Thimbles & Care

Mature mainframe madness prints Mandelbrot fractal in TWELVE MINUTES

The article calls the output device a “dot matrix printer”, but it looks more like output from a 1403 impact printer, which as you can tell from the number was designed to work with IBM’s 1401 processor. The 1403 was adapted to work with System/360 computers, and we still had one in use through the mid 1990’s.

Via Rands in Repose: The Joyless World of Data-Driven Startups

Our capability to measure and record data is rapidly improving, at a time when more and more leaders are trying to protect their status and image by walking the middle ground, pre-calculating every decision and spoken word. The result is that the world increasingly uses and relies on data-driven decisions, from the smallest trivial matters, to policies in large corporations and entire countries. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it’s critical. But sometimes it fails, or results in unintended consequences that we may not notice for years.

Prompted by Chuck’s IT@UT project, I’ve added a couple of more pages about webAgent here: The story of webAgent: webAgent 2 and Was webAgent a good idea?