finally finished the loan from mr tiny as the next "night-reading" has already arrived.

after all i know more about severo ornstein - at least about his role at parc - from the book "dealers of lightning"; which made me curious to read more. for sure his intention was to tell about linc, and the battle over timesharing concept versus "inteRactive real time use" which meant back then personal academic use of a machine. a lot of names in there and some nice recalls.

ibm 1620( CADET=can't add doesn't even try; after that the name was dropped)

ornstein started at bbn to work together with seymour papert to implement logo - but didn't share the conviction of his colleagues, that computer can revolutionize education. (p160)

together with bob kahn he worked on the hardware of imp.

the book is one of the rare sources where bbn doesn't get all the blame for what was wrong/slow with arpanet. for ornstein they tried their best but were fighting with what honeywell supplied. wondering who has written the honeywell ddp 516 story ...

in regard to ibm and their recently all-over-quoted birthday story:

as happened on so many previous occasions, they were practically the last to "get in". personal computers were fundamentally anathema to ibm thinking, so it is hardly surprising that ibm climbed onto the personal computing bandwagen late in the game. the initial success of pc's was due not to any significant conceptual contribution, but rather to ibm's giant size which swamped everyone else once they entered the marked ... it's been suggested that ibm was rescued from the dustbin of history only by the millions of dollars government money that poured into their coffers from air force contracts associated with sage in the 1950s. sic transit, and all that. | severo m. ornstein, computing in the middle ages. a view from the trenches 1955 - 1983

one of the important developments of those days also was the idea to store the bits that represent an image in the computer's memory. nowadays some hope that principle will boost speech recognicion forward, one of the first applications computer scientists dreamed of, back then in the middle ages.