Malleable machines. Where are they?

First, a bit of a warning. I am going to witter on about Smalltalk, and about HotJava, and about the VIC 20. I’m having a nostalgic week. Indulge me. None of those things – nor what they represent – are at the gravitational centre of the computing world. This is a terrible shame. For twenty [...]

Re-reading Neuromancer

I’ve been re-reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer this week, reliving the effect that it had on me twenty-odd years ago. There was a chap at my school who had a cool older sister with an even cooler American boyfriend. This boyfriend had all but smuggled this book out of Canada. Or so the story went. Hadn’t [...]

Everything old is new

A friend and I were arguing in the pub a couple of weeks ago. The next war, he said, will be fought over internet latency. Countries battling it out over the rights to fast internet fibre routes. Nonsense, I replied. You can’t feed people with faster broadband. Or at least that’s how I remember it. [...]