Etiqueta: Byte

Byte, junio del 85

Pues nada, seguimos con nuestro proyecto de leernos cada mes la revista Byte… de hace cuarenta años. Y le toca el turno al número de junio de 1985. Encontraréis todos los números en esta colección de archive.org, y el que leemos hoy, en concreto, dedicado a las técnicas de programación.

Portada de la revista Byte de junio de 1985. La imagen de portada es un cubo de Rubik en que cada una de las pequeñas caras del cubo es un una palabre clave informática. Entre ellas, tenemos char, DUP, UNIT, CAT, REM, puts, NULL, GREP, COND, FOR, GOTO...

Tampoco es que sea el número de mi vida, pero tiene sus cosillas. La primera en que me paro tiene que ver con accesibilidad:

Products Will Aid Visually Disabled Computer Users Computer Aids, Fort Wayne, IN, introduced several microcomputer products for the disabled. One product, Small-Talk, uses a modified Epson HX-20 and a speech synthesizer to allow blind users to perform word-processing tasks. With a printer, microcassette tape drive, and special word-processing software, the computer will cost about $2000.

Que sí. Que hace décadas que hay gente que piensa en usar la informática para ayudar a las personas con discapacidad (en este caso visual). Lástima que tanta otra gente se olvide del tema.

Siguiente parada, anuncio de ordenador de esos que te hace añorar el diseño industrial ochentero:

Anuncio a doble página de la marca apricot. En la página izquierda, los restos de un albaricoque que alguien se acaba de comer, con el texto Past. A la derecha, un albaricoque entero, con el texto Present and Future. En la esquina inferior izquierda de la página, una miniatura de un ordenador de diseño ochentero. Más detalles en la siguiente imagen.

¿Me vais a decir que no es precioso? Bueno. Me vais a decir que no se ve. Hagamos un enhance it:

Zoom de la imagen anterior. Tenemos un portátil en tres piezas. La primera tiene la pantalla (de fósforo verde) y seguramente la CPU. El teclado está en otra pieza, y hay una tercera pieza con lo que parece ser un trackball. La imagen viene con el texto The APricot Portable. 521K RAM, 720K diskette. 80x25 line LCD. MS-DOS. $2495

¿Es o no precioso el Apricot Portable? Había salido a la venta en octubre del 84 y, recomonozcámoslo, le daba sopas con honda a los portátiles de la época (incluido mi adorado SX-64). Ni siete kilos, pesaba. Y las piezas separadas se comunicaban ¡por infrarrojos! ¡El futuro! ¡En 1984! Hasta tenía reconocimiento de voz (aunque habría que poner «reconocimiento» entre toneladas de comillas: dice la Wikipedia que se le podían entrar 4096 palabras, 64 de las cuales simultáneamente en memoria). Y su MS-DOS pasaba de los famosos 640 Ks (para llegar a 768, tampoco nos emocionemos más de la cuenta). En cualquier caso, una preciosidad.

Seguimos avanzando y nos encontramos con otro anuncio:

Anuncio. Vemos la foto de una pantalla de un PC de IBM, con lo que parece una interfaz gráfica del estilo de un Windows antiguo y un programa de dibujo en el que alguien ha creado lo que parece un post it con la palabra hi escrita a mano

¿Qué es eso de GEM? Aquí, otra versión del anuncio:

De nuevo, una pantalla de un IBM PC, con un entorno gráfico de ventanas (también se ve un ratón en la página) y la caja de un software, GEM Desktop, y su precio ($49.95). Se explica que el software era, efectivamente, un entorno gráfico para usar los PCs de IBM sin tener que teclear comandos crípticos.

GEM era el entorno gráfico que desarrolló Digital Research (la compañía de CP/M, fundada en 1974 y que sería adquirida por Novell en 1991 ) principalmente para los Atari ST, pero también para PCs con MS-DOS, entre otros. Y es ver una captura de GEM y que se me caiga la lagrimita. Esnif.

Volviendo a nuestro clásico «¿créias que esto era nuevo?», hoy toca…

Turning a common AI operation into silicon Logic programming is a staple of artificial-intelligence (AI) software and is often dominated by the pattern-matching process of unification (see the "Resolution and Unification" text box on page 173). In fact, when logic-programming languages such as Prolog and LOGLISP are used, as much as 50 to 60 percent of a computer's processing time is spent on unification. When a single algorithm is used that frequently, it is natural to consider implementing it as custom hardware. When that same algorithm lends itself to parallelism and concurrency because of its recursive, treesearch characteristics, it practically begs for VLSI (very large scale integration) implementation. SUM History Professor lohn Oldfield and a team of researchers at Syracuse University are developing the SUM (Syracuse Unification Machine), a coprocessor for computers geared toward AI programming. The project combines the resources of the Syracuse CIS (Computer and Information Science) department. ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) department, and the CASE Center (Computer Applications and Software Engineering Center, set up by New York State). Key SUM individuals are Dr. Oldfield himself (who contributed CAD [com- puter-aided design| and VLSI expertise). Professor Alan Robinson (who is the head of the logic-programming efforts at Syracuse), and Kevin Greene (who made the initial designs of the SUM). Because of a famous 1965 paper, Dr. Robinson is often credited with inventing unification. He is more modest, pointing to the work of Herbrand in the 1930s and the studies of Prawitz and Kenger concerning unification. Dr. Robinson contends that he was just the first to formalize the unification process and apply it to resolution. In 1981, the Syracuse CIS logic-programming group learned that Caltech (California Institute of Technology) student Sheue-Ling Lien had designed a chip that embodied Dr. Robinson's original unification algorithm (see the "Unification on a Chip" text box, page 1 74). Dr. Robinson and his colleagues were somewhat taken aback that someone else had taken this step. Lien's report was a major inspiration for the development of the SUM, even though the chip it described was never actually made. Because ECE had been developing custom VLSI chip-design capability and had a strong logic-programming group, combining the pursuits "seemed a natural thing" according to Dr. Oldfield. Coprocessor Strategy As Dr. Oldfield explains, "Although we started talking about a unification chip, following along the lines of the Caltech one. it soon became fairly clear that at present levels of integration that was fairly ridiculous. You could make a chip, but it would be limited to solving such small problems that it wouldn't be worthwhile." The SUM group wanted to design a full-blown, practical processor. Besides. Lien's chip used Dr. Robinson's original 1965 algorithm. Much more efficient algorithms have been developed since. When they realized that a single chip wasn't realistic, the members of the group looked at the possibility of a coprocessor, initially for the LMI

Sí, queridas, podríais pensar que TPUs y NPUs y demás son una cosa acabada de inventar, pero cada vez que la IA se pone de moda, alguien piensa en hardware para acelerarla…

Siguiente cosa que me ha interesado: ¿cómo elegir lenguaje de programación?

CHOOSING A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE by Gary Elfring It's a three-step process IF YOU WERE a carpenter building a new house, the first thing you would do would be to collect your tools. The tools you'd select would vary depending on the type of job. The same thing should be true if you are a programmer. You have a wide range of tools available, and you just choose the right tools for the job. Your tools are the languages that you program in and the environments needed to support those languages. How do you go about selecting the right tool for the job? There are more programming languages available for microprocessors than most people could learn in a lifetime. What you need is a methodology that can be used to select one language from all the rest for a given application. This article presents a practical method for comparing programming languages. It has an inherent bias toward compiled high-level languages. Compiled languages are faster than interpreted ones, and most interpreted languages also offer a compiler version. Since program speed is often an issue, I chose compilers over interpreters. The actual process of evaluating a group of programming languages can be broken down into three major steps. The first step is to characterize the application the language is being selected for. Then you must identify the features that a language should have in order to deal with the previously described application. Finally, you should take into account practical considerations to further narrow down the language selection. The Application You can't choose a tool unless you know what you intend to do with it. You have to describe your application. Once you have this information you can then proceed to determine whether or not the existing language choices are the right tools for the job. To describe an application, you must consider both the type and size of the application. These questions must be answered before you can proceed any further in the language evaluation: What is the type or class of application? What level of language is needed? There are a number of different classes of program applications. An application can belong to a single class or several. Identifying the class of your application is relatively simple and helps narrow the list of acceptable languages. Some of the more common classes include scientific, business, and system programming; text processing; expert systems; and real-time control. Most programming languages are better suited to solving one particular class of problem than another. COBOL is one example. While it is easy to write maintainable business programs with COBOL, no one would expect to use this language to solve real-time control problems. Another consideration is the level of programming that the application will require. If you need low-level control of various machine-dependent features, then a very high level language...

La cosa comienza dando preferencia a compilados sobre interpretados por temas de velocidad (cosa más importante hace cuarenta años que ahora, que les pregunten a JavaScript y Python). Sigue proponiendo que el tipo de programa es muy importante (y dando COBOL como ejemplo de lenguaje para aplicaciones de negocios), y a continuación proponiendo si lenguajes de alto o bajo nivel… Comencé a leer el artículo pensando que lo que dijese sería siendo bastante actual. Curiosamente, donde uno esperaba más estabilidad… va a ser que no. Pero claro, entonces llega este artículo sobre componentes reutilizables:

SOFTWARE-ICs by Lamar Ledbetter and Brad Cox A plan for building reusable software components THE SOFTWARE WORLD has run headlong into the Software Crisis—ambitious software projects are hard to manage, too expensive, of mediocre quality, and hard to schedule reliably. Moreover, all too often, software delivers a solution that doesn't meet the customers' needs. After delivery, if not before, changing requirements mean that systems must be modified. We must build systems in a radically different way if we are going to satisfy tomorrow's quantity and quality demands. We must learn to build systems that can withstand change. Some system developers are already building software much faster and of better quality than last year. Not only that, the systems are much more tolerant of change than ever before, as a result of an old technology called message/object programming. This technology, made commercially viable because of the cost/performance trends in hardware, holds the key to a long-awaited dream— software reusability. A new industry is developing to support the design, development, distribution, and support of reusable Software-ICs (integrated circuits). A forthcoming series in UNIX/World will address message/object programming. Message/Object Programming and software-ICs In this article we'll look at the concepts of message/object programming and how they support the building of "Software-ICs," as we call them, by satisfying the requirements for reusability. A Software-lC is a reusable software component. It is a software packaging concept that combines aspects of subroutine libraries and UNIX filter programs. A Software-IC is a standard binary file produced by compiling a C program generated by Objective-C. The notion of objects that communicate by messages is the foundation of message/object programming and fundamental to Software-ICs. An object includes data, a collection of procedures (methods) that can access that data directly, and a selection mechanism whereby a message is translated into a call to one of these procedures. You can request objects to do things by sending them a message. Sending a message to an object is exactly like calling a function to operate on a data structure, with one crucial difference: Function calls specify not what should be accomplished but how. The function name identifies specific code to be executed. Messages, by contrast, specify what you want an object to do and leave it up to the object to decide how. Requirements for Reusability Only a few years ago, hardware designers built hardware much as we build software today. They assembled custom circuits from individual electrical components (transistors, resistors, capacitors, and so on), just as we build functions out of low-level components of programming languages (assignment statements, conditional statements, function calls, and so on). Massive reusability of hardware designs wasn't possible until a packaging technology evolved that could make the hardware environment of a chip (the circuit board and adjoining electrical components)...

Ojo a los dos primeros párrafos:

El mundo del software ha chocado con la Crisis del Software: los proyectos ambiciosos son difíciles de gestionar, demasiado caros, de calidad mediocre y difíciles de programar con fiabilidad. Además, con demasiada frecuencia, el software ofrece una solución que no satisface las necesidades de los clientes. Tras la entrega, o incluso antes, los cambios en los requisitos obligan a modificar los sistemas.

Debemos construir sistemas de una forma radicalmente diferente si queremos satisfacer las demandas futuras de cantidad y calidad. Debemos aprender a construir sistemas que resistan el cambio.

¿Escritos en 1985? ¿1995? ¿2025? ¿Nos jugamos algo a que los podremos reutilizar sin tocar una coma en 2065?

En fin… Si queréis saltar de este mes de junio del 85 a nuestra relectura del número de mayo, aquí lo teneís. y el mes que viene, más (espero).

Byte, mayo del 85

Seguimos leyendo la revista Byte, pero cuarenta años tarde (todas las entradas disponibles en la etiqueta Byte). Si queréis pasar de mis extractos y acudir a la fuente, tenéis todo el histórico en archive.org y el número del mes aquí.

Este mes la cosa sera (relativamente breve). La portada, no especialmente destacable:

Portada de la revista Byte de abril de 1985, dedicada al PC Unix de AT&T

De las noticias, me quedo con un breve. ¿Sabíais que este mes se cumplen cuarenta años del anuncio de Excel? ¿Sabíais que Microsoft lo lanzó inicialmente para el Mac? Pues sí…

Integrated Software for Macintosh Microsoft's first integrated package. Excel for the Macintosh, has spreadsheet and graphics capabilities, a spreadsheet oriented database, and a macro facility for storing and recalling commonly used keystrokes. It supports the AppleTalk network and provides two-way file compatibility with Multiplan and Chart for the Macintosh, Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC. and applications that support Microsoft's SYLK format. The Excel spreadsheet provides you with a 256 column by 16.384-row work area. You can view and reference multiple spreadsheets, consolidate worksheets, enter multiple variable problems or situations, and vary the borders, number formats, and font styles and size. You can assign names to cell references, numbers, and mathematical expressions and call four windows into a worksheet. You can produce instant "what if' graphics with Excels charting abilities, which are functionally identical to Microsoft's Chart for the Mac. Excel files can be read directly into Chart, and Excel can read Chart files When you alter numbers in a spreadsheet window, charts in separate windows are instantly updated. For data comparisons, you can open more than one chart window for the same or different data. The charting facility also has 42 predesigned charts, the ability to relocate objects on screen, and your choice of font, range, scale, and patterns. The database is an ancillary function of Excels spreadsheet. With it, you can sort, extract, and display information in a variety of ways. The database lacks form- and report-design capabilities: however. Excels formatting capabilities let you create reports. It does let you remove data for analysis in a different section of your work area. Excels suggested retail price is $395. It requires 512K bytes of memory and will work with the Macintosh XL.

¿Se fiaba mucho Microsoft del éxito de Excel? Pues no sé, pero unas páginas más adelante la empresa anunciaba su solución de hoja de cálculo para el Mac:

Anuncio de Microsoft de su hoja de cálculo para el Mac, Multiplan, más Microsoft Chart para hacer gráficas. Se hace eco de que Multiplan utiliza todas las características amigables del Mac. También anuncian que están disponibles para el Mac Word, File y BASIC.
¿Créiais que lo del caos de productos de las grandes tecnológicas era cosa de ahora? Pues hace cuarenta años Microsoft hacía publicidad de su hoja de cáculo Multiplan para Mac mientras anunciaba el lanzamiento de Excel para la misma plataforma…

Y en la lista de productos tenemos nada más y nada menos que el PC AT de IBM, con su 80286 y sus 256 KBs de RAM en el modelo básico (apenas cuatro mil dólares de la época):

IBM PC AT The PC gets down to business The IBM PC AT comes in two basic configurations. The basic model ($3995) comes with 256K bytes of RAM (random-access read/write memory), one of IBM's new high-capacity 1.2-megabyte disk drives, and a combination floppy disk/hard-disk controller card. Available for an additional $1800, the enhanced model adds 256K bytes of memory, a 20-megabyte hard-disk drive, and a serial/parallel interface adapter (see photo 1). Both systems are based on Intel's 80286 processor and have eight I/O (input/output) expansion slots and a battery-backed clock/calendar. The AT comes with IBM's usual voluminous documentation. It includes a setup guide, an operations guide, and a BASIC manual, all in IBM's standard boxed looseleaf format. An unwelcome addition is a variety of small pamphlets packed in each box. While these are intended to be helpful quick guides, they are easy to misplace and might confuse as much as inform. By the way, the BASIC manual is now complete. You don't have to send in a coupon and replace pages to get up-to-date documentation. Power Supply and Keyboard The power supply is 190 watts, as opposed to the 63 watts in the PC and 130 watts in the XT. This much power is needed. The PC is underpowered, causing many users to have hard-to-trace problems when adding to their systems. The XT's supply is much better but would be inadequate for the AT's two hard-disk drives. Since what goes in as electricity always comes out as heat, IBM has incorporated an innovative variablespeed fan that runs faster (and louder) as the internal temperature rises. Since my system was lightly loaded, the noise level never became obtrusive. A notable addition to the AT is a line-voltage select switch that lets it run on European 220-volt power. The AT's keyboard and interface are more sophisticated than those on the PC and they are not compatible. You cannot use an AT keyboard on a PC. A single-chip microcomputer on the system board manages the keyboard and related functions. Any PC software that goes directly to the keyboard interface hardware, some key-translation programs, and many games will not work on the AT. The keyboard layout is similar to that used on an IBM Selectric typewriter (see photo 2). The Shift, Control, Enter, and backspace keys have all been enlarged. Some of the less frequently used keys, such as backslash, grave accent. Print Screen, and Escape, have been moved to peripheral portions of the keyboard. Three status lights have been added to the Caps Lock, Scroll Lock, and Num Lock keys— this is a welcome feature. The only new key, Sys Req, causes the keyboard handling software that's in ROM (read-only memory) to generate a software interrupt whenever the key is pressed or released. This lets the user signal the operating system for attention. PC-DOS currently ignores Sys Req. To go with its international power supply. IBM provides six different versions of the AT's keyboard for foreign languages. The layout and internal scan codes are all identical, but some of the key legends are different to permit use of symbols peculiar to specific languages. The standard display adapters can display these characters, and DOS 3.0 has a set of utilities to adapt itself to the specific keyboard type. On the output side, the AT uses the standard PC display cards and so is completely compatible. Graphics generation is much faster than it is on the PC. Much has been said about the inclusion of a key switch that disables the keyboard and locks the cover in place. It seems to me that this feature is of limited usefulness. You would have to secure the entire system and external wiring to prevent someone with malicious intent from interfering with a running program. A program can test the state...

Por cierto… ¿lo de la compatibilidad de los PCs? El AT venía con un teclado nuevo, y el software para los PCs anteriores de IBM que accedía directamente a sus teclados (juegos, por ejemplo)… no funcionaba en el AT. El paso del 8086 al 286, para sorpresa de nadie, también daba sus propios problemas.

El AT, por cierto, era el primero en poder usar los novísimos discos de alta densidad, con sus casi infinitos 1,2 megabytes (hablamos de discos de 5¼ pulgadas, claro), a 500 kilobits por segundo. Sorpresa: las unidades de disco también suponían un problema de compatibilidad: si escribías a un disco de doble densidad, este no necesariamente sería legible en otros PCs. ¿Sistemas operativos? PC DOS 3.0 (no, no MS DOS) o el Concurrent DOS de Digital Research.

Y de los anuncios, me quedo con el SORD IS-11C. ¿No os provoca una cierta ansiedad la bisagra de la pantalla?

Anuncio del IS-11C de Sord Compuetr. Se trata de un sistema de procesador de textos y correo elctrónico portátil programable en BASIC. La bisgra que soporta la pantalla es de menos de la mitad del ancho de dicha pantalla.

Dice la Wikipedia que llevaba un Z80 y que la resolución de la pantalla era de 256 × 64. No habla del peso ni de la batería (algo me dice que solo funcionaba enchufado a la corriente).

Y con esto me paso a la sección de programación, donde encontramos, primero…

0.8660254 ≈ √3/2 An algorithm that converts decimals to fractions

Si hoy en día incluimos en una revista un programa para convertir números decimales a fracciones con la capacidad de reconocer al menos unas cuantas raíces cuadradas (el programa reconocía las raíces de 2 , 3 y 5, y π y π2), explotan cráneos (el autor, por más inri, era un estudiante de medicina de Estocolmo). Y por si esto no fuese suficiente…

Computing Pi Using infinite series to compute mathematical functions

(El programa usa la serie de Taylor de la arcotangente y da quince cifras de π, más que suficientes para básicamente cualquier cálculo práctico.)

En fin. Volvemos, con un poco de suerte, el mes que viene. Si queréis anticipar el «futuro», podéis hacer trampa aquí.

Byte, abril del 85

Continuamos con el proyecto de leer mensualmente la revista Byte… de hace cuarenta años (tenéis las entradas anteriores en la etiqueta Byte del blog, aunque a ver si encuentro el momento de currarme un índice un poco más currado (que muy probablemente solo usaría yo, ciertamente)).

Decía el mes pasado que este número venía cargadito, y así es:

Portada de la revista Byte de abril de 1985. El tema de portada es la inteligencia artificial. La ilustración es iuna mano humana dibujando una mano robótica junto a una mano robótica dibujando una mano humana

…pero no cargado de las cosas que suelo destacar, sino de una buena cantidad de artículos sobre IA. Pongo yo unos cuantos «plus ça change» en estas entradas, pero en esta ocasión todo el bloque central de la revista es un «plus ça change». Tanto que, del resto, solo me voy a quedar con la inocentada:

Foto de un accesorio para el Mac que es un afilador de cuchillos. El texto que acompaña a la foto (en inglés) es el siguiente: Knife the Mac Ennui Associates has announced MacKnifer,a hardware attachment that mounts on the side of your Macintosh and sharpens knives, scissors, lawn-mower blades – anything that needs sharpening. With MacKnifer's patented double-action grinding wheel, you can easily sharpen any utensil in less time than it takes the Mac to open a file. According to the manufacturer, MacKnifer is so easy to use that you can opearte it within 30 minutes of taking it out of the box. Turn your spare computing time into extra cash with a knife-sharpening business on the side... of your Macintosh. For more information on MacKnifer, contact Ennui Associates, 52502 Marginal Avenue, Somnolencia, CA, 90541.

Aquí la entrada correspondiente de hoaxes.org: https://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/the_macknifer, por si a alguien le hiciese falta.

(Por cierto, he decidido cambiar de «proveedor» para las revistas, a esta página de archive.org, y en la medida de lo posible (léase, cuando me acuerde) intentaré enlazar los artículos y piezas que comente.)

Entrando en materia, la cosa comienza con nada más y nada menos que Marvin Minsky:

COMMUNICATION WITH ALIEN INTELLIGENCE by Marvin Minsky It may not be as difficult as you think WHEN FIRST WE MEET those aliens in outer space, will we and they be able to converse? I believe that, yes, we will— provided they are motivated to cooperate— because we'll both think in similar ways. I propose two kinds of arguments for why those aliens may think like us, in spite of having very different origins. These arguments are based on the idea that all intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints – limitations on space, time, and materials. For animals to evolve powerful ways to deal with such constraints, they must have ways to represent the situations they face, and they must have processes for manipulating those representations. These two requirements are: Economics: Every intelligence must develop symbol systems for representing things, causes, and goals, and for formulating and remembering the procedures it develops for achieving those goals. Sparseness: Every evolving intelligence will eventually encounter certain very special ideas— e.g., about arithmetic, causal reasoning, and economics— because these particular ideas are very much simpler than other ideas with similar uses. The economics argument is that the power of a mind depends on how it manages the resources it can use. The concept of thing is indispensable for managing the resources of space and the substances that fill it. The concept of goal is indispensable for managing how we use the time we have available—both for what we do and what we think about. Aliens will use these notions too, because they are both easy to evolve and because there appear to be no easily evolved alternatives for them. The sparseness theory tries to make this more precise by showing that almost any evolutionary search will soon find certain schemes that have no easily accessible alternatives, that is, other different ideas that can serve the same purposes. These ideas or processes seem to be peculiarly isolated in the sense that the only things that resemble them are vastly more complicated. I will discuss only the specific example of arithmetic and conjecture that those other concepts of objects, causes, and goals have this same island-like character. Critic: What if those aliens have evolved so far beyond us that their concerns are unintelligible to us and their technologies and conceptions have become entirely different from ours? Then communication may be infeasible. My arguments apply only to those stages of mental evolution in... Artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky is Donner Professor of Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts \nstitute of Technology (545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139). Ik the late 1950s, Minsky, together with John McCarthy [now at Stanford), created MIT's AI laboratory, of which Minsky was the director for several years. Minsky has long been interested in SETI [the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and participated in the important 1971 conference on communication with extraterrestrials, held in Soviet Armenia and organized by Carl Sagan.

Minsky fue cofundador del laboratorio de IA del MIT, había recibido el premio Turing en 1969, inventó el primer «head mounted display», codiseñó con Seymour Papert la tortuga de Logo, y para su tesis doctoral construyó a principios de los años cincuenta SNARC, uno de los primeros intentos de construir una máquina que imitara el comportamiento del cerebro humano, diseñada para simular una red neuronal, específicamente un conjunto de neuronas artificiales interconectadas, que emulaba el comportamiento de ratas recorriendo laberintos, y aprendía gradualmente a encontrar el camino correcto basándose en recompensas (lo que ahora llamamos aprendizaje por refuerzo). Ojo: Minsky (fallecido en 2016) estuvo asociado con Jeffrey Epstein y estuvo en su isla privada, aunque la mujer de Minsky, que estuvo allí con él, defiende que nunca hizo nada moralmente cuestionable allí.

Minsky, que estaba muy interesado en SETI, el proyecto para buscar vida extraterrestre, plantea en el artículo su hipótesis de que toda inteligencia, alienígena o no, debe ser similar y que, por tanto, no debería ser muy difícil la comunicación, a no ser que la otra inteligencia haya ido más allá del estado de preocuparse por su supervivencia, la comunicación y expandir su control del mundo físico. Para ello se apoya en un experimento mental de exploración de máquinas de Turing, y en la universalidad de la aritmética, para acabar llegando a la inevitabilidad, a su vez, de muchos aspectos del lenguaje (el razonamiento me suena a Chomsky, por algún motivo). No me atrevo para nada a resumir ni a juzgar el artículo, pero es curioso combinar la IA de la inteligencia artificial con la IA de la inteligencia alienígena, cuando menos…

THE QUEST TO UNDERSTAND THINKING Roger Schank and Larry Hunter It begins not with complex issues but with the most trivial of processes ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, or AI, takes as its subject matter some of the most daunting questions of our existence. What is the nature of mind? What are we doing when we are thinking, feeling, seeing, or understanding? Is it possible to comprehend how our minds really work? These questions have been asked for thousands of years, but we've made little tangible progress at answering them. AI offers a new tool for those pursuing the quest: the computer. As anyone who has used one can attest, computers often create more problems than they solve. But for probing the issues of mind and thought, that is just what we need. The fundamental use of computers in helping us understand cognition is to provide a testbed for our ideas about what the mind does. Theories of mind often take the form of process descriptions. For example, a theory of question answering might claim that people first translate a question into an internal representation, use that representation as an index into memory, translate the recalled memory into an appropriate form for an answer, and then generate the words to communicate it. (This example is offered not as a real theory of question answering but as an example of what a process theory of mind might look like.) Process theories seem to be a good way of describing what might go on inside the brain. One problem with them, however, is that all too often what looks like a good description really isn't specific enough to make the theory clear. "Use the representation as an index into memory" isn't a good explanation of the processes behind remembering a fact. How are facts recalled? How is the memory organized? What happens when memory gets very large? What if a fact isn't directly encoded in memory but can be inferred from something that is? A researcher trying to write a program that embodies the above simplistic theory would run into all of these problems and more. That's why we need to write programs. Programming forces us to be explicit, and being explicit forces us to confront the problems with our theories. Not long ago, AI researchers like ourselves focused on what they considered to be manifestations of highly intelligent behavior; playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, solving complex logical puzzles, and the like. Many AI researchers devoted a lot of energy to these projects and found powerful computational techniques for accomplishing such "intelligent" tasks. But we discovered that the techniques we developed are not the same ones that people actually use to perform these tasks, and we have instead begun to concentrate on tasks that almost any adult finds trivial: using language, showing common sense, learning from past experiences. Language We began studying these "trivial" tasks by trying to write programs that...

El siguiente artículo también tiene autores «wikipediables»: Roger Schank se doctoró en lingüística después de graduarse en matemáticas, fue profesor de informática y psicología en Yale , donde en 1981 fundó el Yale Artificial Intelligence Project y en 1989 haría lo mismo con el Institute for the Learning Sciences de Northwestern. Investigaba sobre comprensión del lenguaje natural y razonamiento basado en casos. Y, me temo, no solo conocía también a Epstein (ayuda que este se dedicase de vez en cuando a financiar investigación en IA), como Minsky, sino que le mostró su apoyo cuando comenzó a destaparse el pastel :-S. Lawrence Hunter, por su parte, se dedica hoy en día a la biología computacional, campo al que llegó a través del razonamiento basado en casos para el diagnóstico del cáncer de pulmón.

¿Y el artículo? El artículo toca, primero, un tema que se me antoja vital y, a la vez, absolutamente ausente del debate actual: cómo la inteligencia artificial podría ser una muy buena herramienta para ayudar a entender qué es y cómo funciona la inteligencia «natural», y luego se centra en algunos de los problemas de procesar el lenguaje natural, como la ambigüedad, el contexto o la memoria (la de recordar, no necesariamente la RAM).

Me estoy pasando con la cuenta de palabras, o sea que solo citaré The LISP tutor y PROUST, An automatic debugger for Pascal programs, que como podrá imaginar el lector, se centran en los usos , que ahora parecen más cercanos, pero ya veremos, de la IA para enseñar a programar y ayudarnos a programar.

Y cerramos con…

LEARNING IN PARALLEL NETWORKS Simulating learning in a probabilistic system THE BRAIN is an incredibly powerful computer. The cortex alone contains over 10^10 neurons, each connected to thousands of others. All of your knowledge is probably stored in the strengths of these connections, which somehow give you the effortless ability to understand English, to make sensible plans, to recall relevant facts from fragmentary cues, and to interpret the patterns of light and dark on the back of your eyeballs as real three-dimensional scenes. By comparison, modern computers do these things very slowly, if at all. They appear very smart when multiplying long numbers or storing millions of arbitrary facts, but they are remarkably bad at doing what any five-year-old can. One possible explanation is that we don't program computers suitably. We are just so ignorant about what it takes to understand English or interpret visual images that we don't know the appropriate data structures and procedures to put into the machine. This is what most people who study artificial intelligence (AI) believe, and over the last 20 years they have made a great deal of progress in reducing our ignorance in these areas. Another possible explanation is that brains and computers work differently. Perhaps brains have evolved to be very good at a particular style of computation that is necessary in everyday life but hard to program on a conventional computer. Perhaps the fact that brains store knowledge as connection strengths makes them particularly adept at weighing many conflicting and cooperating considerations very rapidly to arrive at a common-sense judgment or interpretation. Of course, any style of computation whatsoever can be simulated by a digital computer, but when one kind of machine simulates a very different kind it can be very slow. To simulate all the neurons in a human brain in real time would take thousands of large computers. To simulate all the arithmetic operations occurring in a Cray would take billions of people. It is easy to speculate that the brain uses quite different computational principles, but it is hard to discover what those principles are. Empirical studies of the behavior of single neurons and their patterns of connectivity have revealed many interesting facts, but the underlying computational principles are still unclear. We don't know, for example, how the brain represents complex ideas, how it searches for good matches between stored models of objects and the incoming sensory data, or how it learns. In this issue Jerome A. Feldman describes some current ideas about how parallel networks could recognize objects (see "Connections" on page 277). I will describe one old and one new theory of how learning could occur in these brain-like networks. Please remember that these theories are extreme idealizations; the real brain is much more complicated. Associating Inputs with Outputs Imagine a black box that has a set of input terminals and a set of output

… nada más y nada menos que un Nobel de física (y premio Turing, y premio Príncipe de Asturias, y no sé cuántos premios más), Geoffrey Hinton. Lo de darle un Nobel en física a un graduado en física y doctor e investigador en IA es algo en lo que no entraré ahora, pero marcarse el punto de publicarle cuando era un mero profesor ayudante en Carnegie Mellon, junto a figuras al menos aparentemente de mucho más relumbrón que él, me lo vais a tener que reconocer, no está nada mal. Más si lo que está explicando es, si no lo he entendido mal, el trabajo en entrenamiento de redes neuronales que es uno de los pilares por los que ha acabado ganando todo el reconocimiento y los premios con los que cuenta.

Y no me alargo más, pero toda la tabla de contenidos del especial merece como mínimo una ojeada rápida…

Y, en cualquier caso, que cuarenta años no son nada.

Si queréis seguir leyendo, aquí tenéis mis notas sobre el número de marzo. Y el mes que viene, con un poco de suerte, más.

Byte, marzo del 85

Es marzo, y toca revisar la revista Byte de marzo… de hace 40 años…

(Ya os avanzo, eso sí, que no es el número más apasionante de los que hemos repasado hasta ahora.)

Portada de la revista. El tema es bargain computing. Se ilustra con una enorme moneda de un céntimo en el que la efigie es la de un ordenador

Algo podemos adelantar: no, querido lector, «bargain» no va ser un ordenador por cien euros actuales.

Abrimos fuego con la editorial:

Editorial ANOTHER WORLD: THE 68000 A year and a half ago, the world of personal computing looked as if it were becoming more and more the domain of a single class of computers, the IBM PC and its compatibles, and a single family of microprocessors, the Intel 8088 and its relatives. The IBM-Intel world has fostered the development of a great variety of software but signs of intellectual stagnation had appeared. Almost all hardware manufacturers had the same strategy: IBM compatibility. Almost all software houses besieged the same market: the corporate office. When IBM reduced its prices and intraduced the PC AT at a surprisingly low price, many manufacturers of compatibles faltered or fell. While a number of software houses tottered IBM introduced dozens of its own software packages. Macintosh offered some hope of a pluralist world in personal computing but software was extremely slow to appear, and in many cases the Macintosh version of a program originally developed for the IBM PC was less capable. It was unclear whether the Macintosh would be able to stem the tide of IBM machines and software. In the past few weeks, however, an assortment of 68000-based machines has been announced or reported. Atari has announced 68000-based systems at astonishingly low prices and with impressive software from Digital Research. Hewlett-Packard's 68000-based Integral is a remarkable UNIX transportable with an electroluminescent display. Tandy also introduced a 68000-based system at the Consumer Electronics Show. Commodore has acquired rights to the68000-based Amiga system. Published reports say that AT&T will release a powerful 68000-based system. Put all these together with the 68000-based Apple machine. the Sinclair QL, S-100 68000 systems, and systems from Cromemco, Arete, Sun, Charles River Data Systems, Stride, Altos, IBC, Plexus, Pyramid, and several others, and you have a remarkably rich world encompassing everything from $300 home machines to expensive but economical 88-user UNIX systems. Will 1985 be the year of the 68000? The Motorola processors may not surpass...

¿Os suena el discuro «no todo el mundo es WinTel»? Ahora que parece que Intel está entre la espada y la pared, que la arquitectura Arm se come el mundo con permiso de Nvidia y sus GPUs, y que este año del señor de 2025 hasta es posible que podamos comprarnos un ordenador con una CPU de arquitectura RISC-V, ahora es posible que se cumpla que no toda la informática personal se base en las arquitecturas de Intel. Solo han hecho falta… ¿30 años para que eso se hiciese posible? ¿25, siendo muy generosos? Y de Motorola, y su pobre arquitectura 68000, que amenzaba la hegemonía de Intel hace cuarenta años, que en aquellos momentos alimentaba los Macs y, sobre todo para mí, los Amiga, lamentablemente, ya no se acuerda nadie (y Motorola la abandonó hace ya más de 30 años).

Mientras tanto… la invasión MSX de Estados Unidos no acaba de llegar:

MSX Computers Shown, Not Sold, at CES A number of Japanese and Korean companies exhibited MSX home computers at a Microsoft-sponsored MSX booth at January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. but only Yamaha has definite plans to bring an MSX computer to the U.S. (See page 43 5 for details on Yamaha's CX5M Music Computer.) Because computers based on Microsoft's MSX standard all use the same basic hardware and software configuration. MSX cartridges and cassette software will run on any MSX computer. Canon, Casio, Daewoo, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sanyo, Sony, and Toshiba all showed MSX computers –available in Japan– but declined to comment on U.S. pricing or availability dates. Most companies said they were waiting for reaction from American dealers and consumers. Spectravideo, the only U.S. company making an MSX computer, also displayed its computer. Financially troubled Spectravideo was recently acquired by Bondwell, a Hong Kong computer maker. At least 19 software companies are reportedly developing versions of popular programs for MSX computers in Japan and the U.S., including Activision, Broderbund, lnfocom, and Spinnaker. However. those companies. like U.S. dealers. are hesitant to commit large development efforts to an American MSX computer market until the Japanese commit to a U.S. marketing effort, which they failed to do at CES. Also at CES, Nintendo showed its Advanced Video System, a version of the FCS home video-game system it offers in Japan and that it says holds 90 percent of the Japanese home video-game market. An optional keyboard unit turns the system into a computer; several other peripherals will also be available. Nintendo had not set a price for the system but said it will be available in the U.S. in June.

Los wearables siguen pegando fuerte:

Japanese Show More Wrist Computers Seiko and Epson both showed watches that interface with computers at CES. Seiko's RC-1000 is similar to its earlier UC-2000, which used a separate keyboard to enter 2K bytes of text data for later reference. However. the RC-1000 includes an interface to any computer with an RS-232C serial port. Epson's RC-20 wrist computer uses a Z80-compatible processor and features a 23-position touchscreen. It includes 8K bytes of ROM, 2K bytes of RAM. and a 4-line by 7-character display. Programs are included for appointment scheduling, address and phone listings, a calculator, and standard time and alarm functions. Neither price nor availability date were released.

Y algo se mueve por la accesibilidad:

Braille Printers Aid Sight-Impaired Visualtek, Santa Monica, CA, is shipping the MBOSS-1 Braille Printer, a bidirectional, continuous form-feed braille embosser. Based on a C. ltoh F10-55. MBOSS-1 runs at 10 cps and produces hard copy from a computer, word processor, or refreshable braille device. It connects through RS-232C serial or Centronics-yype parallel interfaces and uses audio status indicators. The list price is $3225. Nippon Dentsu Co . Ltd. Hachioji-City, Tokyo, Japan will ship its Ohtsuki braille printer to the U.S. this month. The Ohtsuki produces standard text and braille simultaneously. It can be run from a standard word-processing program

Más me llama la atención, eso sí, el lanzamiento del Atari ST. Que uno siempre fue claramente más del Amiga que del Atari, pero Atari > Apple > todo lo demás…

To New Color Computers from Atari Atari has two new color computer lines: the 68000-based ST and the 800-compatible XE. The ST comes with a two button mouse and Digital Research's GEM, a user interface that has pull-down menus, icons, and overlapping windows. GEM is embedded in 192K bytes of ROM along with TOS (Tramiel operating system named for Atari president Jack Tramiel) and a game. For more on GEM, see page 39 of the December 1984 BYTE. The ST, which can handle television, composite color, monochrome, and RGB outputs, produces graphic resolutions ranging from 640 by 400 pixels (monochrome) to 320 by 200 pixels (16-color mode). Its 84-key keyboard is augmented with a numeric keypad and 10 function keys, ROM cartridge, RS-232C serial, Centronics parallel, and floppy- and hard-disk drive interfaces are supplied. Also, the ST carries a three-voice sound chip and a MIDI port for linking it to musical instruments and synthesizers. The 128K-byte Model 130ST will sell for approximately $400, and the 512K byte Model 520ST will be about $600. Shipments are to begin shortly. Atari plans to offer a 10-megabyte ST hard-disk drive for about $600. Both a composite color monitor and a 3 1/2-inch disk drive will be priced in the $150 range.

Hablando de Commodore, este no lo recordaba yo:

Commodore Unveils 3-Pound Portable The Commodore LCD is a 3-pound portable computer with a flip-up 16-line by 80-column liquid crystal display (LCD) and a built-in 300-bps modem. It's powered by either batteries or an external AC supply. The LCD comes with word processing, file-management, spreadsheet, appointment schedule, and communications software in 96K bytes of ROM. It also has calculator, memo-pad, and address-book features. Because the software resides in ROM. the LCD's 32K bytes of RAM are ready for file and data storage. Commodore says the LCD can employ any C64 serial peripherals. such as printers and disk drives. It also has both RS-2 32C serial and parallel ports. The Commodore LCD is expected to sell for under $600. Contact Commodore Business Machines Inc.. 1200 Wilson Dr., West Chester. PA 19380. (215) 431-9100.

(Según la wikipedia, no llegó a salir nunca al mercado.)

Mientras tanto… ya no se hacen interfaces como las de antes:

Footmouse frees your hands Versatron is shipping the Footmouse, a foot operated mouse for microcomputers. The manufacturer notes that the primary advantage of the Footmouse is that it frees both your hands for data input. Footmouse reportedly works with any software package that uses a cursor. It emulates the keyboard cursor functions. yet it does not interrupt normal cursor operations. Footmouse plugs between the keyboard and the computer, requiring neither special boards nor software support. Presently available for the IBM PC and IBM PC-compatibles, versions of the Footmouse for the Apple lIe, Macintosh. IBM PC XT and PC AT, Ivy, Compaq, and RS-232C terminals will be available shortly. The suggested list price is $225.

Y, en productos que, cuarenta años más tarde, siguen estando a punto de «petarlo»… la robótica personal ¡y autónoma! (Como mínimo, es de agradecer que no se fueran a las formas humanoides que tanto han llamado la atención en el Mobile World Congress y que, dejadme vaticinar, no se impondrán).

Anuncio del primer robot autónomo personal, personal, Gemini, de Arctec Systems. La forma del robot es más o menos cónica, y no se acaba de apreciar qué tamaño tiene. ¿Quizás un metro y medio de altura? Cuenta con tres SONARs en la cabeza y cinco más en el cuerpo, tres micrófonos, una interfaz con varias teclas de función y una pantalla LCD de 40 columnas y 8 líneas. Tiene ordenadores para controlar su proplsión, y la entrada y salida de voz, basados en procesadores 65C02s con 92 Ks de ROM y 74 de RAM

Algo me dice que esos procesadores 65C02 con 92 Ks de ROM y 74 de RAM van a ir pelín justitos para la entrada y salida de voz, pero qué sabré yo…

En la serie «artículos que provocarían derrames cerebrales» si se publicasen en una revista generalista de informática hoy», toca…

By Peter Rice Arithmetic on your PC Use strings and arrays to perform operations on 200-digit numbers. Ask some bright I0-year-olds to square your Social Security number and, after a bit of pencil chewing, they'll give you the answer. Ask your computer to do the same. and you will receive something like this: 302.325.855 x 302.325.855 = 9.140092260148103 D+6 Note that the correct answer is 91.400.922.601.481.025. The reason for the slight inaccuracy is that all computers-including the IBM Personal Computer (PC). on which I made this calculation-assign a specific amount of space for storing integers. Any number that requires more than the allocated space is converted to a floating-point decimal. In the case above. the last digit was lost and the answer was rounded off. In the IBM PC. an integer must fall between -32.768 and +32.767; if a calculation exceeds this range. the IBM PC converts the result to a double-precision real number, accurately represented to 16 digits.

…aritmética entera con 200 dígitos de precisión. (También añadiré que igual elevar un número de nueve cifras al cuadrado está más allá de las habilidades típicas de los niños de diez años de edad de hoy en día… y que no me parece ningún problema que sea así, por otro lado.)

En nuevas tecnologías: ¡las pantallas planas!

TWO FLAT-DISPLAY TECHNOLOGIES No one likes the bulk and fragility that arise from the classical cathode-ray tube's (CRTs) bulbous vacuum-tube/electron gun structure. Yet in cost. versatility, and quality of display. the technology of the CRT has proved hard to beat. At present. there are three leading alternatives to CRTs: the liquid-crystal display (LCD), the gas-plasma-discharge panel. and the electroluminescent display (ELD) . All of these are flat screens, and the display modules are a couple of inches thick at most. Currently. each excels in certain applications; none has yet attained the general-purpose utility of the CRT but efforts to improve all three are continuing. The LCD has become familiar through its use in wristwatches, calculators, and most of the current generation of briefcase-size portable computers. It is the most common flat-screen alternative to the CRT today. The LCD's frugal power requirements are especially valued. (See references I and 2.) But the liquid-crystal display has its limitations. Not emitting light, it must scatter or absorb light supplied by other sources. Furthermore, the constraints of pixel (picture element) decay times and scanning rates cause problems in the larger sizes preferred for computer work, notably lack of contrast, and adjustment of the viewing angle is usually critical. Also. current LCD technology can produce only a poor gray scale. The other two display technologies, though less familiar, show promise of eventually supplanting the CRT in several workaday contexts. In this article I will focus on gas-plasma...

Ni los paneles de gas-plasma ni las pantallas electroluminiscentes eran la solución al problema, pero el artículo, hay que reconocerlo, miraba al futuro con ganas. Uno podría pensar que la siguiente pieza también lo hacía…

Navigation Putting the microcomputer to work at sea A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to do some navigating for the U.S. Navy. At that time, I had to use a variety of instruments and consult several books of tables to chart my course. Now, with a portable microcomputer and a few navigation instruments you can find your way across any ocean. Not long ago, only large ships could carry computers with the precision to navigate. Now, navigators of the smallest sailing craft have precise, low-power microcomputer systems available...

…pero no, no se trata de un avance del GPS, sino de una sesuda explicación de los fundamentos de un programa para ejecutar los cálculos trigonométricos para navegar por los océanos (esta vez el programa, para el TRS-80 III, era lo suficientemente grande como para no estar su código en la revista, y tener que descargarse vía modem). Qué cosas.

Y llegamos, ahora sí, a la informática «de oferta». La cosa comienza no apta para cardíacos, con los esquemas para hacer un terminal de 80 columas para el Commodore 64 (que, amiga lectora, tenía una pantalla de 40 por 25 caracteres)…

THE COMMODORE 64 80-COLUMN TERMINAL BY JOHN C. FIELD , GREG RICHARDS, AND ERIC BEENFELDT If you've got an EPROM programmer handy, build this modification for the Commodore 64 THE motivation for this project was the 10 Motorola 68000-based Educational Computer boards we have here at the University of Maine at Orono. Although we had the boards. we had no terminals to use with them. We didn't want to buy expensive new terminals, so we looked at alternatives, including building Steve Ciarcia's Term-Mite ST. However, we thought modified Commodore 64s looked like the best alternative because we can use them for microcomputer experiments when we're not using them as terminals. We modified the Commodore 64s by building an RS-232C converter card for the Commodore's expansion port and a video card for its user port. Both of the cards are shown in photo 1. The video card contains a 2K-byte block of screen memory on a 6116 chip; a 684 5 cathode-ray tube controller (CRTC); various timing, logic, and mixing circuits: a character EPROM (erasable programmable read-only memory), and a program EPROM. The RS -232C converter card brings the Commodore's TTL (transistor-transistor logic) voltage-level expansion port up to RS-232C voltage levels...

Porque, efectivamente, la frase «si tienes un programador de EPROMs a mano» era una frase que daba mucho menos miedo hace cuarenta años que ahora…

Y qué mejor manera de cerrar marzo del 85 que hablando de gráficos 3D baratos (bueno, hay un artículo sobre XLISP e inteligencia artificial, pero confieso que no me atrevo):

BUDGET 3D GRAPHICS Plotting three-dimensional surfaces on a computer can be valuable to a mathematician or scientist. It can also produce visually pleasing geometric forms. Unfortunately, it is not easy to write a program to generate such plots, especially if you want to include such niceties as hidden-line removal and the ability to rotate your plot around the three axes. However, Bridge Software (31 Champa St., Newton Upper Falls. MA 02164. (617) 244-2306) markets a rather versatile program to make generating 3-D plots easy. The program is called SURF, and it runs under PC-DOS 2 .0 or higher on an IBM PC or PCjr with l 28K bytes of RAM (random-access read-write memory) and a color monitor. SURF will also plot the surfaces in high resolution on an Epson printer equipped with Graftrax. if you have 256K bytes of RAM. The package includes two versions of the program-one that supports the 8087 NDP (numerical data processor) chip and one that does not. Best of all. SURF (with its 16-page user manual) is available for $35 plus $1. 50 shipping and handling. To use SURF. you just enter the equation of the surface that you want to plot. If there are any singularities in the plot. you also enter them. In most cases. you can then let the package automatically set the parameters necessary to draw the plot by selecting the "auto-graph" feature from the menu. You can rotate the figure around any axis by selecting the appropriate menu item and specifying the number of degrees to rotate (rotation is not done in real time). You can alter the viewpoint or the position of the projection plane as well. In addition, you can stretch the 2-D picture in the horizontal or vertical direction (thus distorting the plot), or you can change the scale of the x-, y-, or z-axis to accentuate a gradual change in one of these directions. SURF is also sold in a package with two other plotting programs for $90 plus $1. 50 shipping and handling. The CURVES program plots one or two 2-D curves in polar, rectangular, or parametric coordinates with up to four parameters and features a movable "magnifying window" that allows you to repeatedly large part of the plot to graphically solve simultaneous equations. The DIFFS program plots any ordinary first-order differential equation as a tangent field.

¿Qué son 35 dólares de la época (unos 105, actualizando la inflación) por poder generar esos gráficos ochenteros?

Gráficas de dunciones tridimensionales como (sin(x*x+2*y*y)*exp(-x*x-y*y), o x*y*(x*x-y*y)/(x*x+y*y)

En fin… ya os avanzaba que no era el mejor de los meses en Byte, este marzo de 1985. Os puedo avanzar, eso sí, que abril vine calentito, con número dedicado a… ¡la inteligencia articial!

Si queréis adelantaros, siempre podéis pasaros por https://vintageapple.org/byte a curiosear. Y si no, pues… hasta el mes que viene. O podéis dar un paso hacia el remoto pasado de febrero del 85.

Byte, febrero del 85

Veamos qué nos depara la edición de febrero de 1985 de la revista…

La portada tiene el tema de "computación y las ciencias". La ilustración es una doble hélice de ADN, pero la segunda hélice ha sido reemplazada por un cable de datos plano.

Vamos a comenzar con la sección de cartas, esta vez:

ICONS ARE ARCANE Circa 5000 years ago, writing was invented in ancient Mesopotamia. This earliest known script, cuneiform, was derived from pictographic symbols that became stylized and standardized in form. Eventually it became mixed with phonetic elements until it was almost entirely phonetic. Our alphabet is most probably ultimately derived from ancient Egyptian-also originally a pictographic system. The point is this: Over thousands of years a phonetic and finally alphabetic system was developed. To anyone who has gone through the painful process of learning cuneiform or Egyptian, the superiority of the alphabet is readily apparent. A pictographic system (Apple's "icons") requires that the user learn many, many symbols. My contention is that though users may find icons more "user friendly," ultimately, as systems and software become more complex, the icon system will become more unwieldy and arcane than present systems. As a humanist who uses computers extensively in my work. I would like to see user interfaces developed for micros that are faster, more streamlined ("elegant" ), and smarter ("knowledge-based") to aid in the learning process. It doesn't take the uninitiated user long to grow impatient with the Mac. ANN MARCHANT Berkeley, CA

Servidor es un fan de las interfaces textuales y de controlar las cosas con el teclado como el que más. Pero, Ann, donde quiera que estés, espero que hayas olvidado tu clarividente carta… (¿Podría yo haber escrito una carta similar? No pienso responder si no es en presencia de mi abogado.)

Saltemos ahora al What’s New: y esta maravilla de portátil:

Quadram's Datavue 25 is a 14-pound portable computer with a 360K-byte 5 1/4-inch disk drive and a pivoting 80-character by 25-line LCD. It features an 83-key keyboard that communicates with the computer through infrared signals. The Datavue 25 has an 80C88 microprocessor, a real-time clock, 128K bytes of memory and serial and parallel ports. It is powered either by an AC adapter / recharger or by built-in batteries that last up to four hours. Monochrome graphics are available in either 640 by 200 resolution or 320 by 200 resolution with four levels of gray. An internal 300-bps modem is an option. Memory can be expanded to 2 6K bytes using 64K-byte chips or to 1 megabyte using 256 Kbyte chips. Ouadram also plans to release an external IBM PC-compatible bus expansion chassis and an external second floppy-disk drive. The Datavue 25 should be available in March for $2195
Las cosas que te podías comprar hace 40 años por apenas 2200 dólares de la época. Los buenos viejos tiempos… (El teclado inalámbrico, por cierto, es todo un detalle.)

Pregunta: ¿recogerá César todo lo que tenga que ver con Commodore? Respuesta:

Commodore's B128 runs any program written for the Commodore 64 and has a number of additional capabilities. This system has 128K bytes of memory, expandable to 512 K, and it can display 80 columns by 25 lines of text in color on an optional monitor. In addition to the 8500 processor, which is used to run Commodore software. the B128 includes a 2-MHz Z80 coprocessor to run most CP/M-80 programs. The 92-key keyboard has a numeric keypad, 4 cursor keys. 4 numbered shiftable function keys, and 4 special purpose function keys. Like the 64, the B128 can display 16 colors and 8 independently movable sprites and can generate sound in three voices each with a range of eight octaves. The B128 comes with the same serial, expansion, user, and joystick ports as the 64: it also includes video interfaces for a standard television or an RGB or NTSC monitor. Commodore also introduced a faster disk drive for the Commodore 64 and B128. It transfers data to the 64 at 320 cps, or to the B128 at 2000 cps, or, when running CP/M. 3200 cps. The Commodore B128 will sell for less than $400.

Buenas ideas sobre el papel que no lo son en la práctica… Todo el software del Commodore 64, más CP/M, más un ordenador nuevo, por menos de 400 dólares, deberían haber servido para continuar con la misión de Commodore de dar más por menos y llevar la informática personal a cada casa de planeta. En la práctica, CP/M ya había muerto a manos de MS-DOS y el tener todo el software del 64 hizo que básicamente nadie desarrollara nada específico para el 128… Dice la wikipedia que vendieron dos millones y medio de unidades, que no está nada mal, pero en la práctica, me da a mí, deberían contabilizarse más como Commodores 64 que otra cosa. (Por cierto: «maravillosa» la velocidad de los discos nuevos, ¿eh?)

Pasemos ahora a nuestro leitmotiv «no hay nada nuevo bajo el sol»:

Satellite Broadcast Network has announced satellite service that will transmit financial and news information to personal computer owners. SBN plans to have the service operational in May. You will need a 12-GHz satellite-receive antenna, a low-noise amplifier, a solid-state receiver, and SBN's demodulator; all are available from SBN for $695. SBN will also charge a fee for access to each type of information. starting at about $25 per month. SBN will use multiple 9600-bps channels. Some channels will broadcast news and weather information, others will transmit stock and commodity prices. One channel might permit down loading of software sample programs, while another could include special-interest database information. A user could place a request for special database information with modems and telephone lines, but the response could be broadcast via satellite to avoid phone charges. A special header code would ensure that only one person could decode the information.

¿He oido Starlink? (No, no es lo mismo, que la tecnología de la época solo permitía un modelo broadcast. Pero.) Y vamos a seguir con ello, con una segunda misiva de los lectores, en esta ocasión de la sección «Ask Byte»:

Dear Steve. I am planning to build a house and would like to provide for computer control in my home. Can you offer any suggestions? PAUL W. MARSH Urbana. IL With the almost daily announcement of some computerized device, it makes sense to provide a means for installation in the home. However, it is difficult to know what devices will ultimately be required. I will be presenting a series of three articles, beginning in April, covering the construction of the Circuit Cellar home control system. -Steve

¿Alguien tiene los ánimos para contarles a Paul y Steve que, cuarenta años más tarde, todavía quedan tantísimas cosas por resolver en esto de las «smart homes«?

La sección de crítica de libros de Byte, ya lo hemos visto en alguna ocasión, tenía buen ojo para localizar libros de largo recorrido:

ALAN TURING: THE ENIGMA Andrew Hodges Simon & Schuster New York: 1983 600 pages. $24.95 And thus it was that... thinking in his spare time, an English homosexual atheist mathematician... conceived of the computer. This startling claim is at the heart of the first major biography of Alan Mathison TuJring (1912-1954), a man whose legacies include the Turing machine and the Turing test. Andrew Hodges has uncovered the genius of this complicated man and recorded the evolution of his ideas within the unique context of the tumultuous times in which he lived. Hodges's fascinating study adds new information to the history of computer science, counters it's all American bias, and claims a rightful place for the eccentric Alan Turing...

Sí, el libro en el que presuntamente se basa la peli de 2014 con Benedict Cumberbatch haciendo de Turing (me consta que se lo leyeron, pero menudo destrozo le hicieron). Los fans de Turing, por favor, no se retiren y sigan leyendo:

THE BIRTH OF A COMPUTER CONDUCTED BY JOHN C. NASH An interview with James H. Wilkinson on the building of a computer designed by Alan Turing The story of the construction of the first computers is both fascinating and instructive. Understanding the insights and decisions of computing's innovators may explain how the technology evolved to its present state and may illuminate the directions it might take in the future. Among computing's innovators were Alan Turing (see page 65 for a review of a Turing biography) and the men he assembled to help him build a computer based on his Universal machine. Turing's team included James H. Wilkinson, a mathematician who had studied at Cambridge and worked for the British government as a ballistics engineer doing numerical analysis of explosives problems during World War II. This interview was conducted for BYTE by Dr. John C. Nash and took place on July 13, 1984. at the Ninth Householder Gatlinburg Conference held at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. BYTE: Dr. Wilkinson. how did you become involved with Alan Turing and his computer? JHW: Shortly after the war. I discovered that a Mathematics Division was being set up at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL). I got in touch with E. T. Goodwin. who had been a colleague of mine at Cambridge in the Maths Lab. He was one of the first to join this new division. He invited me to have a chat with him at NPL in Bushy Park, Teddington. and there I met Turing, who I knew already by reputation as something of an eccentric. Turing and I had a long discussion. and I was very impressed with him. Presumably he must have been reasonably satisfied with me since he said if I came to NPL he would like me to work with him. I think that this offer and my friendship with Goodwin were the decisive factors. So in May 46, six and a half years after I joined the government service. I moved to NPL (as I thought then, temporarily) in stead of going back to Cambridge University. Turing had worked alone on the logical design of an electronic computer. When I arrived, he had presented his plans to what you might call a "review committee" at NPL. This consisted of a small group of Fellows from the Royal Society. The committee decided that Turing's ideas were basically sound, and they gave him a mandate to go ahead and recruit the appropriate staff. Up to that time everything associated with the project had been done by Turing himself. He was a man with an original and inventive mind. His design had practically nothing in common with the group of computers which arose out of discussions at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert had already successfully completed the construction of the first electronic computer, the ENIAC (this was not a stored-program computer), and their influence was at its peak. When I went to NPL in May '46. Turing was working on what he called version 5 of [his] computer, though I never saw any documents relating to versions 1 to 4. Turing was not a great documenter, and no doubt the earlier versions were buried in the rubble on his desk. Perhaps I should attempt to give some idea of the flavor of version 5, a typical Turingesque creation. It was... (continued)

Es obvio a posteriori, pero a mí me da un cierto vértigo pensar que, teniendo yo once añitos, estuviese vivo un colaborador de Alan Turing (y ni siquiera era tan mayor: tenía 65 años, aunque fallecería al año siguiente), y que yo podría haber leído esa entrevista por aquel entonces (que Byte entraba con una cierta regularidad en mi casa).

El John C. Nash que firma la piez, por cierto, no es el John C. Nash que por aquel entonces estaba a punto de comenzar a trabajar para Xerox y que acabaría fundando una compañía llamada Adobe que quizás os suene. Este era «solo» un profesor de la Universidad de Otawa dedicado a la computación científica. Para completar la lista de nombres famosos de la entrevista y los saltos atrás en el tiempo difíciles de digerir, aparece en ella un Charles Darwin bisnieto de ese Charles Darwin.

La entrevista es bastante técnica y no sé yo si interesará mucho al público en general, pero aparece en ella un «cabreo» que contribuyó a llevar a Turing de Cambridge a Manchester, donde acabó siendo condenado por su homosexualidad, resultando en su suicidio. Quién sabe, igual sin ese cabreo la historia de la ciencia del siglo XX habría sido diferente (Turing, en sus últimos años, se dedicó a investigar en temas de biología (en serio) que hace solo unos pocos años que se han recuperado).

En la sección «cosas que hoy son obvias pero que hace cuarenta años había que explicar con detalle», hoy toca… el correo electrónico (bueno, quién sabe, al ritmo al que vamos igual dentro de diez años tenemos que volver a explicar qué es el correo electrónico a gente joven que no la ha usado jamás en su adolescencia y que sufren un cierto shock traumático al tener que usar algo que no sea mensajería instantánea y redes sociales).

Software Review E-mail for the Masses MCI Mail and Western Union's EasyLink By Wayne Rash Jr. Two giants of the telecommunications industry have started electronic mail services. MCI Telecommunications Corporation's MCI Mail and Western Union Telegraph Company's Easy Link offer the services to individual consumers and businesses. Both services are heavily advertised, and both promise to open the world of easy and inexpensive instant communications to nearly anyone. Only one fully delivers on this promise. MCI MAIL MCI Mail is part of the same corporation that provides MCI telephone communications. MCI has expanded its operations to include electronic mail. billing itself as the "nation's new postal system":· You can access MCI Mail with a local phone call in 64 cities around the country and with a toll free number to its Washington, DC, headquarters. You can use these numbers with your computer to transmit letters and documents to other MCI Mail subscribers in the U.S. and Canada or to telex addresses anywhere in the world. If your recipient does not have access to MCI Mail or Telex, you can have a paper copy of the communication mailed or delivered. As of January 1, 1985. MCI Mail service was available in 41 countries. MCI Mail's hard-copy communications are prepared using a laser printer at 18 locations in the U.S. Courier delivery is available within four hours in some locations, and overnight courier delivery is available in most major metropolitan areas. Delivery by mail usually takes two business days. Because they are prepared on a laser printer, the MCI letters look like they were done on a letter-quality printer and then photocopied. You can have your letterhead and signature placed on file with MCI so they can appear on your letters. Otherwise, the MCI Mail letterhead will appear on the first page of your letter. You can log on to MCI Mail with either a 300- or 1200-bps (bit per second) modem. ...

Acérquese al artículo por la curiosidad de qué habrá que explicar sobre el correo electrónico… y quédese por joyas como

  • «Puedes acceder a MCI Mail con una llamada local en 64 ciudades del país y con un número gratuito en su sede de Wahsington DC». No, queridas: el correo electrónico no «es» un programa. No «es» una URL. Es… ¡un número de teléfono!
  • «Puedes usar estos números con tu ordenador para transmitir cartas y documentos a otros suscriptores de MCI Mail en los Estados Unidos y Canadá o a direcciones de Telex de todo el mundo». 🤯
  • «Si el receptor no tiene ni MCI Mail ni Telex, se le puede enviar una copia en papel de la comunicación».

¿Cómo os habéis quedado? A ver si creíais que os iba a poner el artículo así porque sí…

(Por cierto, a ambos servicios se podía acceder con módems de 300 ¡o hasta 1200! bits por segundo.)

Y cerramos con otro clásico: «artículos que hoy harían explotar cabezas»:

Programming Insight Simultaneous Equations with Lotus 1-2-3 By Jan- Henrik Johnsson An example from Macroeconomics SPREADSHEETS ARE amazingly useful in a number of applications. In this article. I will show how macroeconomic models can be formulated as simple spreadsheet programs as long as they can be defined using just linear simultaneous equations. I will then go on to show how to solve such equations numerically using standard spreadsheet commands. My inspiration for this article came after reading an article by Patrick E. McGuire (see reference 3). He published a simple BASIC program that solved simultaneous equations analytically. and he therefore seemed to have solved the problem I was in terested in. But programming everything in BASIC from now on seemed to me to be a step backward. Was there a more general approach? I will illustrate a different method by using only the familiar spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3. I will use it to solve systems of simultaneous linear equations through iteration (successive recalculations) rather than through successive transformations of the equations. The technique demonstrated here is in fact quite general and can...

Publique usted hoy un artículo en una revista generalista de informática (por muy introductorio que sea) sobre modelado macroeconómico y resolución de sistemas de ecuaciones con métodos iterativos, publique…

En fin. Como siempre, el mes que viene, más (o no). Y si os queréis ir a la fuente, https://vintageapple.org/byte/.

PS Para seguir leyendo, puedes dar un paso atrás, a enero, o adelante, a marzo.