Category: history
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Christmas books for 2024
My rate of book reading has picked up significantly this year. The following are the really interesting books I read, as is usually the case, most were not published in this year. I have enjoyed Grayson Perry’s TV programs on the art world, so I bought his book “Playing to the Gallery: Helping Contemporary Art […]
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21 Algol 60 compilers in 1962
The specification of ALGOL 60 was published in May 1960. Unlike today, where the creators of a new language release the source of a corresponding compiler, people were expected to write their own compiler. The June 1962 paper: The Replies to the AB14 Questionnaire lists implementation details on 21’ish compilers (it’s not clear whether some […]
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The Norden-Rayleigh model: some history
Since it was created in the 1960s, the Norden-Rayleigh model of large project manpower has consistently outperformed, or close runner-up, other models in benchmarks (a large project is one requiring two or more man-years of effort). The accuracy of the Norden-Rayleigh model comes with a big limitation: a crucial input value to the calculation is […]
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The 2024 update to my desktop system
I have just upgraded my desktop system. As you can see from the picture below, it is a bespoke system; the third system built using the same chassis. The 11 drive bays on the right are configured for six 5.25-inch and five 3.5-inch disks/CD/DVD/tape drives, there is a drive cage that fits above the power […]
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A new NASA software dataset from the 1970s
When modeling the process of software development, to optimise the creation of new projects, the best measurement data to use are those relating to whatever developers are doing today. Unfortunately, measurement data for software engineering processes is very hard to find; few development groups record anything about what they do, and even when they do […]
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Fast Hardware Hides Many Sins
Way back at the beginning of my professional programming career I worked for a small software house that wrote graphics software. Although it had a desktop publisher and line-art based graphics package in its suite it didn’t have a bitmap editor and so…
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Fast Hardware Hides Many Sins
Way back at the beginning of my professional programming career I worked for a small software house that wrote graphics software. Although it had a desktop publisher and line-art based graphics package in its suite it didn’t have a bitmap editor and so…