Microsoft open-sources a key piece of software history, one that would help the company rule personal computers. //

Having re-open-sourced MS-DOS on GitHub in 2018, Microsoft has now released the source code for GW-BASIC, Microsoft's 1983 BASIC interpreter. //

The sources for Microsoft GW-BASIC are the assembly language for the Intel-designed 8088 microprocessor from February 10, 1983. Microsoft has released the GW-BASIC source code because having open-sourced MS-DOS people wanted it to do the same with Microsoft BASIC.

While becoming open-sourced, Microsoft has posted it on GitHub as an archive and therefore is not accepting any request to modify the source. It's there for historical reference and educational purposes. Also, the source doesn't contain the tools to generate executable binaries.

In 1981, a Georgetown professor, Jeane Kirkpatrick, remaining a Democrat, became Ronald Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations. Reagan brought Kirkpatrick, as he did with many Democratic hawks who were dismayed with the dovish position of mainstream Democrats.

Kirkpatrick had worked closely with Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson. As an increasingly influential public intellectual in the 1970s, she criticized not only what she saw as President Jimmy Carter's soft and naive stance on communism, but also the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger "detente" policy of accommodating to the Soviet expansion.

And so for the first time since 1952, the 1984 Republican National Convention chose a keynote speaker who was not a Republican. Kirkpatrick delivered a blistering speech, dealing exclusively with foreign policy. She was appealing to large segment of Reagan Democrats who were terrified Progressive and Democratic Establishment did not understand the mortal danger of the Soviet threat.

Kirkpatrick ran through a litany of recent foreign policy controversies: Grenada, Lebanon, the Soviet walk-out from arms negotiations, and Central America. On every topic, said Kirkpatrick, the San Francisco Democrats "always blame America first." //

I heard Jeane Kirkpatrick give her famous speech. The UN Ambassador went on a tirade about the “blame America first” Democrats who had been meeting in San Francisco.

Kirkpatrick was a Democrat hawk who came into the Reagan Administration in reaction to a Democratic Party that had rapidly drifted left to the point Ted Kennedy would try to get the Soviet Leader Andropov to do an American media tour to defuse tensions in the run up to the 1984 election. Kennedy wanted to advise the Soviets on how to navigate the American media to show they meant peace as a way to undermine the strong “evil empire” stance Reagan had advanced.

In her speech, Kirkpatrick said of the Democrats who had convened to nominate Walter Mondale in San Francisco,

They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do - they didn't blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians - they blamed the United States instead.

But then, somehow, they always blame America first.

When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the "blame America first crowd" didn't blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.

But then, they always blame America first.

When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.

But then, they always blame America first.

When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago.

But then, they always blame America first.

What was different between then and now is that while the media leaned left, it was still mostly run by men who had fought on the battlefields of Germany and the islands of the Pacific. They may have leaned left, but they were not really haters of America even if they thought Reagan was too belligerent.

Now, however, the American media is too willing to spread Chinese communist propaganda to own the President. Because Trump is President, the media would rather believe a tyrannical regime that ruthlessly murders dissidents and runs concentration camps.

In the last part of the 1970s, the late President William R. Tolbert, who had become increasingly aware of and concerned about the rapidly deteriorating conditions of the Liberian economy, commissioned a “Tax Force” under the chairmanship of the then Minister of Planning and Economic Affairs to make a comprehensive assessment of the many problems […] //

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On Some Of The Aspects Of The Current State Of The Liberian Economy: A Tentative Diagnostic And Assessment
By Dr. Brahima D. Kaba, Last updated May 4, 2020
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In the last part of the 1970s, the late President William R. Tolbert, who had become increasingly aware of and concerned about the rapidly deteriorating conditions of the Liberian economy, commissioned a “Tax Force” under the chairmanship of the then Minister of Planning and Economic Affairs to make a comprehensive assessment of the many problems confronting the nation’s economy, members of the task force included experts from various professional, technical and academic backgrounds and areas.

Dr. Brahima D. Kaba, brakaba@yahoo.com, Contributing Writer

The author of this paper represented one of the areas of the social sciences to help identify some of the sociological impacts of the deterioration of the terms of a change of our main export commodities such as iron ore, rubber, coffee, cocoa, etc., on the world market. These export products constituted then the backbone of our underdeveloped economy.

Dr. Togba Nah Tipoteh was one of the members of the expert panel on economic issues. It must be noted from the onset that the Liberian economy was then emerging from one of the fastest growths of the country’s history. This rapid economic growth, in turn, triggered a period of unprecedented social and political movements and changes in the society.

In effect, from the early 1960s to the middle part of the 1970s, our economy had experienced perhaps the second fastest growth rate in recent world history, second only to Japan. This phenomenal growth had even attracted the attention of a team of economists from a famous U.S University to conduct a study of – and write a book on – this peculiar moment of the Liberian economy. The book, titled “GROWTH WITHOUT DEVELOPMENT”, rapidly became a classic in the study of third world economies as they developed the tendencies of undergoing phenomenal growth which, due mainly to internal and external structural deficiencies, almost always failed to translate into real socio-economic and socio-political development for these countries and their peoples. Simply put, the huge revenues that Liberia derived from, among other things, her immense iron ore exports were not properly invested into her people and the establishment of the needed productive assets and factors of production such as agricultural, road, educational, and health infrastructure.

Grace Hopper was a phenomenon. She earned a doctorate in mathematics from Yale, was a professor at Vassar, and left the U.S. Navy with the rank of rear admiral. Her contributions to the field of computing can be judged by the number of foundations and programs that have been created in her memory. //

Driven to create a programming language closer to English than the machine-code computers understand, Hopper developed the first compiler. This opened the door for the first compiled languages, such as FLOW-MATIC. This earned her a seat on the Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) of 1959.

She was also instrumental in the specification and development of the Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL). The first meeting took place on June 23, 1959, and its report and specification of the COBOL language followed in April 1960.

COBOL contained some groundbreaking concepts. Arguably, the most significant of these was the ability to run on hardware produced by different manufacturers, which was unprecedented at the time.

The language was elaborate and provided a near-English vocabulary for programmers to work with. It was designed to handle huge volumes of data and to be exceptionally mathematically accurate.

Its vocabulary of reserved words (the words that make up the language) runs close to 400. A programmer strings these reserved words together so they make syntactical sense and create a program.

Any programmer who’s familiar with other languages will tell you 400 is an incredible number of reserved words. For comparison, the C language has 32, and Python has 33. //

As clunky as it might seem today, COBOL was revolutionary when it launched. It found favor within the financial sector, federal government, and major corporations and organizations. This was due to its scalability, batch handling capabilities, and mathematical precision. It was installed in mainframes all over the world, took root, and flourished. Like a stubborn weed, it just won’t die.

Our dependency on systems that still run on COBOL is astonishing. A report from Reuters in 2017 shared the following jaw-dropping statistics:

• There are 220 billion lines of COBOL code still in use today.
• COBOL is the foundation of 43 percent of all banking systems.
• Systems powered by COBOL handle $3 trillion of daily commerce.
• COBOL handles 95 percent of all ATM card-swipes.
• COBOL makes 80 percent of all in-person credit card transactions possible. //

The programmers who know COBOL are either retired, thinking about retiring, or dead. We’re steadily losing the people who have the skills to keep these vital systems up and running. New, younger programmers don’t know COBOL. Most also don’t want to work on systems for which you have to maintain ancient code or write new code.

This is such a problem that Bill Hinshaw, a COBOL veteran, was coerced out of retirement to found COBOL Cowboys. This private consulting firm caters to desperate corporate clients that can’t find COBOL-savvy coders anywhere. The “youngsters” at COBOL Cowboys (the motto of which is “Not Our First Rodeo”) are in their 50s. They believe 90 percent of Fortune 500 business systems run on COBOL. //

This is a widespread and deeply embedded problem. A 2016 report from the Government Accountability Office listed COBOL systems running on mainframes up to 53-years-old. These include systems used to process data related to the Department of Veterans Affairs, The Department of Justice, and the Social Security Administration. //

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
      PROGRAM-ID. Hello-World.
      DATA DIVISION.
      FILE SECTION.
      WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
      PROCEDURE DIVISION.
      MAIN-PROCEDURE.
           DISPLAY "Hello world, from How-To Geek!"
           STOP RUN.
      END PROGRAM Hello-World.

About two-thirds of the $4 billion apple industry is now concentrated in Washington State — and 15 varieties, led by the Red Delicious, account for about 90 percent of the market. But the past looked, and tasted, much different: An estimated 17,000 varieties were grown in North America over the centuries, and about 13,000 are lost. //

some old varieties have become available again, through small specialty nurseries like the co-op that Mr. Bunker helped start in Maine and through university agricultural programs. Commercial growers, however, said old apples had faded for a reason and were probably not coming back.

“They’re hard to grow,” said Mac Riggan, the director of marketing at Chelan Fresh, which has 26,000 acres of fruit trees, mostly apples, in central Washington.

Old varieties, Mr. Riggan said, either bruise easily, don’t store well or don’t produce enough apples per tree. And economic pressure is relentless. “Land costs money,” he said. //

A woman recently sent him a catalog from 1912 she had found in her attic. It listed more than 140 apple varieties then available in Washington. Documents from county fairs — what apples were offered for judging and won the blue ribbon — have provided another critical piece of evidence. //

On a recent morning at Steptoe Butte State Park, where Mr. Benscoter has focused his work, about a five-hour drive from Seattle, he hiked toward an Arkansas Beauty apple tree, perhaps the only one on the planet currently bearing fruit. The tree’s identity was confirmed this year after testing and tasting by scientists and food historians.

Finally, the tree came into view, standing alone in a clearing that overlooked rolling hills of wheat. It was about 12 feet tall and twisted with age. Mr. Benscoter hoisted up the chain saw he had carried out from his truck and pruned off some small branches, which will stimulate the tree to grow new shoots that can be grafted next year onto other trees. And so another relic from America’s past will live on.

He said he often wondered what the old farmers would think about his work, and about the trees that they pushed into the soil and toiled over before walking away in defeat.

“I think they would be glad that something they planted survived,” he said.

The history of pandemics, from the Antonine Plague to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) event, ranked by their impact on human life.

COVID-19 has us all thinking about public health, but looking back, there have been many pandemics before, and we persist in spite of them.

When the wind blows around Notre Dame these days, strange, whistling chimes fill the air. A ghostly harmony made by the gaping holes in the old medieval structure, left by the fire exactly a year ago.

For most of the past year, this quiet music was drowned out by the noises of construction work, the tourists and traffic around Notre Dame. But today this Gothic giant stands silent and empty.

The cranes hang awkward and frozen above its scaffolding, the usual flow of tourists queuing for selfies outside the freshly-built hoarding has gone.

Image caption Daylight peers through the damaged roof of the cathedral

The restrictions in place to deal with coronavirus have meant that all restoration work here has stopped.
'Alone, but not abandoned'

"Notre Dame is an 850-year-old lady," the rector of Notre Dame, Patrick Chauvet, told me. "She's an injured, old lady."

"And for all the elderly, the injured, those in quarantine, or isolated in retirement homes, I think there's a symbolic link. There's no-one around Notre Dame here either; she's has been left alone, but not abandoned."

In the late afternoon of 15 April 2019, Monseigneur Chauvet was enjoying a drink at a nearby cafe when smoke began rising from the spire of Notre Dame.

Media captionThere were gasps from the crowd at the moment Notre-Dame’s spire fell

He ran towards the building he knows so well.

The fire spread quickly, blazing through the mass of medieval rafters - known as "the forest" - and bringing down the iconic spire.

For a few critical hours, firefighters warned the French president that Notre Dame might not be saved.
Image copyright Windfall Films
Image caption The old scaffolding damaged in the fire needs to be taken down very carefully

One year on, wooden buttresses have appeared on the outside walls, and a vast web of new scaffolding is going up around the building.

Ironically, it is a set of old scaffolding, put up before the fire to restore some of the cathedral statues, that poses the immediate threat.

It burned and twisted in the heat, and now needs to be dismantled and taken down.

Patrick Chauvet says the building is not yet totally secure.

"It's still fragile," he told me. "It just takes a storm, a tornado, and it will move. When the old scaffolding that is welded together is removed, then we can say the cathedral is 100% saved."

Claudine Loisel, a glass specialist working on the restoration, has been painstakingly testing the lead and grime on each panel of the building's 19th Century stained-glass windows, to check it's safe for restorers to begin their work.

The SR-71 was fast but fussy — getting the Blackbird into the sky took hours of preparation. Once it was airborne though, it set world records which stand today.

The Story Behind the Unique Photo of the SR-71 Blackbird Creating ‘Fireballs’ during Air Fete Air Show 1986 at RAF Mildenhall //

During that pass we had “13 fireballs” come out of the SR-71’s exhaust. It looked beautiful, and people wanted to know if it could be done again,’ former Blackbird RSO, Lt. Col. Doug Soifer. //

The maintenance people figured it was the TEB [triethylborane] shooting out of its container and igniting the JP-7. With that start, we had an exciting six weeks in England.’

The SR-71 burned JP-7 fuel. A one-of-a-kind fuel that used an additive to raise its flash point so the fuel would not break down at extreme temperatures. In an emergency situation, crews were authorized to refuel with JP-4 or JP-5, however, this limited the aircraft to Mach 1.5. These emergency fuels were to be used only if the crew was low on fuel and had to use any tanker he could find to avoid the loss of the aircraft. //

To ignite the JP-7 for engine start, and to light the afterburner section, a liquid chemical ignition system was used. Talk about “unique!” The liquid chemical, triethylborane (TEB), had the physical property of exploding when exposed to air. Mounted on each engine was a sealed tank, inerted with nitrogen gas and filled by maintenance with 600cc of TEB prior to each flight. During engine start, rising fuel pressure in the fuel control signaled the ignition system that a metered amount of TEB could be injected into the engine combustion section, after the pilot moved the throttle from cut-off to the idle position. Preceded slightly by fuel, the TEB exploded and ignited the JP-7. Anyone watching an engine start from behind the aircraft could see the tell-tale green flash of the TEB exploding, igniting the engine.

Each time a throttle was lifted up and moved forward into the afterburner range, another metered shot of TEB would light the AB fuel. Each engine’s tank contained enough TEB for at least 16 metered shots to light either the engine or afterburners

Around Washington, insiders vaguely understood Weiss as a mysterious but brilliant eccentric with a thinly veiled penchant for insubordination. Obituaries remembered him as an adviser to four presidents, executive director of the White House Council on International Economic Policy, assistant for space policy to the secretary of defense. According to his obit in The Washington Post, “Much of his government work centered on national security, intelligence organizations and concerns over technology transfers to communist countries. As an adviser to the Central Intelligence Agency, he served on the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board and the Signals Intelligence Committee of the US Intelligence Board … His honors included the CIA’s Medal for Merit and the National Security Agency’s Cipher Medal.” France awarded him a Légion d’Honneur and NASA recognized him with an Exceptional Service Medal.

This is a long and fascinating article about Gus Weiss, who masterminded a long campaign to feed technical disinformation to the Soviet Union, which may or may not have caused a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s, if in fact there even was a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s.

Lots of information about the origins of US export controls laws and sabotage operations.

Two new biographies of a pair of America's most innovative men attempt to explain how intense dedication produces remarkable and wondrous results.

This article was originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It is reproduced here with their permission.

As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coördinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For many years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.

• The Editor

This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.

Overview

Many of the discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question - ªYes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project?º This proposal provides an answer to such questions. Firstly, it discusses the problem of information access at CERN. Then, it introduces the idea of linked information systems, and compares them with less flexible ways of finding information.

It then summarises my short experience with non-linear text systems known as ªhypertextº, describes what CERN needs from such a system, and what industry may provide. Finally, it suggests steps we should take to involve ourselves with hypertext now, so that individually and collectively we may understand what we are creating.

Losing Information at CERN

CERN is a wonderful organisation. It involves several thousand people, many of them very creative, all working toward common goals. Although they are nominally organised into a hierarchical management structure, this does not constrain the way people will communicate, and share information, equipment and software across groups. //

A problem, however, is the high turnover of people. When two years is a typical length of stay, information is constantly being lost. The introduction of the new people demands a fair amount of their time and that of others before they have any idea of what goes on. The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found. //

The problems of information loss may be particularly acute at CERN, but in this case (as in certain others), CERN is a model in miniature of the rest of world in a few years time. CERN meets now some problems which the rest of the world will have to face soon. //

A solution: Hypertext
Personal Experience with Hypertext

In 1980, I wrote a program for keeping track of software with which I was involved in the PS control system. Called Enquire, it allowed one to store snippets of information, and to link related pieces together in any way. To find information, one progressed via the links from one sheet to another, rather like in the old computer game "adventure". I used this for my personal record of people and modules. It was similar to the application Hypercard produced more recently by Apple for the Macintosh. A difference was that Enquire, although lacking the fancy graphics, ran on a multiuser system, and allowed many people to access the same data. //

"Hypertext" is a term coined in the 1950s by Ted Nelson [...], which has become popular for these systems, although it is used to embrace two different ideas. One idea (which is relevant to this problem) is the concept: "Hypertext": Human-readable information linked together in an unconstrained way. //

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.

The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use.

The passing of this threshold accelerated by allowing large existing databases to be linked together and with new ones. //

I imagine that two people for 6 to 12 months would be sufficient for this phase of the project.

A second phase would almost certainly involve some programming in order to set up a real system at CERN on many machines. An important part of this, discussed below, is the integration of a hypertext system with existing data, so as to provide a universal system, and to achieve critical usefulness at an early stage.

(... and yes, this would provide an excellent project with which to try our new object oriented programming techniques!)

TBL March 1989, May 1990 //

Nelson, T.H. "Getting it out of our system" in Information Retrieval: A Critical Review", G. Schechter, ed. Thomson Books, Washington D.C., 1967, 191-210

Situational awareness before GPS and computers was a serious challenge.

On 11 April 1970, the Lovell family watched their husband and father, Jim Lovell, blast off on Nasa's third mission to land on the Moon.

But this was to be an ill-fated mission, and in the six days that followed, the Lovells found themselves facing intense agony.

As the 50th anniversary of the mission approaches, we hear Jim's wife, now 89, and his daughter and son, now in their 60s, relive their incredible story.

The story of union jack national flag united st gee cross england flag flag stock fooe 4k hd 221 clipsRead More "English Flag 1620"

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and our grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.

— Daniel Burnham

In a remote forest, a few kilometres from the Chernobyl power plant, the huge Duga-2 radar tower stands as relic of Soviet mismanagement.

Video by Adrian Hartrick and Dominika Ozynska