Kudos to the NSA, the NARA and Michael Ravnitzky for making RADM Grace Hopper's 1982 lecture at the NSA publicly available.
I watched both parts this morning and found them fascinating. If you're interested in computing history, the ability to foresee the effects of technology, the blind spots of human nature, and the particular genius of Grace Hopper, it's well worth your time.
In the latter part of the second video, Hopper talks about very bright young people coming out of rural schools all over the country. Places where she said there were still "good schools." I didn't know what to make of the comment, but it felt problematic. Especially since one of her FBI security anecdotes involved city kids.
But it did call to mind something I'd read from Kevin Drum the other day. Kevin Drum was one of the first people, if not the first, to point out the correlation between the presence of lead in gasoline and crime rates. In 1982, the transition from leaded gasoline to unleaded was not yet complete. I don't know if anyone has looked at standardized test scores of urban students to see if the follow the same curve with respect to the introduction and eventual withdrawal of lead in gasoline.
It's a rabbit hole I'm disinclined to go down, simply because there are too many holes competing for my attention. But Hopper's remark did call Drum's post to mind.
Speaking of retro, I managed to get the //c to boot into a 32MB HD partition on the micro-SD card. I had to switch the Floppy Emu back to being an external drive; in the internal configuration, which allows booting 5.25" floppy disk images, the Smartport can't boot an external HD image.
The HD partition contained a large number of arcade games that had been cracked and turned into applications that could be launched from ProDOS. Not all of them work as advertised, though it's not clear to me why. But enough did work to provide some amusement. I played several rounds of Night Crawler, a Centipede clone that I enjoyed back in the day. You can try it here if you like. (Read the menu carefully. Press "R" for "Run," and "E" for Night Crawler. It's hard.)
I've got a version of President Elect 1988 that boots, I found the manual at the Internet Archive. I plan to give that a try. I never played it back in the day. I was married then, with a family and my then wife didn't share my enthusiasm for computer games.
The ROMxc arrived, but I'm going to wait to install it until I have a hardcopy of the Apple //c hardware reference manual, which should be here next week sometime.
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:29 Tuesday, 27 August 2024