rationale

The koblents.com link is an interesting read and using a goto may actually be valid inside an o.s. Having said that, after having written a significant number of tens of thousands of lines of C (most of which was outside the kernel), I still have never used a goto and I don't plan to.

... "spreadsheets should not be used for work that's not suitable for spreadsheets".

I previously worked for a multi-billion dollar, multi-national company that everyone has heard of. They did the goofiest things imaginable with spreadsheets and thought they were providing us tools. It was similar to using jello to build a hundred foot tall tower.

As someone else wrote, most people who build spreadsheets have no business building spreadsheets.

I often convert the things to plain text files so I can use Unix or Linux tools such as grep, awk, less, and others.

For perfect examples, see anyone in Washington, D.C.

Good Enough For Government Work In 1983 isn't good enough, even for government work.

In the mid- to late-70s, our XDS Sigma computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series) were doing everything online (unless you really wanted to do it offline for some reason). As many as 16 offline ("batch") jobs ran at one time with (in our environment) about 60 to 70 online users. And this was with one CPU and two megabytes (yes, 2MB) of memory.

People knew how to code operating systems well with few resources back in those days.

I forgot one: Quest is an excellent magazine devoted to the history of spaceflight. Highly recommended.

QST, Nuts & Volts, Air & Space, maybe Circuit Cellar, although CC seems to be changing and not necessarily for the better.

Arizona Highways has, very sadly, fallen from a great height. I couldn't recommend it to new readers.

It's better they take over the moon than even one more country!

"The plant appears alive, but it's only there for the good of the pathogen."

The citizen appears alive, but it's only there for the good of the government.

FTFY.

The model 360 was the first machine I coded in assembler. I didn't realize until I learned assembler on a more sophisticated machine (an XDS mainframe) that the 360 didn't have stack instructions (i.e., push registers onto or pull registers off a stack).

Does anyone know whether IBM ever added push/pull instructions to their mainframes?

... red lights are staggered so that you will have to stop at every single one of them...

Around here, the traffic control idiots time lights so that you stop at every other traffic light. I've experimentally determined if you drive about 48mph in a 40mph zone, you'll rarely stop.

OTOH, cops love speeders, so this is not an optimal solution. The optimal solution is to time lights so as to present as few red lights as possible, but people in government around here are generally complete losers.

This story could be the basis for the second remake of The Blob (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/)!

so far.

Who thinks the NSA has to explain this to us carefully? The major concern of these big companies is their next buck.

From what I undertsand, the enigma machine was very well designed (it was made by the Germans) and should have been impossible to crack if it wasn't for Mr Turning and his amazing brain.

Not to take anything away from Turing's brilliant work, but his Enigma accomplishments were based on the work of Polish cryptologists Rejewski, Rozycki, and Zygalski, who were breaking Enigma messages in 1932 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine/].

It's about time the Brits recognized Alan Turing. Without his Enigma and other crypto accomplishments, you might be speaking German.