> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Behalf Of Han Tacoma
... > > There's hardly a machine or acronym there that isn't familiar > to me... but > I > > should note that I was 9 years old in 1965. > > How'd you get to know all those numbers and acronyms? I think my life was programmed for computers. When I was 10 or 11, I was part of a project by some Carnegie-Mellon graduate students doing a thesis on the question of whether or not kids could learn to program computers. It's sort of strange to think that was once a mystery. Afterwards, I continued to hang out at CMU's math department to learn computer stuff -- my best friend's mother was the department secretary. When I was a freshman in high school, we moved to Connecticut for a year and I ended up at one of the only high schools to have a computer -- a Wang minicomputer. I taught the teachers how to use it. Back in Pittsburgh, I joined a brand-new Explorer post sponsored by the Westinghouse Telecomputer Center, which was a couple of blocks from our house. That's where Westinghouse kept all of their computers -- all seven of them. When I got to college, I wanted to write for the student newspaper, but they found out I knew computers, so they persuaded me to write code instead of articles, a mailing list application for their new PDP-8 (ah, TOPS and RSTS!) that was replacing their IBM 360. And on it went... The friend with whom I took that first computer class soon moved to L.A. and we lost touch. But a few years ago, I discovered that he was living about 10 blocks away from me. He'd gone to CMU and then became one of the very early Sun employees, and like me, was an early member of the W3C's advisory board. > > Aspect-oriented programming seems to be the latest... > > I think you're talking about an addition to Smalltalk, Apostle, AspectJ? > Wasn't the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) -- aka Xerox doing some > of the work? > I don't have any URL's handy but I guess a Google whould show some. PARC seems to be the thought leader. I bumped into it via AspectJ (http://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/), an IBM Java effort in that direction. I'm still absorbing the idea. More at http://aosd.net/ > I wonder how many people know that some banks still run their ATM's with > the CICS/COBOL combo in the mainframe today? I think many people realized that as Y2K approached. Especially the institutions that had to go find people who could fix their code! Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
