Viewing profile — mhewett

I was working at IBM in Boca Raton in 1990-91 when OS/2 was being developed. Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaini…

My wife worked at Boeing for seven years in the 1980s, in management. We tracked down her pension recently, hoping for a huge payout after it had been invested for 35 years. It tur…

I stand corrected. My offer still stands.

The CEO who presided over the fall of Yahoo received $40 million in compensation. I'm advertising here that my fee for doing the same job is only half that amount.

One comment from his thesis advisors on AM was that they couldn't tell which part was performed by AM and which part was guided by Lenat. I think that comment holds for both AM and…

Lenat was my assigned advisor when I started my Masters at Stanford. I met with him once and he gave me some advice on classes. After that he was extremely difficult to schedule a …

I once owned a 1.5 acre property that had approximately 1.4 acres of English ivy on it. It was horrible; the ivy is, by all practical means, impossible to kill. An area covered wit…

I've been through changes like this several times and the SURE indicator that big changes are coming is when the higher-ups say "Nothing will change". Seriously. I actually think t…

Not everyone. Everyone I know loved it.

It would take him 5-10 years to become a competent programmer. Does he want to finally achieve stability in his career at age 70? I would suggest that he become a business advisor …

I once called a travel agent to book a flight to San Jose (California). She mis-heard me as wanting to go to Santa Fe (New Mexico). She called me a few days later in a panic, sayin…

In the article it says that Dijkstra didn't use a computer, TV, or cell phone.

I was a computer operator in the late 1970s and I used to read ComputerWorld which was the biggest enterprise tech "journal" (actually a newspaper) of the day. In the late 1970s th…

The Warren Abstract Machine has a bunch of Prolog-related opcodes mixed in with a bunch of opcodes for maintaining linked lists and other data structures. Once you figure that out …

"nautical miles from radians" has to be one of the most esoteric functions built into any language.

Ummm, on a farm you milk the cows and gather eggs and move the herd BEFORE breakfast. Then you tend to the crops for several hours before lunch, if you have lunch.

History. In the late 1970s you could get 17% return on your savings account and mortgage rates were well above 10%. People still bought houses.

I've been trying for several years to determine the company size at which we will be forced to turn our understandable site into marketing buzzwords and incomprehensible sentences.…

Can you add one column to the table: a brief description of the service? Thanks for collecting all the information.

Latest information is that there were at least two, maybe three waves of immigration from Asia. There were probably also small numbers of people who made it from Polynesia to South…

When I was growing up, Nightfall was considered to be the greatest SF short story ever written. I'm not sure what the current ranking of it is but it is well worth reading.

That's a very good observation. I grew up on the line (in Topeka). I believe it is roughly where Western expansion had reached at the time the transcontinental railroad was finishe…

Join a bowling league and see how many people struggle to add 15 to a score by hand. Seriously.

Some possibly useful advice: if I'm at a conference and someone I sort of know says, "This one speaker is being an ass. He's pestering me about another speaker." I'm like, "yeah, y…

The one thing that makes LISP great is the "functions are data" formulation. Many of the "current best paradigms" of Computer Science are actually fads. LISP was a fad of the 1980s…