Don is still around, and is still awesome! His memory for events around that time is surprisingly sharp, for it being 50 years ago.
He's been an invaluable resource for us at the VirtualAGC project [1]. He provided over half (!) of the AGC programs we've made available, including LM software for Apollo 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 15-17, plus several other ground development programs. He also was the source of a majority of the schematics that we used in the AGC restoration [2] -- I can say with 100% confidence that it wouldn't have been possible to get that computer working again without his help.
He's got a book out now, Sunburst and Luminary [3], that is very good and goes into a lot of technical detail on the LM software, without getting too much into the weeds. I highly recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing!
Mike, thanks a lot for working on the restoration project! It was amazing to watch your progress and the ingenious tools and solutions you guys came up with.
It also sparked my interest in AGC-related things and while I at first expected it to be a somewhat simple and elegant machine (easier to formally verify) I quickly realized it too like almost any engineering project was subject to reality/deadline-driven compromises everywhere (looking at you memory architecture). However, it is a machine which still 'fits in your head' compared to the historical achievement. We probably won't be able to do that kind of thing with the more recently developed, more complex systems we're going to use for the next steps in space exploration.
> What NASA needs most, he says, is some imaginative PR... The astronauts he has met could provide reams of picturesque copy; they are hard-drinking, fast-living, generally “wild and weird.”
The editor of Rolling Stone was certainly paying attention! It sounds like they sent Tom Wolfe to cover Apollo just a short time after publishing this. His book, The Right Stuff, would cement the image of those first American astronauts in just this “wild and weird” frame.
The author was also a minor player in new journalism circles. He wrote "boys on the bus", an account of working with Hunter S Thompson to cover the 1972 presidential campaign.
Great article. I was curious about the game mentioned towards the bottom:
> At M.I.T. next door to Draper, some of the undergraduates play a game called “Space War.” To play “Space War,” you need a television screen, a computer, and a working knowledge of Newtonian physics. The TV screen shows a planet surrounded by spaceships. Each player fires torpedos from his spaceship, aiming them according to the laws of orbital dynamics. The torpedos must destroy either another spaceship or the planet. The game is enhanced by programming the computer to include such factors as time warps, so that a spaceship can disappear “for years.”
Thanks to the magic of the internet, I found a few versions of the game (actually called "Spacewar!"[0]), both the original[1] without time-warp and the more advanced version described in the article which includes it[2]. However contrary to the article's description it seems only the ships follow Newtonian physics, the projectiles always travel in a straight line, and I wasn't able to blow up the star or planet you're orbiting, though perhaps a version with these features exists and I simply wasn't able to find it. Interestingly, the circular layout isn't just for the game, the screen of the PDP-1[3] Which ran it was circular because it was originally a radar screen!
You can also play Spacewar! on a real restored PDP-1 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. You may even get to play against Steve Russell. Highly recommended.
He's got a space at an artists' cooperative which is divided up into live/work spaces for a few dozen professional artists (including Don himself, who's now a professional fine art photographer). So the address is public already in a whole bunch of other places.
I probably wouldn't personally put my home address online. But if you own a place and are reasonably identifiable, it's pretty trivial for someone to find given public records, etc.
> “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s book about Gogol where at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol, there’s no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It’s sort of discouraging.”
Today computer languages are mostly easier to learn than a totally new human language I guess.
I still thought this one was quote-worthy.
Also: is it just me or was writing in some ways better before?
Way easier. It is hardly noteworthy for a programmer to know a half dozen programming languages well, but a person who knows a half dozen human languages well is.
I think the main determining factor here is vocabulary. Modern programming langs have fairly small #s of reserved words, and when you add the standard library on top of that, you essentially have all the 'vocab' you need to use the language well. This is because (a) a large part of programming is the act of creating new vocab via writing new APIs/libraries/functions, and (b) the time pressure is significantly lessened; there's no issue with consulting docs for the interfaces you forget.
Meanwhile, human languages are essentially unusable without a fairly extensive vocabulary, and importantly a vocabulary that has to be memorized and available at a moment's notice.
One needs a lot more fluency than the other - there's a difference between what could be considered 'knowing' a programming language (where it's possible to slowly cobble together, or decode, a sentence over an afternoon with documentation to hand) and conversing 'live' in a natural language.
The languages themselves, yes, but there's a lot more that comes into play besides the language. I'm working with Go right now and there's a lot of ground to cover with subjects like error handling, context, concurrency, web services, modules, and the whole ecosystem.
I had the same experience with Java and its vast standard library and the community (e.g. J2EE, Spring). And with Javascript and the entirety of web development and (nowadays) package management and backwards compatibility.
So yeah you can learn the words and letters - most languages only have a couple dozen keywords and characters anyway - but the language is much more complicated than just the words and letters.
There's mention of him in this article regarding the source code (printed on white and green paper). He wrote about 2000 lines for the Lunar Module.
I often wonder how many lines of Javascript I load every day just to browse the web and watch images fade in and out and animate etc. and all the megabytes of framework garbage I load just to display some content. By comparison, it's depressing.
> “Look,” he says, “they’re devoting three billion dollars a year to curiosity that might yield good results in the long run, and eighty billion a year to the Defense budget — to killing. I’d be for a bigger space budget as long as the money came from the Defense budget. That’s the one to cut.
Wish we had more people talking this way these days. Instead, they’re militarizing space.
We do have more people talking this way. The other people aren't listening.
Society might benefit from peaceful pursuits in the long run (and individuals will in the present), but people with piles of money will make bigger piles of money from war in the short run.
Perhaps the articles from 1971 that get reposted today represent the top 1% of articles from then, making articles from then seem so much better than now?
My experience looking at, say, the front-page (or more likely these days, inside-page briefings section) of a newspaper, today vs. say 1970, or at an issue of a leading magazine, is that writing and editorial standards have changed, largely for the worse.
Newspapers are an easier direct comparison, and though I don't have a specific example to show (a selection, say, of front pages from the same day of the month across a span of decades would be useful -- 12 issues a year, enough to show trends, but not so many as to drown them out -- would be a good demonstration), but I've done periodic research and am struck.
There are always gradual changes, but a tipping point toward commercialisation and sheer crassness emerged strongly in the 1990s.
For magazines, the larger problem is that so many simply aren't what they once were, notably leading US news weeklies. It might be better to consider a set of political magazines -- New Republic, National Review, The Economist. Possibly Atlantic, Harpers Weekly, and The New Yorker.
And perhaps Rolling Stone as well.
There's some survivor's bias, yes. But there's also been a palpable shift.
In Australia, our independent public broadcaster reads like a clickbait rag. I routinely find basic spelling, grammar and punctuation errors in newspapers. That's not how I used to remember the news.
Whenever longform articles are posted from more recent dates, the HN comments are full of people complaining that the article is too long, takes too long to get to the point, employs flowery prose, etc all of which this article would be just as guilty of—were those valid objections to begin with.
I don't know about that. Modern longform articles all seem as if they're trying to be The Atlantic, with a very specific style that seems heavily informed by the conventional language of cinematography - and does not translate well to the written word. In thirty frames a second, it's quick and easy to do establishing shots, for example. Starting an essay with one takes a couple of paragraphs, and once you've read enough such pieces to start noticing that they're doing it (that they're all doing it), it quickly becomes tiresome. In such circumstances, you don't get impatient because of pull-to-refresh Twitter poisoning; you get impatient because your time is being wasted.
This Rolling Stone article, meanwhile, isn't like that at all. It starts by quoting four quick stanzas of doggerel to briefly set the tone, and then it's right into the meat of its subject matter. Four sentences in, you know exactly what it's talking about, and if the subject matter interests you at all, you're engaged. It's written with a respect for the value of its audience's time that is nowhere evident in the modern longform style.
If I had to put the difference briefly, I'd put it like this: the Rolling Stone article is an example of genuine craftsmanship in nonfiction prose. It has a point to make, and it does so, in a way that's interesting and enjoyable without overstaying its welcome. Conversely, the Atlantic style, in which modern longform is conventionally done, is an example of performative prose-stylistry for its own sake. It screams "Look at me! I'm a writer! Look at the way I paint pictures with words!"
Maybe you enjoy that sort of thing. If so, you're welcome. But saying "look at me, I'm amazing" is not the job of journalism, and it's hardly a surprise that people get impatient with journalists who behave as if saying "look at me, I'm amazing" was not only part of their job, but the meat of it.
There's plenty of great long-form stuff out there. You just have to know where to look. This one came to mind, from 2016, but it's just what was at the top of my stack:
the 80s, basically. But, there was a reactionary swell that hit circa 1976ish, propelled Reagan into office and has continued in one form or another ever since.
The climate happened, I think. Difficult to maintain optimism on the ultimate destiny of consciousness when the science is telling you there's an extinction event on your doorstep.
Living through the Cold War brought us a constant and very close awareness of the potential for a nuclear extinction event so I don’t think it’s climate change. If anything it was scarier then because there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error in a highly complex socio-technical system.
I’m of the opinion that much of the change in our culture was driven by a concerted pushback on the part of the “straights” to reassert the primacy of their worldview. The threat felt by those in power by the rise of the civil rights, anti-war and nascent environmentalist movement was a direct threat to business as usual. So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan, we have adopted a worldview that for decades has told us that happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success and conventional career paths.
> there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error
Agreed, I was there and watched the "Duck and Cover" films in school. That only stopped when leaders realized that surviving the initial blast was one thing, and surviving a month later for most urbanites was unlikely.
> So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan ... happiness and satisfaction comes only through the pursuit of financial success
I don't see a coherent argument here.
You can ignore Thatcher, since she was the head of a bankrupted, hapless country (Britain had food rationing for 9 years after WW2.)
Reagan was one of the most powerful leaders in world history. He wanted a strong America, both domestically and overseas. Can't really argue with that. We don't like people who utter words like "Evil Empire" [see Prof. Victor Davis Hanson], but somebody has to say it. Just be glad Reagan was on our side.
Whose side was Reagan on? He certainly wasn't on the side of a lot of gays, blacks, or the other minorities his administration threw in jail, poisoned, or just let die through inaction.
Re. gays, Mr. Reagan signed into law federal outlays of $5.73 billion for AIDS research and treatment and he opposed California Proposition 6, which would have fired public-school teachers for advocating homosexuality.
Re. blacks, his administration did push hard for tough-on-crime measures — measures which were supported by black groups in the 80s. They may or may not have been wise in retrospect, but they were a well-intended attempt to support black communities and black people.
Where does $5.73 billion come from? I searched and found figures in the hundreds of millions [1] along with other evidence of the Reagan administrations indifference to AIDS [2]
It's not as black and white as that. Reagan was probably the last conservative president that made an effort to work with groups opposed to his own ideological positions.
For example, have a listen to his 1983 Address to the Nation.
Be careful, also, to view him in context of the era he was active in. It's tempting to judge historical figures' actions in a modern context, but that dramatically alters the nature of what they did and why.
The peace-love-dope crowd were a reaction to our defense of South Vietnam. Once North Vietnam violated the Paris Peace and successfully invaded South Vietnam, there was no need anymore to react — we weren't defending anyone at that point. I imagine that there might also have been some embarrassed reactions to the boat people, the re-education camps and the mass murder which followed the invasion — after all those years of hailing Ho Chi Minh as the George Washington of Vietnam and pretending that the Viet Cong were freedom fighters, it was probably a bit embarrassing to see that they were just your normal run-of-the-mill dictator and his thugs.
Also, I think a lot of the peace-love-dope crowd just grew up and got jobs.
How do we bring back the national enthusiasm for space again? Enthusiasm that spans across politics.
Maybe I'm out of touch, it seems to take a lot longer to get things done and get something flying into space than it used to. I don't think we can be world leaders with projects like the SLS that never get off the ground anywhere near the expected date. Seems like we used to take more risks or have less bureaucracy or ???
Apollo was not as popular at the time as commonly remembered.
>Polls both by USA Today and Gallup have shown support for the moon landing has increased the farther we've gotten away from it. 77 percent of people in 1989 thought the moon landing was worth it; only 47 percent felt that way in 1979.
>Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda.
I think support has a lot to do with reporting and the stories we tell. The economy has an impact too. In 1969 we had a great story to tell, it was all over the news and everyone was paying attention. In 1979, the economy was crap and there probably wasn't the money to spend. In 1989 the economy was doing well. 1989 also saw 5 shuttle missions, again lots of news. From your link - "Americans might not have supported the space program in real life, but they loved the one they saw on TV."
> Seems like we used to take more risks or have less bureaucracy or ???
More like we had a Cold War to win via technological showmanship.
Today's world has more important, more fundamental political problems to solve (not that we're doing a good job on those either, but regardless). At the same time:
> it seems to take a lot longer to get things done and get something flying into space than it used to
It's never been easier to "get something flying into space" thanks to, surprisingly, private industry. Walking on the moon may be a different story, but significant progress has been made getting both objects and people into space.
"Apollo ran from 1961 to 1972, with the first crewed flight in 1968" - $25.4 billion (1973)
"The Space Launch System (SLS) is a US super heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle, which has been under development since its announcement in 2011. It is the primary launch vehicle of NASA's deep space exploration plans,[12][13] including the planned crewed lunar flights of the Artemis program and a possible follow-on human mission to Mars.[14][15][16] SLS replaces the Constellation program's Ares V launch vehicle of 2005, which never left the development phase." - For fiscal years 2011 through 2018, the SLS program had expended funding totaling $13.999 billion in nominal dollars.
In 7 years Apollo had crewed flight. In 7 years SLS isn't even off the ground, and that is after the previous project never finished.
So, how do we gain public support for funding these missions? Honestly, while 'war' may be an answer its not a good one.
It's so funny to see an article from 1971 is on the same page as news (and ads) from 2020. If this were a printed newspaper, people would be very confused!
Historical material is particularly welcome on HN. When an article shows up that's old, has never been discussed here, and strikes chords with the community, that's the best!
Hopefully it didn't sound like I was complaining! ... I also love that Saturdays and Sundays have a broader scope of topics making it to the front page. I do appreciate having the date shown though ... I've read a couple articles and thought "that seems pretty passe" before I realized I was reading older materials.
>>> “They passed a resolution with a lot of whereases and things in my honor. I was introduced to Monsignor somebody-or-other. I was stoned out of my mind.”
I’ve always heard it was because the budget dried up after we beat the evil commies to the moon. Could you point to a source that talks about the safety angle? I’d love to read about it.
> Eyles and some of his fellow Consciousness IIIers regard computer programming as a fine craft that might some day be elevated to the status of an art. “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s book about Gogol where at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol, there’s no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It’s sort of discouraging.”
As I read this, I was aware that there is a steaming pile of JavaScript a single Alt-Tab away on my laptop. I think there's a profound lesson here - buried in the path between these dreams of programmers in the 70s and today's reality.
This was a really good read. Gave me something to think about.
Whytheluckystiff wrote some Ruby code that can only be described as good poetry (including at least one project used in production in some places, the Camping web framework) circa 2005. I'm sure some people write poetry-level code today (obviously the folks at shadertoy.com, but they're writing in a classical style, and I'm sure someone's writing code poetry that could not have been written before 2020).
As far as I understand, he quit his public life when someone hunted down and published his real name and address. He removed his website and github, which contained his various writings, some of which had names with "tutorial" or "guide" in them but all of which were at least 80% works of literature and at most 20% works of technical documentation. Not sure I would call it "ragequitting".
A few years ago he published a sort of absurdist goodbye (as a live-updating printer spool) which Steve Klabnik collected into a 95-page PDF here:
https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE
His blog contained many small snippets of code that were definitely meant to be consumed as poetry, they are easy to spot because of all the colors and shapes and sometimes animations:
But my own experience of learning from him how to experience code as poetry mostly involved around using Camping in production for some small side projects and needing to explore some bits of its code because of practical reasons:
Closure, the printer spool “book” in question, is one of the best works on the philosophy of software engineering and life on the modern internet ever written.
What's so hard about understanding somebody's desire for their art to be in the world without violating the boundary between that and their personal life?
It is difficult for many people. Whenever I read about W, I see people offended there was (what they consider) an overreaction, and that everything was deleted. Personally I only see that as exerting extreme caution after something really bad happened. Beyond that, it is their right to share or stop sharing when it stops being fun.
People seem to have forgotten the old hacker ethos: doing stuff for fun. Many people are more now attracted by publicity and fame than by the fun part - look at how many want to be influencers! Or even worse: by extracting value from than fun spirit - look at social networking being used to create fame by manufacturing outrage!
Some people who do things for fun may also want to be forgotten. They just care about the fun. Yet many people think they have a right to whatever they create. It's hard not to see that.
Personally, I see that because I do not want any of the stuff I do online have any link to what I do offline. I do not want my identity leaked either.
Yet here on HN when I will delete my account, my posts will stay. And I can't edit them in any way. So much for being about hacker values!
I think many people who weren't following his art in real time make the reasonable misunderstanding that his works are code and documentation participating in the vast human project of Open Source Software, since they tended to have names like "_why's (poignant) guide to ruby" and not more descriptive names like "cartoon foxes and how mad I reacted in front of my expanded family that time when my mom said my sister uses cocaine and how she didn't end up killing herself and stuff like that and some ruby code".
I mean, he did write some widely used open source. I think the most popular yaml parser? And an html parser or generator or something that some people were still using but most already moved to another one inspired by it? And there was a community around projects like Camping and Shoes?
So less-involved people judged him like they judged the left-pad guy (which, I mean, was in his full right to remove all his code from npm, but was a bit unkind to the vast community of left-pad dependent day-job developers).
But almost everything he did was 99% art, and his persona shared a lot of things you might not want your boss or mom to read, so I think he should be judged more like Kafka requesting his books to be burned.
Camping and Shoes were also 99% art, and I think nobody who was actively part of their communities was very much hurt and the sentiment in their communities was more of worrying for his well being.
But he let it be known that he's ok and just wanted to quit so they just let him be.
The outrage was mostly from people reading "popular open source developer deletes his github and vanishes" without context.
And yeah, when I was 16 I used to post on HN and for some stupid reason all my comments began with "Hi, I'm <full name>" and it's the most embarrassing thing ever, and Google will never forget...
About your HN, Google will never forget but maybe you could nicely ask HN for some understanding (I mean, you were a minor!) or in the worst case try to GPDR you way through?
Tbh, for any piece of great poetry or prose or code, there are nine others which are crap, as noted by Sturgeon's Law. The steaming piles of yesterday have been forgotten, with only the memorable works remaining; thus creating an illusion of a Golden Age.
>It’s like Nabokov’s book about Gogol where at the end he says that if you really want to know anything about Gogol, there’s no way around it, you gotta learn Russian. It’s sort of discouraging.
As a programmer who loves Russian lit, this hit close to home. It's a dream of mine to one day read Tolstoy's drafts of his predecessor novel to War & Peace ("The Decembrists"), but my professor informed me that the copies that exist are entirely in russian. One day.
The 19th century contained writing like the writing of Gogol. It also contained writing such as dunning notices, calling cards, semi-literate love notes, graffiti, army regulations, and shopping lists. The literary quality of most of the latter may have been deplorable, but it certainly does not detract from the merit of the former.
Title correction: there should be an exclamation point after "extra". As in "extra! extra! read all about it", not "extra weird–looking freak". Although it did make me laugh :)
When breaking news came out a newspaper would sometimes publish an extra edition to go out in the afternoon. The paperboys would stereotypically say, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”
The Wikipedia article [1] is to the point here, and even explains why they went away: the introduction of radio meant that a one-off printing for news didn’t make sense as everyone heard it on the radio.
Being different was itself weird back then, while it's almost normal now. Being long haired and stoned and consciousness oriented, among short haired short sleeved pocket protected engineering units was especially weird.
"Freak" would have been the title editor's attempt to put a particular image of hippiness into a reader's head, justified or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_scene
Heh, that article is interesting with how much it references Zappa. I am not his biggest fan, but whenever I hear the word Freak, I think of his song "Hungry Freaks, Daddy".
I'm not sute if I'll get much sympathy but I would SO much rather get a synopsis with maybe a couple bullet points and some relevant pictures (or graphs!) than an article.
Let articles die. I just want to know what happened. I don't want to read the history or a flowery introduction. They just hide the point. This is why I believe reddit2 will use either an AI or the emergent intelligence of thousands of redditors to distill articles down to a short synopsis.
I do not think reading the whole article is a sign of intelligence. If I want to read something that's going to take 30-40 minutes it will be a lot more planned out than just stumbling upon an interesting headline.
I really think the article format has had its day but it will take a while for people to admit they don't like reading long flowery opinionated journal entries.
He's been an invaluable resource for us at the VirtualAGC project [1]. He provided over half (!) of the AGC programs we've made available, including LM software for Apollo 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 15-17, plus several other ground development programs. He also was the source of a majority of the schematics that we used in the AGC restoration [2] -- I can say with 100% confidence that it wouldn't have been possible to get that computer working again without his help.
He's got a book out now, Sunburst and Luminary [3], that is very good and goes into a lot of technical detail on the LM software, without getting too much into the weeds. I highly recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing!
[1] http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KSahAoOLdU&list=PL-_93BVApb...
[3] https://www.sunburstandluminary.com/SLhome.html