developer.* Blogs - So this guy Markoff gets paid for this level of fact checking? Sweet! How do I get in on this deal? - Comments

Coding Critic

Donna L Davis — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:51:23 -0800

E.N., reading your comments on this book convinces me that I should *never* attempt to write one myself. I didn't exactly live through the entire era and certainly can't appreciate the value of LSD on creativity (that is repeatedly mentioned) and the impact that had on early PC design.

I remain in awe of folks who have such a ready store of facts in their noggins, indexed and optimized for immediate recall. On what topic could I truly claim to be such an expert? Not M*A*S*H TV episodes I watched too frequently in another life (although I can tell you that the theme song to M*A*S*H was Suicide is Painless).

Not the Jane Austen or Charles Dickens books I've slobbered over despite the fact that I have an undergraduate degree in English Literature. And unfortunately, not the software development profession in which I've been immersed for...what 20 years? Heck, I couldn't even tell you with certainty if my teenage daughters are current on all their immunizations.

How humbling this all is. I only share the naked truth of my inadequacies in case there are any other vanilla studio musicians out there playing Muzak in this rock opera.

How do you shut down your brain at night so you can sleep? I have a hard enough time with that myself, and I've clearly got the gears in neutral.

This leads me back to the earlier topic of Agile Reading. Does anyone else feel the need for *diversion* after a day slaving over a hot computer? There are a lot of technical books I'd like to read, but frankly, many days by the time I come home, I'm fried.

It gets worse

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 17:57:08 -0800

Markoff refers to WWII defense workers with whom Engelbart worked as "French Canadian peasants".

Someone should tell him that "peasant" is part of a semantic series (farmer, peasant, serf, slave) and that in this n-tuple there are NO peasants in North America since all farmers in North America participate in the cash economy, this participation (absent legal ties to the land or involuntary servitude) differentiates the farmer from the peasant.

But in the increasingly narcissistic style of the New York Times under Junior, Markoff from his privileged perch in San Francisco sees a foreshortened world, and actually seems to reason that being Canadian is Strike One, being of all things French is Strike Two, and this means he has the right to caricature decent and hardworking people as peasants.

Celine Dion sees this she gonna have a fit, in fine.

The book you are reading continues to be not my cup of tea and to be flawed in IMO, in other words.

Markoff's rehabilitation of Doung Engelbart's work at SRI is based, as far as I can tell, on a paper given by Alan Kay at a conference in Germany on the history of software: yet there is a definitely disturbing difference between Markoff's story and Kay's.

Kay praises Engelbart's CODE but Markoff as a journalist seems to think that programming is low and mechanical labor, therefore in Markoff, Engelbart is this visionary who would look out the window, eat a plate of ham and eggs, and then tell the mere programmers what to do.

In Markoff's picture, common to technology journalism but perniciously false in that actual programming groups organize in this fashion, the coders then tug their forelocks, and proceed to merely transcribe the "vision".

This is why programming cannot be managed, because it is self-contradictory to "tell" programmers what to "do". They don't "do", they "write".

Is it a missed fact, or a misprint?

Andy Tegethoff — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 08:53:31 -0800

Hell, even I know off the top of my head that there was no Peace Corps until at LEAST 1960, just by counting presidents.
I can't believe such a bold error could slip thru even the Times fingers.

The Untold Story

Donna L Davis — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 07:07:56 -0800

Are you, in fact, talking about the book I mentioned purchasing: What the Dormouse Said: The Untold Story of How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry? by John Markoff?

Interestingly I've been reading it alongside The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian, by Nina Burleigh. I've been struck by the parallels between the inner circles of the innovative computer scientists Markoff mentions and those who formed the Republic of Letters in the enlightenment period of late 1700's.

Unfortunately my opportunity to read is between 11:00PM and 12:00AM so I am barely competent to read, much less catch discrepancies.

I hope you do complete the project you mention.

Dammit

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 02:42:49 -0800

Judy Miller didn't check her New York Times facts on Iraq and as a result 2000 people are dead. There is a certain arrogance at the New York Times under its baby Boom publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, which Miller and Markoff share.

It is the arrogance of America's elite-level *nomenklatura* Baby Boomers whose daddies were true giants such as Punch Sulzberger and who expect to be heirs apparent. The President is merely exhibit A.

Seriously, folks, I would have caught this error (impossibility of thinking of joining the Peace Corps in 1950) in my first proofread as would any good journo.

What's interesting about Doug Engelbart is that he's older than me, and I am at 56 older than dirt. Doug was born in 1925 and just missed serving (as my Dad just missed serving) in WWII.

In Doug's case, according to a Markoff whose facts we should check, Doug's ship was leaving the Golden Gate when Japan surrendered. Nonetheless, like my Dad, Doug had to serve.

His age meant that his most productive years were the 1960s but unlike his generation (which was referred to as The Silent Generation, the age of "the man in the grey flannel suit" at the time: an age of conformity), Doug wanted, as an employee of research institutions, to pursue his vision. As such, he got nowhere for the most part but thanks to Kay, and, I suppose, to Markoff, he is getting credit.

Unfortunately, the American technology press is uniquely ill-equipped to report negative criticism from within technology such as Dijkstra's therefore someone, like me for instance, needs to write a "Beautiful Mind" style semipopular biography of Dijkstra. I am in fact working on this project but it may never come to fruition owing to time constraints.

So this guy Markoff gets paid for this level of fact checking? Sweet! How do I get in on this deal?

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 02:34:31 -0800

It would be impossible for Doug Engelbart, a genuine pioneer in GUI based computing, to think about joining the Peace Corps in 1950 as Markoff states. The Peace Corps was founded by President Kennedy in 1960.

Nonetheless, New York Times [sic] technology journo Markoff is on to something, because for the first time in the general press, somebody listened to Alan "Smalltalk" Kay, who saw in 1968 that Engelbart was light-years ahead of his time.