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As I read about Sears stores closing I remember the old days when you got a Sears catalog in the mail every few months. It was a big fat book with just about everything you might need: clothes, tools, household appliances,... You could order by phone if you had a Sears card or mail in an order form with a check. And the stuff would get delivered in a few days or you could go pickup the stuff at one of their centers.

So I anticipate the above headline in 75 years from now. The article explains that no-one has enough money to buy much and delivery by boat over flooded streets to houses that sometime vanish between the time the order is placed and when it is delivered is too difficult and costly.

I've sometimes had the experience that when you go to a dinner at a restaurant with a large number of people and you sit at a long table you essentially have no interaction with many of the people at the dinner. I had this idea that if you had a table made of modular components on a track that moved slowly over time you would have each person that wasn't next to you opposite you for a short period.

Then a while ago there was a New Yorker article: A Good Table about a clever design and I looked up the patent 6,375,256 which was exactly that.



There is a Swiss company, Dynamic Meetings, that makes such a product (maybe).

(A long post with information about a very important period of my life and career)

On May 28 and 28th I attended a 2-day conference at MIT to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Project Mac - the second afternoon of which was a Multics Reunion.

Project MAC (Mathematics and Computation, later backronymed to Multiple Access Computer, Machine Aided Cognitions, or Man and Computer) was an interdepartmental project at MIT with lots of ARPA funding. It has transmogrified into MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and sits in the Stata building - a Frank Gehry masterpiece.

One of the key projects in Project MAC was Multics (Multiplexed Computer and Information Service). It started as a joint project with MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric and eventually became a Honeywell product. It was a many-user multiple access "time-sharing" system with an emphasis on security, 24-7 operation, ease of use, segmentation and virtual memory, and had a number of very new design ideas for the time. Many of the innovations have since appeared in other products as people who worked on Multics joined/started other companies and/or were users of it.

In 1967 I left Honeywell where I had spent the beginning years of my career as a Fortran Compiler writer and joined GE to work on this project. My last assignment in Honeywell had been in a Systems Planning organization looking at new Operating System possibilities and new ways to write software and was very frustrated at the difficulty getting them to think ahead. They sent me to an Industrial Liaison Symposium at MIT which was about Multics. Several months later I was working for GE on Multics .

GE was the hardware vendor who planned on making a commercial product out of this. In 1965 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference there was a set of papers presented describing this system. By 1966 the project had started design and development. Bell Labs dropped out in 1969 (the people working on Multics at Bell labs went on to invent Unix (castrated Multics - a joke name).

The GE people and the MIT people were working together, but not very well. My boss at GE, Charlie Clingen, got promoted to be the lab manager for our organization (Cambridge Information Systems Laboratory - CISL) and I got promoted to be manger of the development unit. We started working on getting people in the two organizations to work together. Several years later I became overall (lower level) project manager of the joint project and continued to work- on merging the people in the two organizations (on separate floors in the same building in Tech Square). Sometimes project members did not know which organization their peers worked for. In 1970 Honeywell bought the GE Computer business and committed to making Multics a product. We hired some of the MIT people and went on to make 12 major releases to a number of prestigious customers. It was a great model of a University Research/Industry joint project with effective technology transfer.

After the product was capped in 1985 and CISL closed in 1986 - wotj product maintenance and enhancement handled by our counterpart group in Phoenix and a University if Calgary spinoff company that had done some of the develop,emit in the later years. Some of my team moved to the local Honeywell office and worked with other people on a project, called Opus, to create a new OS for the existing mini-computer system. Opus was cancelled in 1988 - mostly because the growing popularity of PCs was killing the mini-computer business. Some of us also had an attempt for a spin-off to produce secure systems but that didn't pan out and besides Bull - the new owner of the Honeywell computer business wouldn't give up the technology rights - it took a long time for them to agree to release the source code.

The first day and a half of the conference had a number of presentations from Project Mac veterans, some current researchers, and university people from Cornell and Georgia Tech on new educational/research ideas. Some of the presentations described the origins of Project MAC, particularly those projects which are big deals today - either in industry or in the research arena. It was very interesting to attend and it was good to get back in touch with what is going in this industry and research lab that I worked in for 30+ years.

The Multics reunion was on the second afternoon and we had a presentation from the key MIT professor on this project and it's predecessor: Corby (Fernando Corbató) and several other presentations. It ended with a panel session that I chaired; the panelists were Corby, Jerry Saltzer - MIT professors with key roles in the project (and that is an understatement), Bob Freiburghouse - a compiler genius who was a colleague of mine at Multics and previously at Honeywell), and Peter Neumann who was the Bell Labs leader. The Panel session had short talks by each of us and then lots of Q&A which continued after the session was officially over.

There were lots of opportunities to reminisce with many people who I worked with in the past and even before that. I got to talk to Doug MacIlroy - one of the Bell Labs guys who produced a compiler for Multics when the contractor GE had chosen failed, and who was my M-11 (Calculus) instructor in my freshman year at MIT (1956)! I talked to Joel Moses, one of the MIT professors at Project MAC who had nothing to do with Multics but he and I were students at Columbia in 1961 when we both took an introductory computer programming course - which to me was the catalyst that launched my career.

It is interesting to note that this project was conceived in 1964, first ran as a service at MIT in 1969, became a product in 1974, ran in mission-critical applications at a number of big customers - with a total of about 70 systems (5-10 million dollars per system) and whose last system was shutdown in 2000. It was used as a Software Factory in Bull and Honeywell for other products. There is a huge amount of information about the system on the Multicians Web site including the one formal paper I wrote. The source code is on an MIT web site and there are several people working on emulators. And lots of the ideas were adapted by other companies for their products.

The people who worked on it were a great set of people and many of us remain in touch in various ways these days. One of those people is my husband.

On Tuesday I went to the Expo portion of Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2012 - essentially a conference on the equivalent of social-networking in business. This used to be called Groupware and the academic side equivalent is CSCW (Computer Support for Cooperative Work). Going to these expos is about my only exposure these days to technology other than what I see on my screen or install on my computers.

I like to ask the demonstrators how their products support review or inspection of documents and relate this to my 20-years ago experience in this domain.

( Background about software inspection and our system )

In our system, called Scrutiny, inspectors look at the document on their computer and make annotations. Then at an appointed time they all sit at their screens, the moderator zooms his/her mouse over a portion of the document and that gets highlighted on everyone's screen along with the annotations made to that portion and the discussion ensues via the text messaging component to identify the defect and classify it. We first demoed at the CSCW Conference in the fall of 1992. We wrote a few papers - I was usually the lead author and among other places got the this one: Scrutiny: A Collaborative Inspection and Review System accepted to the European Software Engineering Conference in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

( What happened next )

None of the vendors that I talked to can easily support the synchronous meeting portion. Some use screen sharing which is a partial solution but no-one had the capability of allowing everyone to easily see other people's annotations (in our system this was automatic). Too bad, I still think this would be a useful function. There are some products available today - such as CodeCollaborator by SmartBear software that look like they do a pretty good job at this function but I've never seriously explored it.

( A bit further in the past )

I just finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (just in time since it is due back at the library tomorrow and can't be renewed).

It is a really fascinating book about this amazing person who was one of the most obnoxious people I've ever read about but yet an absolute genius as a business person and technical designer. Isaacson has done a nice job of writing about his whole life both as a person and as an inventor/business leader. Isaacson also wrote biographies of Kissinger, Ben Franklin, Einstein - so he's picked some other extreme personalities.

Jobs was overly obsessed with detail at every level from the big picture down to the shape of a screw on a case. When he was contemplating opening the first Apple Store he had a life-size mockup built in a warehouse so that it could be tested and changed - and there are lots of changes. He has patents on the glass used in the staircases in the stores. He really wanted to build a great company that made great products and pushed his people over the edge to do what he wanted. Some people got used to the fact that when he said "this is shit" he really meant that it wasn't nearly good enough, but that creative, intelligent discussions about the design and how to overcome various technical and non-technical issues would eventually lead to his saying it was great.

I liked this quote in a conversation Jobs had in 2008 with the Fortune managing editor. "So you've uncovered the fact that I am an asshole. Why is that news?"

I've been an Apple product user for a long time. My first one was a MacPlus I got in 1986. I'm writing this on Gesualdo da Venosa, my year and half old iMac. Robert's iMac is Clemons non Papa; my MacBookPro is Ludovicus Episcopius; I have an older dead iMac: Machaut (I need to extract the disk before getting rid of it); Obrecht (10 yrs old) and Ockeghem (15 yrs old) (running 9.1) are two old sort-of working macs and de la Rue is an old PowerBook that still works running 10.2. I have had Dufay, Lassus, and Palestrina. Josquin was my only Windows machine which I disposed although I still have the Windows XP image runnable on my iMac. (Yes, I like Renaissance composers). My iPod that I use at the gym is at least 8 years old. I don't yet have an iPad or an iPhone.

Part of the Segway tour involved seeing interesting Miami Beach Architecture and especially Art Deco buildings and some of their insides.

The Versace Mansion on Ocean Drive, which I read is the second most photographed house in the US (how is that measured? what is first? White House?)



( Other buildings - inside and outside )

I just finished reading Grand Illusion - The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny by Theresa Amato. She was the campaign manager for Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004 so it is written from the point of view of third party candidates. It was a bit tedious at times but she really nailed a huge bunch of things wrong with our political/voting system with lots of factual information and analysis.

Because each state runs all elections including Federal ones and the administration is mostly at the local level there are enormous problems due to the variation of laws and practices throughout the country. For a 3rd party candidate to get on the ballot there are 50 sets of rules and deadlines and they are affected what happened in a previous election and the status the party.

Then there are are the problems and variances with voter registration, how one votes absentee, overseas ballots - different in each state. Access to the polls on election day, what is printed on the ballot, whether ID cards are used (to protect against ID fraud for which there is essentially no evidence for).

And then there are the voting machines and how the counting is done with lots of proprietary software that no-one other than the vendor has seen and varying policies about how improperly scanned ballots are handled and how recounts are done. Remember 2000.

The electoral college violates the one-man one-vote system since each state gets 2 for their senators + 1 for each rep so the ratio of number voters to electoral votes is skewed.

She is a big fan of IRV (instant runoff voting) as am I which would make 3rd party candidacies make much more sense and would be especially good for primaries. (The state senator primary election in my district is on April 13 with 6-8 candidates running. The winner could have 20% of the votes - my congressional rep (Capuano) for life won his primary with 23% of the votes - and voter turnout in primaries is abysmally low.

She has lots of suggestions about various cures to these problems but because the two existing major parties essentially control everything makes it unlikely that anything will ever change. Considering how much dissatisfaction there is in the current political system, maybe there will be some improvement in the future but I'm not hopeful.

Last night we went to another What Makes it Great performance by Rob Kapilow. This one was Mendelssohn's Octet. The way these programs work is in the first half Kapilow and the musicians are in stage with Kapilow talking and demonstrating on the piano and the musicians playing parts as he directs. He breaks down the piece illustrating themes and their relationship to each other. He'll play them slowly, or leave out some of the instruments. Sometimes he plays a less imaginative imitation in order to illustrate how great something is. He gets the audience to sing a bit or test out rhythms. He expounds about the music, the composer, and performance at the time of the composition, and in this case how incredible this 16 year old at-the-time composer was.

After the intermission, the piece is played in full. And then there is a Q&A section at the end. I learned a lot about the piece such as the little theme from the Hallelujah Chorus in the last movement, a piece of the Scherzo (3rd movement) that appears in the last in imitation of a then recent Beethoven invention, how Mendelssohn pioneered conducting an orchestra, and also started the practice of performing old music (e.g. Bach was not generally performed at the time). Two of the musicians used MacBookPros with a two-button foot pedal to turn pages as their source of music and one explained how it allowed him to play from the score instead of just seeing his line because rapid page turning was now possible.

The next What Makes it Great is January 23 with Cole Porter's music.

As was true last year, before the concert we went to dinner with eblaug_rss and RP at Bombay Cafe.

My first home computer wasn't a computer. In 1967 I got a Model 37 teletype connected to a 150 baud Modem (rented from MA Bell) attached to a private line extension to the PBX in our GE (later Honeywell) office in Cambridge. With this I could dial up to Multics (or at first to CTSS which is what we first used for Multics development) and send email to colleagues on the project and write and run programs. This beast sat right next to my harpsichord! In 1971 Multics was connected to the fledgling ArpaNet and I could communicate with many other people than those at MIT. A bit later the Model 37 was replaced by a Terminet 300 which was twice as fast and much smaller. I used my Multics account at Honeywell/Bull until about 1990 for email, other electronic communication and document preparation and then switched to a Unix system at Bull for this purpose for a while.

In about 1987 I took home a MacPlus that I got from work so that was my first home computer. In 1994 this was later replaced with a 601 PowerPC CPU Mac called Palestrina that I bought along with about a 13 inch monitor. This was my first home computer and it was connected to the internet via dialup. It might still be in a box in my basement.

My main computer was later replaced with a G3 (upgraded to a G4) Mac (the so-called beige) called Ockeghem (not running but on the floor under my desk), later with a G5 iMac named Machaut, and at the end of 2007 with an Intel iMac called Clemens non papa. I also have a 2 cpu G4 called Obrecht which may have been my main computer for a while. I also have a G4 PowerBook bought in 2002 called de la Rue that I use occasionally although the battery is week. The four running Macs are on four separate releases of OS X. de la Rue is next up for replacement.

For a while I had a Dell running Windows ME which died in 2001 and was replaced by a newer Dell running Windows XP - both of these were called Josquin. It has been discarded. The disk image and Windows XP runs under Parallels on Clemens non Papa (and was handy to backup my LJ account the other day). My cell phone (Verizon xV6800) does run Windows but other than that I have no Windows machines that are running.

Because of my consulting with Packard Bell I have also had a PowerBook 603, a NEC laptop, a Compaq laptop, and a Packard Bell desktop. The three laptops are still in a closet. I had another Mac desktop (called Lassus) for a while belonging to a defunct organization that I worked with but it also went to be recycled.

My Network connections went from the private line to work, to dialup modem on a second line that work paid for, to ISDN modem (still have that router lying around), to ComCast. I chose shore.net (now primus) as my provider because they were in Lynn, MA and I could get unlimited service to them from both Gloucester and Cambridge and thus minimize my costs which were now mine since I was no longer a Bull employee.

Today I went to a luncheon at Upstairs on the Square courtesy of the US Postal Service. I am a member of the Cambridge Consumer Advisory Council and we received an award for being the best one in the US.

It was a fine lunch - I had an interesting fruit oriented salad (tomatoes included - they are fruit), salmon and a fruit tart with ice cream. There were various big and medium wigs there from Boston HQ, Connecticut HQ (higher up than Boston), and Washington DC as well as the Cambridge brass and the Mayor. I think the wigs were in town for other stuff. One of the things happening today was the unveiling of the Bette Davis stamp (I missed it).

We meet once a month with the Postmaster, several other USPS employees, and the 5 or so of us residents. We discuss topics such as graffiti on mailboxes, failures in held and forwarded mail, long lines in the PO, and other such topics to give them consumer oriented advice. They really listen and sometimes act. I am currently pushing a better procedure for held mail that isn't completely dependent upon the route carrier (it often fails when a non-usual substitute handles the route) and they are about to report on what they are doing. Another item is the fact that they don't "know" which street mailboxes have graffiti even though USPS employees visit each one several times a day. I learned today from one of the bigwigs at the lunch that the scanners that record when they visited each box have several programmable buttons that could be used to report a graffiti box.

Another program which we sponsored is the Carrier Alert program. This allows Seniors to register with the Senior Center and the PO places a marker in the mail box. Then if the Carrier notices that mail hasn't picked up he/she informs the Senior Center who contacts the contact people or sends out EMTs. I'm the database person of course (and nagger to make sure we do this each year), so I get the Street Address file with names and ages from the Election Commission (updated each year with the annual local census), select the seniors and prepare a labels file that can be used for an announcement mailing. Seniors in the Senior Center are used to stick on the mailing labels. There have been a couple of false alarms but also several cases where an injured person got help probably a few days before they would have without this program. Carrier Alert is a national program but there aren't very many instances of it.

Each of us got a coffee cup and an official proclamation from the Mayor commemorating our service. That is the second such proclamation I got this year - the other from membership on the GLBT Commission. I joked with the PO person who gave me the cup - I thought I was going to get lifetime free postage and all I got was a cup.