In August 2014, Dartmouth College published a video commemorating the 50th anniversary of the BASIC programming language, the subject of this month's Vidéothèque section. It features original footage from the 1960s and interviews of former students and team members, including Professor Thomas Kurtz, who was 85 years old at the time. But the heart and soul of the video is, without any doubt, Professor John Kemeny himself; not only his technical contributions, which were outstanding by every standard, but also his open personality and progressive spirit.
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Guy Kawasaki
There is a website out there providing an answer to the question "What is Developer Relations?," a question that this author, whose job title is precisely that one, gets a lot. According to this resource, Developer Relations is an umbrella term encompassing three major areas of activity: "Community," "Content," and "Product;" a perfect description of a job role, at least as far as this author is concerned.
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Mayuko Inoue
The archetype of software engineering dress code is quite parochial: a t-shirt (usually featuring a conference or programming language logo, or a geek joke), a pair of jeans, snickers, and a sweatshirt, in case the weather gets more San Francisco-like than you might expect. And that is it. Let us admit it: the "about us" page of software companies often looks like advertising for The Gap, American Apparel, or sometimes even, sadly, Abercrombie & Fitch, minus the abs, of course.
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Ken Ross & Paul Laughton
What was it like to use a computer without an operating system? We seldom ask ourselves this question, used as we are to download and install the operating system most adapted to our hardware at hand. But merely 60 years ago, the IBM 1401 was the most widely used computer system in the planet, and it did so without a matching operating system. How did it work?
