I was young, with all of it yet to unfold, but I have to say, the summer of 1969 was a helluva thing.

Stand! For the things you know are right It's the truth that the truth makes them so uptight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49vjFN6Fsw

2,000,000 miles of roads @ $1,000,000 per mile.

Think of that the next time you drive through Arizona on I-40, avoiding the potholes, debris, and life-threatening disrepair.

I-40 runs a scant 2,556 miles from Barstow, CA to Benson, NC.

Are you declaring first use?

Creating the most abject chaos imaginable, grabbing all the floatation devices while those around you tread turbulent waters, is by most definitions, diabolical.

Nice to see Monte Davidoff's name included at line 69. Already the hierarchy tho'.

I picture he and Paul discussing the code he had just written when Bill walks in and asks "Are you done yet?"

Saving $2.1B to $3.6B means the 13,834 management positions pay between $150,000 to $260,000 per year. Plus benefits and other incentives I suppose.

These are not the workers who travel from warehouse to warehouse living in their RV's.

It makes me wonder if Amazon's AI implementations are starting to move up the food chain as was generally predicted for the U.S. economy 5 years ago.

To get a good insight into the problems faced by nations in West Africa and Southwest Africa as they try to implement electricity-based technologies to their populations, I highly recommend watching Season 7 of Itchy Boots on YouTube [0].

Her experiences as she "adventure rides" through this region tacitly documents the true nature of "life as it is lived" by the millions and millions of human beings residing there.

It is stunning to consider and is an Africa I never knew existed.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8M9dV_BySaXNvQ_V1q4U...

Your page-swap analogy is apt and razor sharp. Well done.

Diskettes inside the book as I recall.

We were running Oregon Pascal on a PDP/11-44 (later upgraded to a VAX 11/780) that cost thousands. To have access to Pascal for $49 was too good to be true. Kept thinking it had to be deficient somehow, but it wasn't.

The paradigm shift was underway right in front of us.

My CS 101 class in 1989 was all in Pascal and had to be entered via a IBM terminal and ran as a batch job on our school mainframe. There was no interactive feedback and you had to hike across campus to a basement of a building that had an enormous chain printer to get your greenbar paper output of your run to see if it 1) compiled and 2) output the right thing that the autoscorer checked when you flagged your assignment as complete.

I was lucky in that I had a Tandy 1000SX in my dorm room and I had Turbo Pascal (bought using an educational discount at the school bookstore). A hidden feature of Turbo Pascal was that it supported multiple comment delimiters, including the comment delimiters used by IBM Pascal (the assignments were also graded on comment quality). I was able to do all my class work locally, using interactive debugging, and thanks to a guy I met while working at a local computer shop that was the student IBM rep I got a file uploader and the phone number of hidden 2400 baud that it used so I could directly upload my code and then dial into the interactive terminal number and submit it.

I sort of felt bad for all the other kids in the class for the write/submit/walk/debug loop they endured, but not really.

A couple of observations to give insight into the USA's political sentiment at the time:

1. In 1976, Ford carried California, Illinois, Virginia, and every western state except Texas. Carter carried Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio and almost all southern states including Florida.

2. When Carter won the country was still coming to terms with Vietnam, was completely dismayed by the Watergate scandal and subsequent pardon, was witnessing chaos in Iran, was living under the threat of mutually assured destruction, was experiencing rampant inflation, rising oil prices, a stagnant economy, and possessed a large group of rebellious baby-boomers kicking at the stalls but not quite ready-for-primetime.

The USA needed Jimmy Carter's southern sensibilities, humility, and values in order to take a deep breath.

Rest in Peace Mr. President. Well done in retrospect.