On August 15th, 1971, President Nixon declared a 90-day freeze on wages, rents, and prices. The next day, the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) was charged with implementing the Freeze. OEP launched an administrative crash program, leveraging the expansive power of the federal government, and also took the risky step of developing novel software to facilitate coordination of hundreds of federal employees. Originally called the Emergency Partyline, the software was soon known as EMISARI. EMISARI aided the OEP with internal communications, reporting, and conduct of their mission. Leveraging early time-sharing technology and a dialect of the BASIC language, EMISARI supported communications in the styles of chat, forums, and email as well as providing a flexible data collection and reporting workflow system. We explore the design and implementation of EMISARI and PARTY-LINE, the adjunct synchronous chat program, how EMISARI compared to the other software systems used by the OEP during the Emergency, and what lessons may be applied to modern startups and crash programs.
John Bridges is a software engineer that co-developed PCPaint, which in 1984 was one of the earliest digital painting programs and helped spur the use of mice within the IBM PC market. He supported the growing number of PC video developers by freely releasing the VGAKIT and TGA utilities, tools that helped developers understand and compensate for the many hardware and software quirks of the era. He was also on the forefront of presentation software, developing GRASP, GL Pro, and AfterGrasp, which supported the commercial development of interactive games, screen savers, and demos of graphical algorithms.
In this interview, we seek to understand the engineering craft during the pioneering days of the 1980s and 1990s, how Bridges approached design and implementation choices, and the impact of a programmer outside academia and the big technology firms.
The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers: From Fast Machines to Fast Codes is a technical and business history of the roughly three-decades when Seymour Cray dominated the development of a class of computer called the “supercomputer”. The book covers the development of the major supercomputer models, the technical decisions and trade-offs involved, and changes to the market. The book ends with SGI’s purchase of Cray’s assets and the transition to massively parallel processing.
As catalogs for digital marketplaces grow in size, customers have greater difficulty in finding products that meet their needs. Marketplace owners might improve product discovery by adding new categories, tags, or other searchable and filterable metadata to product descriptions. As it is often difficult to get product owners to update old product descriptions, a marketplace owner may use automated methods to “backfill” product data. We investigate using multi-modal computer models to extract data from digital products, specifically, digital maps for tabletop role playing games. Across five tasks, we find that models perform comparatively with their ranking on the Open VLM Leaderboard. State-of-the-commercial art models perform well with zero-shot feature extraction and image association/captioning tasks, but all models perform poorly with reasoning and quantitative tasks.