Welcome to the eighteenth issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to the subject of Obsolescence. In this edition, Graham pleads for longer living computer systems, and an end to the prevailing tech consumerism, Adrian writes about the upcoming, unavoidable, greatest revolution in computing, and then in the Library section, explores Jean Sammet's 1969 opus "Programming Languages, History and Fundamentals."
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A Farewell To The Von Neumann Architecture
Unbeknownst to most if not all full stack developers and DevOps consultants out there, the computer industry has been fighting a raging war against the Von Neumann architecture for the past 70 years.
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The Twenty-Year Computer
Computing needs to become significantly more long-term in its outlook, if we are to play our part in the coming move from a growth economy to a planetary survival civilisation. We need to move from a situation in which we expect people to buy (or lease) a new handheld computer every 1-2 years, even if their existing one works fine.
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Jean Sammet
From October 24th to 29th, 1927, twenty-nine scientists gathered in Brussels for the fifth Solvay Conference. Among the attendees, of which seventeen got a Nobel Prize before or after attending, were Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, and Albert Einstein. One might think there might have not been such an assembly of brilliant thinkers since the Platonic Academy.
