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« Previous Entries10 years ago today I left IBM
Tuesday, April 7th, 2020Ten years ago on April 7, 2010 I left IBM, a company where I had worked on and off since 1974. The post I made 5 years ago on this anniversary pretty well sums up how I got to that point and what I set off to do in the time afterwards. There’s not much […]
Tim Bray posts on the 20th anniversary of XML
Sunday, February 11th, 2018Tim Bray has a nice post on the 20th anniversary of XML.
The Tufts Community Revolts over the Ben Hescott Tenure Decision
Tuesday, May 30th, 2017Ashley Hedberg has done us all a terrific service by compiling and sending to the Tufts administration reactions from former students to the decision by Tufts not to grant tenure to Ben Hescott. Ben is one of the finest teachers I’ve met. Tufts made a terrible mistake by not recognizing his extraordinary contributions and by […]
5 years
Tuesday, April 7th, 2015Seems hard to believe, but exactly 5 years ago I was signing the papers to retire from IBM after a career that had spanned 36 years. I said in my post that day that I hoped to “take an extended break to play music, read, travel, work on our house, spend time with my children, […]
Vote for Bill Hurley and Jessie Steigerwald for Lexington School Committee
Monday, February 23rd, 2015If you are a registered voter in Lexington Massachusetts, I strongly urge you to vote for Bill Hurley and Jessie Steigerwald for School Committee in next week’s election. The election is on Monday (yes Monday!) March 2nd. Both of these candidates have been endorsed by the Lexington Minuteman. This is a particularly important election. If […]
IBM 360 is 50 years old today
Monday, April 7th, 2014It’s been way too long since I posted here, but the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the IBM 360 seems like a good excuse. Of course, the 360 was to its era what the Intel architecture is today, and in fact even more. Not only was its instruction set the code of choice for […]
Excellent post from Mark Nottingham on HTTP 2.0
Wednesday, July 10th, 2013Geekpage has a terrific interview with HTTP 2.0 WG chair Mark Nottingham on recent developments relating to HTTP 2.o. The newly released IETF draft is at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-04.
Moving on from the W3C TAG
Thursday, May 2nd, 2013A few minutes ago, Tim Berners-Lee announced that as of June 1, Daniel Appelquist and Peter Linss will take over as chairs of the W3C Technical Architecture Group. I have been a member of the TAG since 2004 and chair since early 2009. Serving on and chairing the TAG has been one of the most […]
Professor of the Practice
Tuesday, February 12th, 2013I’m pleased to announce that I have accepted a position as Professor of the Practice in the Tufts University Department of Computer Science. I expect to be teaching a course each term and advising students. As I said in my previous post, I’ve been having a wonderful time at Tufts, and I’m thrilled to have […]
A great first term at Tufts
Wednesday, December 19th, 2012If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted since September, it’s because I’ve been working nonstop on teaching my distributed systems course at Tufts. I’ve had a terrific time, and we had a wonderful group of students. Though he’d probably be surprised to hear it, the original inspiration for this course came from Tim Bray. We […]
Tufts COMP 150-IDS starts this week
Saturday, September 1st, 2012After spending all summer preparing, my new Tufts course on Internet-scale Distributed systems starts this week. I’m excited! There’s still plenty of work to do on the details, but the course Web page is now up, and I expect that course notes, slides etc. will start appearing there as things unfold.
Teaching at Tufts
Wednesday, July 4th, 2012I’m delighted to announce that I have accepted a position as a Visiting Scholar in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University, and in fall of 2012, I will be teaching a new course titled: Internet-Scale Distributed Systems: Lessons from the World Wide Web. The course description is: The World Wide Web, one of the […]
A small correction to the historical record on Colossus and Bletchley Park
Monday, June 18th, 2012Awhile ago I posted an entry recommending a Nice Video about Colossus and Tommy Flowers. I have since been in touch with Capt. Jerry Roberts, who was one of the key members of the codebreaking team at Bletchley Park (B.P) during World War II. Capt. Roberts contacted me after I made my posting, and although […]
IBM Advanced Computing System (1961-1969)
Saturday, March 24th, 2012IBM and CDC developed some of the most innovative computer architectures during the 1960’s. The advanced 360 architectures such as the IBM 360/91 are well known for their pioneering implementations of instruction-level parallelism and register renaming. Before that, Project Stretch was famous for contributing many innovations to computer architecture. Less well known was the Advanced […]
Happy Dynamic Range Day – End the Loudness Wars
Saturday, March 17th, 2012It’s that time of year again, and audio mastering engineer Ian Davis is reminding us to celebrate “Dynamic Range Day“. This is about improving the sound of the audio recordings that we buy on CD and stream through the Internet. Specifically, it’s about compression.
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