Posts

Showing posts from May 12, 2011

Editing a letter to Dad about what it is I do..

Image
The three laws of Arthur C. Clarke: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The third law applies best to how most people perceive what I do for a living. I will try to dispel magic in lieu of science, and I will try to do so semi-chronologically. In the early 1980s I had been given a number of Apple computers which were either on loan from or purloined from the law offices of my father; some he bought, outright, seeing my interest in computers. Nevertheless my very first command-line interpreter (CLI) was the built-in Apple BASIC interpreter that all Apples came with, on 5.25” floppy disks. A typical program might look something like thi