge. It’s a great corporate video from 1982 following people at DEC as they tried to enter the PC market. At this time, DEC ruled the minicomputer sector, but failed to make much of a dent in personal computers in the 80s. This video, stocked full of –ahem– characters, might explain why.


Great new features in Saros

July 4, 2011 Saros

Another release of Saros was made last Friday (version 11.7.1). We’re pretty pleased with the new features, added as a direct result of user feedback and requests. The first is a partial sharing feature. When sharing a project, you now have the option to choose a subset of files instead of the sending the whole… read more

The Mythical Man-Month Keeps on Giving

June 20, 2011 General software engineering

I’ve recently been re-reading Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month for something like the fourth or fifth time. It’s one of those textbooks that’s so well-written and a joy to read it becomes a work of literature. It’s also a book that keeps on giving. Every time I read it I seem to get something new… read more

Latest Saros release

May 25, 2011 Saros

After the landmark release of Saros several weeks ago, we have spent a lot of time fixing and improving those new parts of our software based on user feedback. Saros 11.5.6 should now have numerous bumps smoothed out and provide a more slick user experience. Feature-wise, we’ve taken advantage of Eclipse’s own security technology (part… read more

Saros @ ICSE (Again!)

May 20, 2011 Research, Saros

Saros and the Freie Universität Berlin will once again be at the premier venue for software engineering research this year. ICSE 2011 takes place in Hawaii. The organisers are now recognising plug-in development as a legitimate and distinct area of concern in software engineering. If you’re lucky enough to be there yourself, go along to… read more

Don’t take my word for it, ask William Shatner

May 11, 2011 Posted by Karl Beecher under Uncategorized
No Comments

I’d love to be able to say that my parents bought me a Commodore Vic-20 (my first computer) on Bill Shatner’s recommendation.

More likely, it was because the guy at the market was flogging them dirt cheap. And so began my obsession…

Also, the Vic was marketed under a different name here in Germany (it was called the VC-20). Whatever was wrong with “Vic” I wonder…

“Why can’t it work like a TV?”

April 13, 2011 Posted by Karl Beecher under General software engineering
No Comments

The research of Andrew Tanenbaum (who, like me, is based in a “Free” university, but his is “Vrije” where mine is “Freie”) has long involved computer operating systems, and he reserves many disparaging opinions about their general state. He regards a number of common OS concepts as obsolete, be they file systems largely unchanged since the 1960s or big, monolithic kernels that stretch to millions of lines of code. (He famously declared the Linux kernel to be obsolete while still in its infancy).

Tanenbaum’s group has taken these problems and developed Minix 3 as an embodiment of many of their solutions. In his articles and talks, he often calls upon some hypothetical grandma as an argument against the woeful state of software quality. This mouse-wielding octogenarian (I mean the grandma, not Tanenbaum) laments “why doesn’t it work like a TV?”, meaning why can’t you just switch on a computer and have it work for the next ten years without crashing?

All respect to Tanenbaum and his efforts at producing fault-tolerant, super-reliable software systems. Minix 3 has many interesting and innovative ideas within it and has been demonstrated as an impressive proof-of-concept. Hopefully, this will help towards steering our industry towards levels of reliability common to just about every other major industry and so salvage its reputation among the public.

However, I fear the days of his TV analogy are numbered. You see, the missus and I recently treated ourselves to a new TV. How surprised I was after setting it up to find that it is powered by the Linux kernel and an assortment of GNU software. But, as we already know: where there is software, there are crashes. If we are now entering the days where TVs are essentially running full operating systems, we may no longer be warranted as citing a TV as technology that “just works”. We’ve already suffered a Blu-Ray player that has been turned into useless brick after it demanded software updates and we foolishly obliged in providing them.

Presenting the New Saros Interface

April 5, 2011 Posted by Karl Beecher under Saros
No Comments

The latest version of Saros (11.3.25) is one of the most exciting and important releases in its recent history. Why? The whole interface has been overhauled and redesigned to provide a much more usable layout. Three of Saros’s views (Session, Roster and Chat) have been merged into a single view from which you can manage your collaborations. Click on the screenshot below to see an example.

Eclipse during a Saros session

As a reminder, Saros still has all of the usual awareness information, including:

  1. Marked files, which users with write-access have open (yellow) or visible (green).
  2. Current text selected by another user.
  3. Text changed by another user (by default, the last twenty edits are marked).
  4. Current view scope of other users (i.e. what portion of a file can they see).

But the changes are concentrated in the Saros view, your main control panel for shared project collaborations.

As you can see, the view is divided into two main areas. The left pane contains the user information: your current username, who is in your current session, and a list of all the buddies you have. On the right is the on-line chat, where you can send messages to everyone in your current session. For existing users of Saros, we have tidied away many of the buttons and options into context menus, accessible when you right-click on a user.

This redesign is accompanied by a batch of other visual overhauls, including the setup and user account wizards. Here’s a sample of configuration wizard; much more informative and friendly, to ensure newbies can keep track of what’s going on.

Saros configuration wizard sample

Along with a whole raft of fixes and UI improvements, this makes the latest release of Saros a must have!

Next Page »