It may be hard to believe, but BASIC turned 60 this week. Opinions about the computer language vary, of course, but one thing everyone can agree on is that Professors Kemeny and Kurtz really stretched things with the acronym: “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code” is pretty tortured, after all. BASIC seems to be the one language it’s universally cool to hate, at least in its current incarnations like Visual Basic and VBA. But back in 1964, the idea that you could plunk someone down in front of a terminal, or more likely a teletype, and have them bang out a working “Hello, world!” program with just a few minutes of instruction was pretty revolutionary. Yeah, line numbers and GOTO statements encouraged spaghetti code and engrained bad programming habits, but at least it got people coding. And perhaps most importantly, it served as a “gateway drug” into the culture for a lot of us. Many of us would have chosen other paths in life had it not been for those dopamine hits provided by getting that first BASIC program working. So happy birthday BASIC!
Speaking of gateways, we’ve been eagerly following the “65 in 24” project, an homage to the “65 in 1” kits sold by Radio Shack back in the day. These were the hardware equivalent of as BASIC to a lot of us, and just as formative. Tom Thoen has been lovingly recreating the breadboard kit, rendering it in PCBs rather than cardboard and making some updates in terms of components choices, but staying as true to the original as possible. One thing that the original had was the “lab manual,” a book containing all 65 circuits with schematics and build instructions, plus crude but charming cartoons to illustrate the principles of the circuit design. Tom obviously needs to replicate that to make the project complete, and while schematics are a breeze in the age of EDA, the cartoons are another matter. He’s making progress on that front, though, with the help of an art student who is really nailing the assignment. Watch out, Joe Kim!
Last week we mentioned HOPE XV is coming in July. This week, a partial list of talks was released, and there’s already a lot of interesting stuff scheduled. Supercon keynote alums Mitch Altman and Cory Doctorow are both scheduled to appear, along with a ton of others. Check out the list, get your proposals in, or just get your tickets.
If an entire forest is composed of a single tree, does it make a sound? Yes it does, and it’s kind of weird. The tree is called Pando, which is also weird, and it’s the largest living individual organism by biomass on Earth. The quaking aspen has 47,000 stems covering 100 acres (40 hectares) of Utah, and though it does a pretty good job of looking like a forest, the stems are genetically identical so it counts as a single organism. Quaking aspens are known to be a noisy tree, with leaves that rattle together in the slightest breeze. That pleasant sound isn’t just for us to enjoy, however, as sound artist Jeff Rice discovered by sticking a hydrophone down into one of Pando’s many hollow stems. The sound of the leaves banging together apparently gets transmitted down the stems and into the interconnected root system. At least that’s the thought; more rigorous experiments would be needed to confirm that the sound isn’t being mechanically coupled through the soil.
And finally, we’re in no position to cast stones at anyone for keeping a lot of browser tabs open, but keeping almost 7,500 Firefox tabs going seems a bit extreme. And yet a software engineer going by the handle Hazel just can’t bring herself to close any tabs, resulting in an epic restore session when her browser finally gave up the ghost. Panic set in at first when Firefox refused to reload all the tabs, accumulated over the last two years, but eventually the browser figured it all out and Hazel was back in business. Interestingly, Firefox doesn’t really use up too much memory to keep al those tabs open — only 70 MB. Compare that to Chrome, which needs 2 GB to keep a measly 10 tabs open.