Thomas E Kurtz, co-creator of the BASIC programming language, died November 12th at 96:
Dr. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny, then the chairman of Dartmouth’s math department, believed that students would come to depend on computers and benefit from understanding how to use them.
“We had the crazy idea that our students, our undergraduate students, who are not going to be technically employed later on — social sciences and humanities students — should learn how to use the computer,” Dr. Kurtz said in an interview for Dartmouth in 2014. “Completely nutty idea.”
At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall on the Dartmouth campus, the time-sharing system and BASIC were put to a test. A professor and a student programmer typed a simple command — “RUN” — into neighboring Teletype terminals and watched as both received the same answer simultaneously. It worked.
I don't have the earliest programs I wrote because nothing survives from the TRS-80 era, when we saved everything to cassette tape (!), nor from the Apple ][+ era because I never converted those files to PC format. But here is a little thing I wrote in October 1987 in the BASICA (Advanced BASIC) language that shipped with MS DOS 3:
5 DEFDBL A-Z
6 PRINT
7 PRINT
10 INPUT "Number to test = ",N#
15 U$="##########"
16 IF N#<10000000# THEN U$="#######"
17 IF N#<1000000! THEN U$="######"
18 IF N#<100000! THEN U$="#####"
19 IF N#<10000 THEN U$="####"
20 N#=INT(N#)
30 TEST#=1
33 WHILE TEST#<=SQR(N#)
36 TEST#=TEST#+1
40 IF N#/TEST# = INT (N#/TEST#) THEN GOSUB 100
50 WEND
55 PRINT
60 PRINT "I found";FACTORS;"factor(s)."
70 IF FACTORS=0 THEN PRINT "The number"N"is prime."
80 PRINT
81 INPUT "Test another (y/n)";A$
82 IF INSTR(A$,"Y") OR INSTR(A$,"y") THEN RUN
90 END
100 FACTORS=FACTORS+1
120 PRINT USING U$;TEST#;
130 PRINT " * ";
140 PRINT USING U$;N#/TEST#
150 RETURN
If you can find a DOS emulator with BASICA, knock yourself out.
Winnemac Park, 3:39 pm:
Spiteful Brewing Tap Room, 7:08 pm:
Yesterday I posted a short video from Robert Wright reminding everyone that the OAFPOTUS and his hangers-on thrive on negative energy. The moral: don't waste your own energy on his bullshit.
For example, I haven't agonized at all about his kakistocratic nominations for top cabinet posts, for the simple reason that I think they're distractions from the Republican Party's principal goals of increasing the wealth of billionaires and stealing as much as they can rake in from the American People. I mean, the only person in Congress more hated than Ted Cruz is Matt Gaetz; I have little doubt that the Senate will bounce his ass to a bottom-feeding lobby firm.
But nominating Gaetz and having him fail miserably doesn't bother the OAFPOTUS at all. Because when Gaetz fails to get confirmed, the OAFPOTUS will nominate someone even worse. He did this sort of thing more than once during his first term.
The United States has just re-elected Zaphod Beeblebrox to the presidency. We should really care more about the six guys with the black ships, and not worry about the idiot with two heads and three arms. (I'm just waiting for some Fox News guest to finally declare, "Donald's just zis guy, you know?")
Again: let's don't let the flim-flam distract us. Oppose the policies, not the pronouncements. We'll have enough to do for the next few years without wasting our breath on every trolling utterance that comes from the Administration.
I've got a couple of minutes before I descend into the depths of a very old codebase that has had dozens of engineers mucking about in it. Time enough to read through these:
Finally, everyone take six minutes and listen Robert Wright as he reminds us not to get distracted by the OAFPOTUS's trolling:
The Brews & Choos Project had a net shift of zero in the last two weeks. I am pretty bummed about the loss, but intrigued by the gain.
The loss: Long-time Evanston microbrewery Temperance closed up shop on October 27th. I am sad:
Evanston didn’t have a brewery before Temperance Beer Co. arrived at the end of 2013. The suburb’s first brewery was a historic moment, and the taproom quickly became one of the city’s finest with hits like Might Meets Right and Gatecrasher IPA. Temperance represented the rising popularity of the craft beer movement when home brewers crowded taprooms and stood in long lines for the latest release.
But times have changed. On Tuesday afternoon, Temperance founder Josh Gilbert announced the brewery would close on Sunday, October 27. All brewery tours had been canceled with refunds on their way. In a newsletter blast and Instagram post, Gilbert calls the craft beer world “barely recognizable” compared to a decade ago. “It’s difficult to even imagine that kind of excitement for a new brewery launch these days,” he writes.
The gain: Suncatcher Brewing opened by the Milwaukee District Western Avenue station yesterday. I am glad:
After a two-year building renovation, finalizing city licensing and hiring staff, Suncatcher Brewing is now open at 2849 W. Chicago Ave., making it Humboldt Park’s only brewery and taproom after Ørkenoy closed earlier this year.
On the Suncatcher menu are six draft beers with 4-to-7 percent alcohol: a stout, a brown and blonde ale, an IPA, a Michigan pale ale, a fall bier — each matched with a song to complement their pairing. At least three other beers are coming soon.
In addition to focusing on lower alcohol content, the Suncatcher beers are also made with hops, barley and malts grown a few hours away in Michigan and Indiana.
“We’re trying to highlight local materials while keeping the alcohol level low,” Matt Gallagher said.
The new brewery is on the map. I'm already planning a Brews & Choos dip into Pilsen once the choral calendar lightens up in December. Suncatcher would fit in with a visit to Fulton Market (Guinness, Cruz Blanca) and the new Goose Island location at the Salt Shed.
Chicago-based humor magazine The Onion has won the bankruptcy auction to acquire Alex Jones's InfoWars Media:
The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.
The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.
While the alliance between Everytown and The Onion may seem like an odd fit, the two organizations share an interest in curbing gun violence, said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown. Mr. Feinblatt said that mission was underscored with depressing regularity in the aftermath of mass shootings, when The Onion goes viral with its oft-shared headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The Onion, of course, spun the purchase in its own way:
Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.
No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.
As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.
Alex Jones, according to my social media feed, vowed to keep broadcasting until a court ordered him to stop.
Well played, Onion. Well played.
I had a completely different post in my head this afternoon, but the OAFPOTUS just nominated Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to run the Justice Department and I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.
I expect he'll nominate high-school dropout Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to run the Education Department next.
These kinds of moves explain why I haven't worried so much about fascism as a government that couldn't find sand at a beach. As the OAFPOTUS has no competence himself, it follows that he would neither recognize nor care about competence in others. The next four years will suck, all right, but not in the ways that some of my more hysterical friends fear they will.
I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write.
Meanwhile:
Finally, the South Shore Line lost 40% of its rail cars to wheel damage over the past two weeks, and suffered 30-60 minute delays as a result, because of leaves on the tracks.
The domain name wx-now.com went live on 11 November 1999, 25 years ago today. The earliest known Wayback Machine capture of the old Active Server Pages site was in September 2000; this screen shot from January 2001 looks a bit closer to what it looked like when it went live:
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In 2008, Katie Zoellner gave it a facelift that lasted pretty much until March 2022, when I completely overhauled the app, writing an entirely new UI and refactoring about 50% of the internal code.
I still have all the old source code. It's trippy to look at how I wrote 25 years ago. Even trippier that I've had an application running in the wild continuously for that long.
Welcome to an extra stop on the Brews and Choos project.
Brewery: Off the Rails Brewing, 111 S. Murphy Ave., Sunnyvale, Calif.
Train line: Caltrain, Sunnyvale
Time from SF Terminal: 62 minutes
Time from Chicago: about 4½ hours by air
Distance from station: 300 m
Sunnyvale, Calif., has blocked off the north end of Murphy Ave. to traffic, turning the entire block into a pedestrian zone lined with restaurants and a good-enough-for-the-suburbs brewery where you can have good-enough beers. Despite the amazing weather when I visited on Friday—it's hard to beat 23°C and sunny in November—I just couldn't get excited about the place.
I had a flight of 4 120-mL pours that left me feeling "eh." The Kölsch (5%) had a decent, malty flavor, a little sweet for my palate, with banana and apple notes. The Lazy Hazy IPA (7.2%) did not taste like a 7% beer, and also didn't taste like it had a lot of hops, but the banana, apricot, and honey notes were pleasant enough, though again too sweet for me. The YOLO Fruity IPA (6.2%) was actually less fruity than the hazy, though it had a good balance and was drinkable. Again, though, not a memorable beer. But the Otis Imperial Stout (9.2%) was my favorite of the four, with just enough bitterness to match the coffee and chocolate flavors.
Bottom line: Off the Rails has a convenient location right by the Caltrain station in a part of Silicon Valley that doesn't have a lot of Brews & Choos-eligible breweries. So, sure, why not? But I wouldn't make a special trip.
The Thai place next door, though, smelled amazing.
Beer garden? Street pedestrian zone and smaller back patio
Dogs OK? Outside only
Televisions? Unavoidable inside
Serves food? Full menu
Would hang out with a book? Maybe
Would hang out with friends? Maybe
Would go back? Maybe