Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips We return to the era of the main computer center and waiting for computer time. Way back in the previous millennium, I was leaving graduate school. While in school, I had access to a new 32-bit minicomputer (I think it was made by Perkin-Elmer if anyone else remembers that time). One problem […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Big iron is back. The mainframe is back. And we hate it more now than ever. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… well it was 1979, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and a friend of my father worked for the computer company of America (IBM). He walked me through the […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Expert systems live on after 40 years. Well, sort of. I worked in artificial intelligence research in the mid-1980s. We had an AI boom in that decade. Then a winter and a boom or two since then. Back in 1985, we had “expert systems.” (I am old enough to remember this. I […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips If a computer is used in a system, the data is stored and can be retrieved. This story is making the rounds on the Internet…Tesla was involved in a crash lawsuit. Tesla said, “We don’t have any data.” A hacker found the data in the car. Put this down next to the […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips Borrowing from The Software Crisis of the 1990s, I declare The AI Crisis. A recent report from MIT claims that 95% of AI projects attempted by well-meaning folks fail. Gosh. That is a pretty high percentage. I remember the software crisis of the late 1980s and all through the 1990s. Reports like […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips The makers of the first generation of the home computer are passing. I saw recently that Steve Wozniak is now 75 years old. I clearly recall the first time I saw an Apple computer. It was early in 1980. I was still a senior engineering student at LSU. I was in one […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips AI agents are all the rage. Really? Of course these things are old news. OpenAI released the ChatGPT Agent recently. Wow! Great stuff! Okay, it is pretty good stuff. Here is a prompt in plain, everyday English. When something happens, do something. Here are instructions in plain, everyday English. Do that complex […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I can do something wrong. I can do something right, but be mistaken in how I tell the story of the doing. There is a difference. Is one mistake better? I can do something wrong. For example, not tighten the lug nuts properly when I change a tire on a car. I […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips I have been able to write drafts faster and with much higher quality than other writers I know. I have, unknowingly, been writing at “pulp speed.” I stumbled across this concept of writing at pulp speed recently. It came from a blog post by Dean Wesley Smith. Back in the old days […]

[Read more →]

by Dwayne Phillips We store more information on computers. And we FIND it all. Back in ’07 (2007 for those who don’t know an old old way of writing the dates in the first decade of a century), I had a conversation with a senior manager of a government agency. Like 98.6% of senior managers, […]

[Read more →]