What Is the Oldest Computer Program Still in Use?

MIT: Technology Review: What Is the Oldest Computer Program Still in Use?

In 1958, the United States Department of Defense launched a computerized contract-management system that it dubbed Mechanization of Contract Administration Services, or MOCAS (pronounced “MOH-cass”). The system was designed to use the latest in computation and output technology to track contracts in progress and payments to vendors.

Fifty-seven years later, it’s still going.

by Glenn Fleishman

Utterly mind-blowing. But aged programs like these present a challenge as fewer and fewer coders learn these older languages. The solution seems simple: modernize them. Unfortunately, that costs time and money, and most government bodies don’t have room in their budgets for such efforts.

Case in point: a government agency I support requires all of their trainings be compatible with Internet Explorer 11 because one of their primary internal systems relies on ActiveX controls only found in IE. It’s created issues, but my team has to keep working around this requirement for the foreseeable future.

MOCAS faces the same dilemma:

There have been efforts in the past to build a full replacement for MOCAS, and they’ve sputtered due to cost, complexity, and transition planning. Because the system handles so much that’s in progress and critical to the DoD, any new system has to overlap and perfectly hand off everything underway.

Victor Hugo On Notre Dame

Vox pulled this passage from book three, chapter one of Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) to illustrate the importance of all that the cathedral of Notre Dame represents.

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, ~pendent opera interrupta~; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction,—following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many large volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.

…

However, all these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not attacked by it. There is always the same internal woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts. Whatever may be the carved and embroidered envelope of a cathedral, one always finds beneath it—in the state of a germ, and of a rudiment at the least—the Roman basilica. It is eternally developed upon the soil according to the same law. There are, invariably, two naves, which intersect in a cross, and whose upper portion, rounded into an apse, forms the choir; there are always the side aisles, for interior processions, for chapels,—a sort of lateral walks or promenades where the principal nave discharges itself through the spaces between the pillars. That settled, the number of chapels, doors, bell towers, and pinnacles are modified to infinity, according to the fancy of the century, the people, and art. The service of religion once assured and provided for, architecture does what she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose windows, arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-reliefs,—she combines all these imaginings according to the arrangement which best suits her. Hence, the prodigious exterior variety of these edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity. The trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.

Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, Book 3, Chapter 1

To Victor Hugo, Notre Dame was a monument to human accomplishment. All the more important, it was a call to rebuild and restore the great cathedral fallen to disrepair and vandalism. It was rescued once from the brink of destruction. I have faith it can resurrect from these ashes once more.

via Vox.com

Much of a Universe

NPR: Stephen Hawking, Who Awed Both Scientists And The Public, Dies

There aren’t very many scientists who achieved rock star status. Stephen Hawking, who has died at the age of 76, family members told British media early Wednesday, was definitely a contender.

“He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years,” the family statement said, according to The Guardian. “His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world. He once said, ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him for ever.”

One of the things that always impressed me about Hawking was his future. Despite any physical limitations he faced, despite skepticism for his ideas from some corners of the public, and even occasionally ending up in political crosshairs, Hawking never let bitterness or cynicism take over. He was funny, likable, and brilliant.

Choosing Between Android and iOS

Gizmodo: Why Choosing Between Android and iOS Still Matters

Gizmodo has a nice overview of most of the basic difference between Android and iOS devices that still matter. It’s a good read if, like me, you’re finding yourself torn between the benefits and drawbacks of each platform.

Android and iOS might have borrowed enough features from each other over the years to make the superficial differences not so great any more (iOS even has widgets these days), but dig a little deeper and you’ve got three main ways that Apple’s mobile platform differs from Google’s. This is what you need to know about them, and why your pick of smartphone OS still matters.

One of the big differences in choosing a mobile device platform rather than a desktop or laptop system is that the mobile choice is a far smaller commitment. With the ability to upgrade your device after a couple years, it’s not as daunting a prospect to jump from iOS to Android (or vice versa) as it is Mac to Windows.

Designing Windows 95

Socket 3: Designing the Windows 95 Interface

This link contains a recovered paper that Microsoft UI Researcher Kent Sullivan authored regarding the development of Windows 95’s now famous interface. Two notes about this paper:

• It’s fascinating to see the evolution of elements — like the Start Menu and the Taskbar — many people have taken for decades.
• Stick around for the comments after the article. The original author joins in and responds to a few questions.

Although we abandoned the idea of a separate shell for beginners, we salvaged its most useful features: single-click access, high visibility, and menu-based interaction. We mocked up a number of representations in Visual Basic and tested them with users of all experience levels, not just beginners, because we knew that the design solution would need to work well for users of varying experience levels. Figure 5 shows the final Start Menu, with the Programs sub-menu open. The final Start Menu integrated functions other than starting programs, to give users a single-button home base in the UI.

Apple At Its Best

Stratechery: Apple At Its Best

More importantly, the experience of using an iPhone X, at least in these first few days, has that feeling: consideration, invention, and yes, as the company is fond to note, the integration of hardware and software. Look again at that GIF above: not only does Face ID depend on deep integration between the camera system, system-on-a-chip, and operating system, but the small touch of displaying notifications only when the right person is looking at them depends on one company doing everything. That still matters.

Moreover, it’s worth noting that the iPhone X is launching into a far different market than the original iPhone did: touch is not new, but rather the familiar; changing many button paradigms into gestures certainly presents a steeper learning curve for first-time smartphone users, but for how many users will the iPhone X be their first smartphone?

After a tough week for Apple enthusiasts, I enjoyed finding this in my archives to read. We went to our local Verizon store to upgrade my wife’s phone a couple weeks ago (to an iPhone 8 Plus), and the iPhone X certainly stood out on the shelves. It looks nice in press images, but it looks outstanding in person. Using it feels even better. It recalled the very first time I picked up an iPhone.

Compel the Reader to Read the Next Sentence

The Writing Cooperative: 10 Unusual But Critical Edit Checks Before You Hit Publish

There’s some incredibly good advice here.

Each time you read your piece focus on one checklist item. In your first pass, read your copy out loud. See where you stumble. On your second pass, move to the second checklist item. With each pass, look at your piece through a different lens.

I know that I can really benefit from the edits suggested in this article, and I hope you’ll find them useful as well.

Reflecting on #MeToo

We have to do better. Not simply for the sake of our daughters, our wives, our sisters, or any other woman we may want to define by relationship. No, we have to do better because women are *people*. We have to be willing to listen and break the pattern of victim-shaming that has permeated our culture when it comes to sexual aggression. We have historically put all of the attention — largely negative — on the victim. In doing so, we suggest culpability.

When I was ten years old, an elderly man approached me in a toy store and attempted to molest me (true story). If he had succeeded, no one would have blamed me in any way. But if it had been a girl or woman of any age in my place, we might question what she was wearing, why she was alone, how she had led the guy on, etc. We infer culpability. And we have to stop it.

Victim-shaming only leads to victims being hesitant to speak out because they see it as easier to deal with the consequences of being assaulted or coerced than dealing with the fallout and shame of coming forward. Victim-shaming only makes the problem more pervasive. It makes life easier for sexual predators.

I know that I’ve unintentionally created awkward or uncomfortable situations for women in the past. I never intended offense, but intentions mean nothing. Instead of leaning on intentions, I had to listen without judgment, without ego, and without self-justification. That’s how we learn to do better. It’s not easy to hear you wronged someone, especially when you thought you were helping; but it’s better to hear and change than to continue a harmful pattern.

Guys, let’s be self-aware and self-critical. Be honest. Listen. And always strive to be better. If anything good has come from such public figures being outed for their flagrant mistreatment of others, it’s that it should make us all deeply self-reflective of how we can be better.

Because we can do better. We can be better.

 

Treating You As a Product

Fast Company: Apple Explains How It’s Making Siri Smart Without Endangering User Privacy

Joswiak argues that Siri can be every bit as helpful as other assistants without accumulating a lot of personal user data in the cloud, as companies like Facebook and Google are accustomed to doing. “We’re able to deliver a very personalized experience . . . without treating you as a product that keeps your information and sells it to the highest bidder. That’s just not the way we operate.”

How Siri learns—and how much personal data it needs to be effective—is of utmost importance to Apple: Future updates to Siri will give it an increasingly central role in our interactions with all kinds of Apple products.

Craig Federighi, the company’s senior vice president of software, wrote in an email to Fast Company that “Siri is no longer just a voice assistant . . . Siri on-device intelligence is streamlining everyday interactions with our devices.” Apple teams have “worked to make it a core part of all of our platforms”—iOS, MacOS, tvOS, watchOS, and HomePod.

I don’t know that I’d claim Siri is as good as, say, Google Assistant, but she’s almost as good. And I’m willing to trade that minor gap in helpfulness for more control over my privacy any day.

For Subscribers

Just a quick note that, along with trying to be more active with this site again, I’m going back and restoring a bunch of posts I’ve archived for various reasons.

If you subscribe to this site, that means you’ll be seeing email notifications about things published in the past. Thanks for your patience, and I apologize for unintentionally spamming your inbox.