triangledesbermudes.org

Many members of that original team, now grayer and more slow-of-gait than they were during the Eisenhower administration, filled an auditorium Thursday night at the Computer History Museum to reminisce and consider the legacy they bequeathed. Fred Brooks, who was a system planner for Stretch, and Harwood Kolsky, who worked on product planning, later joined Allen on stage for a panel discussion moderated by The New York Times reporter Steve Lohr.

When Stretch came along, IBM, which controlled about 70 percent of the computer market and about 90 percent of the punch-card business, was already fending off charges it exerted monopoly control. Brooks said that when Watson ordered the original price cut to $10 million, “that put it at under cost and violated antitrust…antitrust was a fact of everyday life in all our thinking.”

The first system was developed for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory under contract to the Atomic Energy Commission

(Credit:
IBM)

“All depends on your perspective,” recalled an amused Fran Allen, not at all regretting her participation in a now-storied mid-1950s supercomputer project popularly known as “Stretch.”

Left to right: Stretch collaborators Fran Allen, Fred Brooks, and Harwood Kolsky, and The New York Times’ Steve Lohr.

Stretch: announced April 1960 and withdrawn in 1961.

Kolsky recalled the initial reaction to Watson’s decision, saying that the project’s engineers thought it served as a potential death knell to future supercomputer development.

“It’s a pretty good model of a highly ambitious program that, at the time, was considered having not met its objectives,” he said. “But when you look at some of the things that came out of that effort and how it’s influenced the computer industry today, (Stretch) has had a profound, indirect, benefit to this industry.”

(Credit:
Computer History Museum)

Even though IBM only built nine of the machines, Stretch left behind a legacy that remains a source of pride to the participants who were present at its creation.

“We were about 300 people working in Poughkeepsie (New York),” said Kolsky. “Individual teams met frequently. That’s why it’s hard to tell who invented what. Generally, morale was high. You wouldn’t know it by looking up here, but it was a young person’s group…there were only two people over 40. Most members of the team were in their 20s and 30s.”

Of course, it was anything but. In fact, the lessons learned from Stretch paved the way for the subsequent development of IBM’s System/360, which turned out to be a smash success. Meanwhile, the innovations invented for Stretch subsequently entered the wider world of mainstream computing.

In January 1956, work on the Stretch project formally got underway with the goal of building a supercomputer to replace IBM’s 704 supercomputer. The resulting product, called the 7030, as the Stretch was officially known, could perform 100 billion computations a day and handle half a million instructions per second.

(Credit:
Computer History Museum) So how does it feel to be associated with one of Big Blue’s biggest failures?

“A lot of what went into that effort was later helpful to the rest of the industry,” Allen said with the sort of understatement you’d expect from a former winner of the prestigious Turing Award. Fact is that Allen and the 300-some people who collaborated on Stretch invented many of the concepts that later became standard computer technologies. The short list includes multiprogramming, pipelining, memory protection, memory interleaving, and the eight-bit byte.

With the exception of industry cognoscenti–and the relative handful of folks responsible for engineering and managing the project–Stretch remains a footnote for most people. But maybe that’s starting to change. To underscore the moment, IBM flew in one of its up-and-comers, senior VP of Development and Manufacturing Rod Adkins, to introduce the panel. Earlier in the evening, I sat down for a conversation with Adkins, who placed Stretch in its historical context.

But they were in for a shock. IBM’s then-CEO, Thomas Watson, Jr. judged the 7030 to be a failure. Even though the machine was about 30 to 40 times faster than other systems, IBM won a bid submitted to Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory on its pledge to build a supercomputer that was at least 100 times faster than the 704.

In fact, IBM had signed off on a consent decree with the Justice Department in 1956. The company eventually shipped nine systems to customers around the world but then closed the production line forever.

Computer historians should also note the following: Stretch remained the most powerful computer in the world until 1964. Some failure.

Photos: Gadgets that broke our hearts

Sure, Valentine’s Day is a time for long-stem roses and “I Love You!” teddy bears. Yet as this annual day of compulsory romance approaches, some people find themselves reflecting not only on the current object of their shmoopiness, but on their past heartbreaks.

And now that we’ve shared our stories of personal heartache, be sure to tell us in the TalkBack section which gadgets have left you bitter.

It’s not just sweethearts who stomp on our dreams, though–technology can, too. So put down that Hallmark card and those pink balloons and scroll through the gallery below to see which gadgets have broken Crave contributors’ hearts–or at least made us question our undying love. (Naturally, gadgets besides the ones mentioned in this collection have hurt us, as well. But sometimes the wounds are just too fresh to talk about.)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Snipd’s real threat still comes from Evernote and FriendFeed. Evernote has a product that lets you clip standard bits of the Web while offering a viable alternative to paid word processing applications. Meanwhile, FriendFeed brings a large team of developers (including ex-Googlers), which results in a rapid release cycle. It also offers a stream of content that flows even when users are not implicitly using it. To get past these two the best thing Snipd can do is offer better tools to make Web clippings that more engaging to make and read.

Snipd co-founder Alex Schliker tells me the amount of adult content Snipd has brought in has been so substantial that he and his partner Emil Gilliam are working on a separate site called Stripd that will house it all and keep it out of Snipd’s public feed. This could end up getting the pair more traffic than Snipd, considering no-one has really filled that market niche.

See also: Yoono, Clipmarks, JetEye, and Diigo

Snipd lets you clip bits and pieces of a site to share the parts you want.

Besides its utility as a social-clipping tool, Snipd lets you mark whatever page you’re on for reading later. This emulates some of the versatility of the popular
Firefox Extension Read It Later (which updated this morning). However, in Snipd’s case, you get e-mailed the entire page.

One of the things that separates it from something like Evernote, is that your snippings can be found in a public directory–at least by default. It fully supports keeping items private, which you can change later on. However, you’re encouraged to publicly share things for the social element. Just like FriendFeed people can follow you and track your latest additions in a chronological flow, complete with comments and favorites.

Snipd, a Web clippings service we profiled in September, has just opened up to everyone. Its claim to fame is that it lets you clip bits of the Web including text, images, and videos, all without having to download any software or register for an account. The first time you use it via its tiny bookmarklet, it simply creates an account for you, which can be claimed later on.

After all, with Virgin America’s new Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi service, consumers could just as easily donate online to another cause if they’re feeling charitable while airborne.

Consumers could get nitpicky about each individual project. Donating to IdleAire sounds fine, but where is that electricity the truckers’ tap into coming from? Is the local electricity being used generated from a renewable resource or coal?

There’s also the world food shortage, and many poverty and disease-fighting nonprofits struggling from a lack of available charity due to the tough economy. Consumers might place environmental causes at the bottom of their charity list if they themselves are limited to what they can give this year.

Perhaps more promising is the second tact Virgin American plans to take.

Then, again, it’s been argued that some water and food shortages can be directly linked to environmental changes in those problem areas. Will consumers feel there’s a long view to be seen and donate toward offsetting pollution with that hope of improving things down the road?

One of the projects from that list that Virgin America chose to support, for example, is IdleAire.

Through Carbonfund.org, the money Virgin America collects from consumers will be directed toward projects sanctioned by the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) official CarbonOffsetList.org.

(Credit:
Virgin America)

IdleAire lets truckers connect their cabins to electricity sources at rest stops, rather than keep their engines idling to keep their power on. The process saves each trucker about a gallon of diesel per hour, according to Virgin America.

Many other airlines have tried offering carbon offsets with lackluster results. Virgin Atlantic, admitting its online option wasn’t getting many takers, announced last year it would try guilt by offering an offset in the air alongside the drinks.

Will a view of the clouds (and the occasional smog ruining skyline views) shame the guilty into donating? I’m just not sure.

While IdleAire sounds like a practical project, it’s questionable whether consumers will go for it.

While it’s not in place yet, the airline plans to offer an onboard option. Through the touch-screen televisions on their flights, consumers will have a second chance to donate once their flight is already in the air.

Virgin America announced Thursday it will offer customers the option to pay a voluntary fee when booking their ticket, which will go toward supporting carbon offset projects.

The U.S. domestic airline based in California, of which Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is a minority share investor, has partnered with Carbonfund.org on the effort.

In security circles, monoculture is a key concept. Roughly speaking, whenever a technology–Windows, for instance–is dominant it becomes a big target to attack. You attack the target and wreak a lot of havoc. Windows is a monoculture. If Windows is wrecked, the damage is far and wide just because of market share.

(Credit: Google, via Friendlybit.com)

Without diversification, companies are at risk. In this respect, all companies should diversify a little. Say Windows is attacked and effectively wiped out. The all-Windows shop is wiped out too. But if that company is 80 percent Windows, 15 percent open source, and 5 percent
Mac, suddenly the prospects look better.

The monoculture issue is a lot like a pure-bred dog with health issues. Take golden retrievers or black labs. They are popular dogs. And they are bred too much. They have bad hips, arthritis, and a host of other ailments. If you want a healthy dog, you get a mutt. Your IT infrastructure should be a little bit of mutt too. Diversify your apps and providers whenever possible even if it’s only to keep the big dogs honest.

ZDNet blogger Ryan Naraine in his Google coverage on Saturday foreshadowed the monoculture question. He said the Google incident “provides a harsh lesson on our total dependence on a single vendor/search provider.” Is Google a monoculture? If Google isn’t a Web monoculture today, it soon will be. Google is becoming a search monopoly, and it can extend that dominance into other areas. Just look at the reaction to its malware screw-up. There was one hour when we couldn’t use Google–and everyone noticed quickly. If Ask.com–or Live Search for that matter–had a similar malware tagging glitch, the hubbub wouldn’t have existed.

What’s worrisome is that monocultures exist everywhere. The goal for every IT vendor is to become your monoculture. Windows is a monoculture. In enterprise software, there’s SAP and Oracle–that’s a duopoly, but depending on the company, one of those two suppliers runs the business. Cisco Systems is a networking monoculture. Pick an industry or technology, and there’s some form of lock-in.

Google tagged the Web as malware on Saturday and was rendered useless for about an hour. The search giant blamed the incident on human error.

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

Was the ruckus over Google’s screw-up overblown? Possibly. But to many folks, Google is the window to the Internet. If folks can’t google something, they are simply lost. That fact alone probably qualifies Google as a Web monoculture, although it may be a touch premature to make a definitive call. However, Google touches everything, and frankly that’s a bit worrisome.

Perhaps the reaction to Google’s bad weekend was overblown, but it’s always a good time to ponder how monoculture affects your IT infrastructure.

If you take this argument to the Web, the implications are clear. We should all diversify from our Google habit at least a little. Ditto if you’re a small business totally reliant on Salesforce.com. In fact, any technology supplier–Web, SaaS, on-premise or otherwise–that represents more than 90 percent of your infrastructure portfolio needs some competition.

And the pressure for enterprises to become a monoculture is immense. How many times have you heard some CIO yapping about standardizing on one technology because it’s allegedly more cost effective? When it comes to vendors, they want one throat to choke. The downside: what you save in costs and complexity you lose in immunity.

Here are Google's results for a search on 'Google' Saturday morning.

Today, hardware cycles and the video game industry itself are becoming too commercialized for some of the more hardcore gamers. Some believe that the industry has sold out and the idea of fun gameplay has been replaced with fast profits. It’s tough to argue with that logic given the state of affairs in 2008.

Worse, the Dreamcast was plagued by poor third-party support and even major titles like Shenmue were met with lackluster excitement. Everyone wanted to play the Playstation 2–it offered better graphics capability, a DVD player, and better third-party support. All the while, the Dreamcast sat on store shelves.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

It may have failed and Sega may be out of the hardware business. But for me, the Dreamcast is still the centerpiece of my gaming.

Although few outside the video game community noticed, September 9 was the nine-year anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast’s launch. I can still remember holding the Official Dreamcast Magazine in my hands with a huge picture of Sonic on the front just waiting for the console to be released. And once it was released, I couldn’t have been happier.

See, I don’t really care that the Dreamcast was torn apart during the last console generation. To me, the Dreamcast was the real winner because it provided me with the highest level of satisfaction and the best all-around gameplay. It may not support an online gaming environment like we’re used to today and it won’t look any better on my HDTV, but it can do something that few consoles since its release have been able to do: provide me with a fun factor that eclipses all else because it’s designed with the gamer in mind.

Of course, it lacked some of the necessities that could have made it more relevant in succeeding years: it didn’t offer a DVD player like the Playstation 2 and although it had connectivity options, Ethernet support wasn’t built into the console, which put it at a significant disadvantage once Sony, and especially Microsoft, entered that generation’s console war.

But I digress. I’m not saying that the Dreamcast is the best console of its generation because it sold extremely well or that it provided more functions than its competitors. I’m saying that the Dreamcast is the best console of its generation because it captured the essence of gaming and provided users with an experience that, in my mind, wasn’t rivaled before it was released and hasn’t been rivaled since.

Say what you will, but what other console in recent memory has been able to captivate a cult following like the Dreamcast has? What other console in the past few generations was truly ahead of its time while still providing gamers with an experience they actually wanted? And most importantly, what other console in the past few generations has been able to leave a lasting impression on so many people across the globe?

OK, so maybe the Dreamcast didn’t really win the last console war. But who cares? The way I see it, the Dreamcast was the best console of them all. If you wanted to play great games, one of the best places to do so was on the Dreamcast. It had Shenmue, Samba de Amigo, 2K Sports, Skies of Arcadia, Jet Set Radio, and countless other titles like the Sonic and Crazy Taxi series that truly made an impression on the lives of many gamers. And we also can’t forget that many of those series still live on in today’s consoles.

But unfortunately, I was (and I’m probably still) in the minority. Back then, Sega was off its game. It was trying to recover from the Saturn debacle and the countless other false starts it had succumb to over the years with products like the Sega CD and arguably, the GameGear.

Happy Birthday, Dreamcast. We miss you.

The Dreamcast seemed different to me, though. Unlike previous Sega consoles, which only copied competing products and failed to truly grasp what gamers wanted, the Great White Beauty sitting under my TV was different. For once, Sega was ahead of its time; the Dreamcast had the best graphics of any console in the space at that point, offered compelling games that people actually wanted to play, and even included support for online gaming.

And in the end, the Dreamcast finally died before its time and Sega was forced to retreat from the console space and try its luck in software. It was a sad time for Dreamcast Fanboys, but they got through it. How you ask? By keeping it connected to their HDTVs at all times and telling themselves that no matter what sales figures say, the Dreamcast really did win the last console war.

Vik Singh's TweetNews application shows how Twitter can be used to find the most pertinent breaking news.

Here’s Web 2.0 at its finest: A Yahoo programmer has combined his own project, Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), with Twitter and Google App Engine to create a new way to determine what news is both new and important.

BOSS supplies Yahoo search results in a form that can be repackaged, processed, and published for free, though Yahoo asks for revenue sharing for popular services.

(Credit:
Vik Singh/TweetNews/CNET News)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

The service, called TweetNews, presents Yahoo news search results in a different way, using results from the same search on Twitter to determine what should get high placement, according to a blog posting about it by BOSS engineer Vik Singh.

“Twitter as a ranking signal for search freshness may prove to be very useful if constructed properly,” Singh said in the blog.

Freshness (especially in the context of search) is a challenging problem. Traditional PageRank style algorithms don’t really work here as it takes time for a fresh URL to garner enough links to beat an older high ranking URL. One approach is to use cluster sizes as a feature for measuring the popularity of a story (i.e. Google News). Although quite effective IMO this may not be fast enough all the time. For the cluster size to grow requires other sources to write about the same story. Traditional media can be slow however, especially on local topics.

TweetNews combines human interest, as judged by Twitter users, with a measure of authority, as judged by publications that make the cut for Yahoo News search. The application also includes an expandable “related tweets” button that supplies links to people’s Twitter references to the various news stories.

The application isn’t just a novel demo, though. It’s an attempt to solve a challenging problem in determining what breaking news is most pertinent to people. Here’s how Singh describes the challenge:

I remember when I saw breaking Twitter messages describing the California Wildfires. When I searched Google/Yahoo/Microsoft right at that moment I barely got anything (

Here’s a screenshot of the search in action, using the terms “hudson plane” to illustrate the news items Twitter users find most pertinent.

Yahoo BOSS engineer Vik Singh

The application is publicly available as a service running on Google App Engine–not the first time Singh has demonstrated BOSS ideas on his main competitor’s application hosting system. Google hosts applications on App Engine for free, but only within various limits, and Singh’s However, the application exceeded its quota within a few hours of his posting.