The stability issue was on 48 core systems. That would be something like a ARM Bulldozer setup if it only had four sockets, and that's certainly not a "little thing".

I recently replaced ten halogen GU10 type bulbs in my house with LED ones, and the website I bought them from stocked dimmable ones. They even had replacements for the twelve G9 bulbs that we have in one room, which is great as the non-LED ones blow at a rate of roughly one a month and are very inefficient. We have an energy meter, and our daily consumption of electricity has roughly halved since replacing all the old incandescent and halogen bulbs.

And PA-RISC hits the 20th anniversay for the 64 bit version on three years time. Was always intrigued by that architecture, but only got to play very briefly with a HP9000 server.

Simula 67 was standardised in 1968. ANSI Common Lisp dates from 1984, and the OO implementation it includes (CLOS) was a relatively recent development at the time. CLOS is also a hack, although Lisp bores try and pretend it isn't by claiming the omissions make it "more poowerful".

Strange fortune cookie or whatever else that quote at the bottom of a Slashdot page is called:

To err is human; to forgive is simply not our policy. -- MIT Assasination Club

Seems somewhat awkward given events in Boston over the last 24 hours.

Banks were among the earliest commercial users of computers.

And tea shops.

They've reinvented Smalltalk. Let's party like it's 1980.

Whenever I install Debian or a derivative of it, I always find it includes Guile, but that no packages depend on it. The only reason it exists is because RMS didn't like Tcl, which was the up and coming glue language at the time. Despite its shortcomings, Tcl was a very nice language to extend, whereas Guile was (and probably still is) an incomplete dialect of Scheme that only satisfies the Lisp obsessives.

Better hygiene. Less beards. More women.

There's an E10000 Starfire still chugging away in it's own extremely secure cage at a large data centre in East London. I always wonder what it's used for every time I wander past it to our own rather less impressive servers.

I can't remember their names, but there were two programming editors I used on VMS. Both had their quirks - the first wouldn't wrap text that was wider than the terminal screen (72 characters?), nor could it scroll. The second could wrap, but wouldn't allow you to do a "save as", which was a bit of a pain as you could accidentally navigate to a non-existent directory and open a new file by mistyping the name of the directory you'd intended to create the file in. You'd then happily enter a bunch of code, only to discover your navigation mistake when you went to save the file. Cue a bunch of DCL (DEC Command Language - the VMS shell scripting language) to create a 'cd' command that would check for the existence of a directory ...

Blimey, just checked the Wikipedia article for Turbo Pascal and it did indeed pre-date the ST. In a weird piece of synchronicity, the article mentions the Nascom computer, since that's where the Turbo Pascal compiler originated. It's the second time in the last few days the Nascom has intruded on my consciousness, as it's the basis of a very rare drum computer that's just been added to the Vintage Synth Explorer.

I thought Turbo Pascal came out around 1988 - 89. That's certainly the timeframe in which I first started to notice people talking about it.

That's a very Microsoft-centric article, although it does have a passing mention of Smalltalk. Earliest IDE I ever used was the toolset on VMS, which included editor, compiler, debugger and profiler - they were integrated via the shell. If that doesn't qualify, then there was DevPac for assembler and a C development package (Lattice C I think) on my Atari ST, which inclued integrated tools that were far more sophisticated than what was later offered by Turbo Pascal.

I also have an integrated dust removal tool. It operates by projecting a high velocity jet of yellow liquid.