On this day in 1993, Intel released the first Pentium CPU. It ran at 60 MHz — 60 million cycles per second. Think about that: the little clock inside that chip was going from 0 to 5 volts and back to 0 volts: 60 million times every second! That still boggles my mind. Meanwhile, the computer I’m writing this on has a clock speed of 3.1 GHz — 3,100 million cycles per second — fifty times faster. I think the more you know about computers, the more amazing they are. To most people they are just a given. It shocks me that this all works.

Anyway, I remember at the time that the Pentium was released, most people I knew scoffed at the name. There had been the 8086. And then there was the 80286 — confusingly called the “eighty-two eighty-six.” Soon everyone just called it the 286. The 386 was the first 32-bit version of the chip. And the 486 was just the 386 with a math co-processor, so no big deal. The 586 was a big deal. But it was the 586, not the Pentium. Did Intel really think their marketing campaign could get us all to use the silly new name?!

Well, I don’t know what Intel thought it could or could not do. But I do know that very soon everyone called it the Pentium. And after a few years, most people just gave you blank stares if you mentioned the 586 (much less the 80586). It’s like when I used to confuse people by calling Windows 2000 what it actually was: Windows 5.0. XP was Windows 5.1. I don’t mean to be difficult, but it’s actually a lot easier than things like “Windows Vista” (Windows 6.0).

The Pentium Name Means Nothing

It’s the power of marketing. And the amazing thing is that the name — Pentium — didn’t mean anything. The original Pentium had P5 microarchitecture. Within three years, Intel was selling the Pentium II, which had a P6 microarchitecture — more or less the 80686, although they didn’t call it that. The Pentium IV which had NetBurst microarchitecture, which would have been called the 80786 in a sane world.

We have the same thing today. Do you have an i3 in your computer? Or maybe an i5 or an i7? These names are meaningless because the chips keep changing. It’s all about branding. And I hate it! It isn’t because I’m a snob. I just want things to be clear. When you bought an 80286, you knew what you were getting. Now, you need to know a whole lot more than what chip you are talking about and what its clock speed is. In fact, my i5 might be more powerful than your i7 — or less powerful than your i3. I don’t know. I don’t care. I let Will make my computer decisions for me. And thank God for that! Otherwise, I’d be nuttier than I already am.

Last year, I decided that 16 March would from that day forward be Richard Stallman Day. Most people don’t know who he is, but isn’t that typical of people who revolutionize the world? Let the Obamas and the Putins think that they run the world. The rest of us know that they are mere figureheads who the greater social forces allow their illusions of power. Richard Stallman has no illusions of power because he has no power. He is just a thinker — one who changed the world.

If you don’t know who Richard Stallman is, I will tell you. He is the guy responsible for the server that delivered these words to you. He started the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project. He wrote the gcc and g++ compilers — and much more. But most of all, he led the free software movement, which led to what is normally called Linux. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that it is called Linux, though. It is named after Linus Torvalds. And not to take anything away from him, but an operating system kernel is not an operating system. It’s like calling a quarterback a football team.

The history of GNU/Linux is typical of our economic system where 99% of all the work can be done, but the person who puts that final piece of the puzzle gets an overabundance of credit. The truth is that GNU/Linux was the result of many thousands of developers working over decades. And all of that should be honored. But just like the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is celebrated with the moniker of one of its great leaders, Martin Luther King Jr, GNU/Linux and the free software movement should be celebrated in Richard Stallman’s name.

I think we should build statues to Richard Stallman. But I don’t see that happening any time in the near future. For one thing, he’s a political radical. And he’s radical about things that most people have never thought about. Every time I hear him talk or visit his website, I’m struck by how much of a sellout I am. But I’m just not smart and brave enough not to be swept along by doing what is easy, even if it makes me somewhat queasy. Then again, I’m not a technologist. I would be happy to go back to the typewriter.

Barring that, Richard Stallman has done great work to make technology better. It isn’t just GNU/Linux. Although Big Computer has never embraced free software, it has embraced open source software. And that continues to have great effects. Richard Stallman started a movement that has had as great an effect on the world as anyone I can think of in my lifetime. The world owes him a great debt.

Happy Richard Stallman Day!

On this day in 1970, Unix Time began. Well, not exactly. It was just a convenient point to set as an epoch. And all Unix Time provides is the number of seconds since that time. It is coming up on 1.5 billion seconds. It also provides fractions of a second. In its first implementation, it subdivided seconds into 60 parts. But when I was first cutting my Unix teeth on a couple of Sun workstations in the late 1980s, Unix Time was divided into millionths of a second.

All computer systems have their own epochs. MS-DOS had its epoch exactly a decade after Unix on 1 January 1980. COBOL has an epoch of 1 January 1601. Microsoft C++ 7.0 had an epoch of 31 December 1899. VMS had an epoch on 17 November 1858. And MATLAB’s epoch is on 1 BCE. In other words: epochs are totally arbitrary. And that’s great. I’m surprised that some smart–aleck computer geek hasn’t set an epoch thousands of years in the future just so we could have negative time stamps.

But given all this epoch madness, why did we have the great Y2K scare of 16 years ago? Now I know the main issues. There were computer shortcuts taken to reduce memory usage. And there was lots of binary-coded decimal, which I’ve never understood. I mean, really: do everything in binary and then convert to decimal when humans have to look at it. It makes no sense to represent numbers in this way on the hardware level. And I know that binary-coded decimal was especially used for time and date functions.

But I do think that Y2K was vastly overblown. Yes, I think that mission critical computers should have been thoroughly checked out. Any chance of a computer firing a missile is unacceptable. But it was mostly just something for reporters to talk about. But Unix Time is cool. At least I can remember when it is. I will have forgotten all about VMS time by the time you read this.

On this day in 1968, computer scientist Douglas Engelbart gave what came to be known as The Mother of All Demos. In this single 90-minute demonstration, he introduced the world to, well, basically all the things that distinguish the computer you are using today from the computers people were using at that time (and for a bit more than a decade after that). These include:

• Graphics
• Windows
• Mouse
• Hypertext
• Collaborative editing
• And quite a lot more.

It was a demonstration of his own designed “oN-Line System.” It is known as NLS. Why? Because computer scientists are cruel people. Trust me, I’ve worked with them for decades. It’s a good thing we have them working on computers, because it would be ugly if they go into politics.

Anyway, that image above is the first prototype of a mouse. You may not be able to tell, but it is one-dimensional. That is a cylinder and not a sphere underneath. But it doesn’t matter. That’s actually what I like about computer scientists as compared to programmers. The scientists are just interested in concepts. Leave the details to the programmers.

Today is the sixth anniversary of Frankly Curious. On this day back in 2009, I published Everything Interesting for Everyone Interesting. It was a little 500 word essay to explain what the site was supposed to be about: interesting material for interesting people. And I think it has lived up to that mission. I can’t honestly say how interesting the material is, but the website is frequented by a large group of interesting people. We now get several hundred unique visitors per day, but I’m more impressed by the statistic that we get over a hundred people per day who come directly to the home page to check in to see what we are up to.

That’s probably the biggest change from last year. There is more of a sense of community now than there was even then. I’ve long been jealous of other blogs who don’t get nearly the traffic that Frankly Curious does, but that still had more regular visitors. It’s kind of like a bar. There are neighborhood bars where everyone knows each other. And there are bars in the mall that do a lot of business but are impersonal. I’m glad to be turning into more of a neighborhood bar.

I also had one huge article this year, The Shocking True Story of Twin Chickens. When that story came out, it went crazy — for a week or more. That was nice because it was an article I worked on a lot and ended up being really pleased with. It also answered a question that I had long wondered about. But it didn’t cause the blog to grow. The vast majority of the people came, read the article, and left. Frankly Curious is, after all, not about chickens or farming or anything related to that. That’s not to say that we didn’t pick up some regular readers because of it. But most people didn’t even click from the article to the home page to see what the blog was about.

Another big source of traffic was an article from over a year ago, College of Architecture and Planning Sign Is a Joke. That’s one of those articles that prove just how lazy most people are. There are huge arguments about the sign, but no one is willing to do even the smallest amount of research. So they came to that page. And that made me write another article, Update on the Ball State College of Architecture and Planning Sign — It’s Still a Joke. But again, these visitors did not stick around.

Another change this last year was the implementation of a strict publishing schedule. That sounds like it would make managing the site harder, but it was the opposite. It allowed me to work ahead of time and manage things better. We were doing six articles per day. I brought that down to four now, which works a lot better. It gives me time to do other things. And it is not overwhelming for those people who think they ought to read everything. And four articles per day is more than enough for a blog that is done by just one person.

Regardless, it is amazing that this site has been around for six years. Even more amazing is that it seems to be running better than it ever has been. For so many years, we were just limping along. Now it seems more like a machine. And other than, you know, writing the articles, it all pretty much takes care of itself. But I keep adding to it — trying to make it a bit more interesting. As you have probably noticed over the past couple of days, there is now the “Recycled Genius” post at the top of the home page. And by the time you read this, I expect to have up a comments page. If you have any requests, let me know.

But thanks to everyone who makes this site interesting. I’d mention you all by name, but I’m sure I would leave some people out. But you know who you are.

Afterword

Because of my varied freelance work, I’ve been forced to because a business. So I’ve just started to set up Frankly Curious Media. There isn’t going to be much there — just business stuff: clients, work examples, prices. But if you know people who need work done, you can send them over there where it will be more professional than our freewheeling stuff here.