Links & Resources |  |
The web is very dynamic with new information
appearing and old information diappearing. One way to find
about something is to search for it. Of the various
search engines, we like Google the best.
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This section collects a number of different links and resources which
may be of interest to the PCC community. The best description might be
"serendipity". Additions, corrections to
pcc@sumeru.stanford.edu.
Organizations
The Exploratorium
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The Exploratorium has a great web site (They've won scads of webbies!) and a great hands-on science and technology museum. While most folks think of it as a museum, it's really a teacher training facility. |
The San Jose Technology Museum
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Interesting exhibits. |
The Computer History Center
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The Computer History Center has an enormous collection of historical computers and computer related artifacts. |
The Homebrew Computer Club
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The Homebrew Computer Club is no longer in operation. In the early days the Homebrew Club met regularly in the Palo Alto Area. It was a focal point for early work on personal computers. Many PCC people attended Homebrew meetings and vice versa. |
ACM -- The Association for Computing Machinery
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The Association for Computing Machinery is more software and systems oriented than the IEEE. It sponsors conferences and workshops and publishes journals. |
IEEE Computer Society
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The IEEE Computer Society is a sub-section of the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. The IEEE-CS has a focus biased towards hardware and systems, but overlapps with the ACM. Like the ACM, IEEE-CS holds conferences and workshops and publishes journals. |
Benetech
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The concept behind Benetech(http://www.benetech.org is an interesting one: venture sitting somewhere between a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit and a high tech venture funded company, chartered to do "good works", and funded using a variety on non-traditional sources. |
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Events
The Vintage Computer Festival
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The VCF (aka The Vintage Computer Festival) is a celebration of computers and their history. The next event in the Silicon Valley is September 15-16 at the San Jose Convention Center. Check http://www.vintage.org for information about the festival and vintage computers in general. They have a sort of retirement home for old machines. ;-) |
Stanford's CSL Colloquium
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This weekly colloquium covers a broad range of topics related to computer systems and applications. It's available both live and on demand over the Internet. |
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Tribal Gatherings and Ritual Events
Burning Man
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The quintessential meeting of technology and art, fantasy and reality. |
The Asilomar Microprocessor Workshop
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Invitational. Originally mostly about microprocessors, the conference has grown with the times. Topics now run the gamut of nerd interests. |
The Hackers Conference
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Invitational. Originally only a gathering for folks mentioned in Steven Levy's book, Hackers it has grown to include hackers in a variety of fields. The term "hacker" as used here has its true meaning (see The Hacker's Dictionary by Eric Raymond) and not that used in the media. Folks who do malicious things are better called "crackers" or worse. |
Financial Cryptography Conference
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Sponsored by the International Financial Cryptography Association this conference brings together many innovative thinkers in the fields of electronic cash and commerce. It's held in the Caribbean, the home of offshore companies and reputed money laundries, this is a serious, heavy-duty conference. |
Survival Research Laboratories
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Mark Pauline brings the fantasy of dueling robots and gigantic flame spewing machines to life. It's a real-time view of Mad Max or Brazil. It's hard to find enough space for one of these productions as they take on the proportions of a small war. |
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Programming Languages
 Squeak (Smalltalk)
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Squeak is a highly portable version of Smalltalk (the legendary Xerox PARC language) done as open source. It comes with substantial multimedia support thanks to the folks at Walt Disney Imagineering. (Thanks Alan Kay and Dan Ingals.) Be sure to check out SqueakLand too. |
 Python
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Python is an object oriented programming language designed by Guido van Rossum and implemented as open source. It can be easily embedded into other systems; likewise, it can be easily extended. The language is clean and internally very consistent--it's a good candidate for teaching language. The Python library has all sorts of useful classes which simplify many complex tasks. |
 ToonTalk--Making Programming Childs Play
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ToonTalk is a programming environment for kids invented by Ken Kahn. Even the youngest computer users can learn programming concepts and write programs (invent robots) which do interesting things--all in an amazing graphical environment. This is not at all like BASIC. |
Small C
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Small C is a compiler and library for the 8080 done by Ron Cain and published in PCC's Dr. Dobb's Journal. It's a simple and elegant little language. Jim Hendrix expanded on it. It's been ported to numerous machines. Years before, Scott Guthery published and sold an interpreter for C called "Tiny C". |
Tiny Basic
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Tiny BASIC is a extremely minimal subset of the BASIC language which was designed at PCC when the Altair Computer was announced. The original Altair did not have much memory (256 bytes was standard, but that was not enough to do anything significant) so doing BASIC in two thousand bytes or so was a great boon. There were a number of implementations including LiChen Wang's Palo Alto Tiny Basic. The TRS-80 included a varient of Tiny Basic in ROM. Tom Pittman created numerous versions for small embedded computers. |
Eric Raymond's Retrocomputing Museum
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Eric Raymond has reimplemented compilers for many early computer languages and a few jokes. While you're at it, check out his home page. |
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Computer Storytelling
Adventure Games
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From the classic Wumpus and Adventure to the latest versions of Doom and the adventures of Laura Croft, computer based adventure games are a form of literature. |
Hamlet on the Holodeck
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Janet Murray's book and web page are a wonderful resource for active storytelling. |
Chatterbots
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These programs are the grandchildren of Eliza, Joe Weisenbaum's Rogerian therapist and the parents (maybe) of Julia, the CMU MUD chatterbot and XXXX in Enders Game. Having a machine (that is, a computer program) be able to converse and be indistinguishable from a human being is one of the Turing Tests. The annual Loebner Prize Competition pits program against human observer to determine whether anyone has yet succeeded. Interested? Take a look at Michael L. Mauldin's AAAI94 paper, "Chatterbots, Tinymuds, And The Turing Test: Entering The Loebner Prize Competition". |
Active Stories
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Ted Kahler's Active Essays were an experiment in presenting information in a different way, done while Ted was at Apple. Unfortunataely, the working examples are no longer available on the web. |
Stagecraft.com
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A system created by Larry Tesler and Alan Cypher and others for kids to use. Somewhere between story telling and a computer game and a simulation. |
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Role Playing Computer Games
Dungeons and Dragons
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The dragon notes: My good friend Dave Arneson is the creator of Dungeons & Dragons. Check out his web site: The world of Blackmoor & Dave Arneson creator of D&D, http://castleblackmoor.com/ Also of interest:
"Good Gaming!," a survey article about role-playing games, including D&D, appeared in PCC V4N5 Mar-Apr 1976. The 3-page article "Dungeons & Dragons" by Steve Jackson was reprinted by permission in PCC V5N2 Sep-Oct 1976. The last time I talked to Dave, he was teaching computer game design at Full Sail Real World Education in Winter Park, Florida. Give a listen to Full Sail Real World Education offers career training in Digital Media, Audio, http://www.fullsail.com/pop/tl.html, or take a look at Full Sail Real World Education - Game Design, http://www.fullsail.com/fs1/gd/main.html, for information about the program. |
Wumpus
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Wumpus, by Greg Yob, was done at PCC and published in PCC Newspaper and widely republished and redistributed. It's been incredibly popular, has been ported to many different computers and rewritten in many different programming languages. It's one of the things AI agents are trained to play. Today you can even buy a cellular phone which has Wumpus as a built-in game. Wumpus websites include: http://www.wumpus.com.au/story, http://www.wumpus.com, and http://www.catseye.mb.ca./vintage/wumpus/. Chapter 1 of Lehman's textbook, Intermediate Algebra, A Journey by Discovery Chapter 1 -- Fun Math has a secion on Wumpus. To see what's there, click on the URL and then Click on The Wumpus World/ |
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Mathematics and Computer Games
MAXIT
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MAXIT by Harry Saal is a great game for learning and teaching math. We'll be putting up an on-line interactive version soon. Here are somelinks to MAXIT, including shareware versions of the game MaxIt Rules http://216.119.79.54/Moosesoftware/maxit_rules.html, Maxit http://www.gregmacg.com/Maxit.html, SigmaTech Software Games Programs http://www.sigma-tech.com/games.html (Written in Visual Basic 6.0). Object http://csi.sjce.net/maxit.htm Sample moves and C code. Bob Albrecht, dragonfun@aol.com, has developed simplified versions of MAXIT to play with Sonoma County elementary school kids as whiteboard, blackboard, and paper and pencil games. He uses MAXIT as part of his under-construction system of games for learning and teaching math from grade 2 up. MAXIT and many variations can be a powerful tool for learning & teaching math. A variation called AlphaMaxit uses letters and words instead of numbers. |
James Horton Conway
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The author of several deep books on the mathematics of games, he also devised the Game of Life. This is a generational game where you set the original conditions and see what develops. |
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Robot Pets and Slaves (Atoms not Electrons)
Rover Ranch
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Rover Ranch: K-12 Experiments in Robotic Software is a NASA site that provides all sorts of resources about robotics for grades K-12. Their URL is http://prime.jsc.nasa.gov/ROV/. |
Lego Mindstorms
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A robot kit. Lots of things to build. Several good books on projects exist. And the controller has been reverse engineered so you can work outside of the box. |
Furby
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A popular toy in 1999 reputed to be considered a recording device by the NSA. The design is masterful. There have been a couple of Furby Challenges including one, still open, to port Java to the Furby. There have been numerous efforts to reverse engineer the device. Hack Furby!. Coming Christmas 2001, a friend for Furby, Clam, who is not quite so mobile, but lots smarter. |
Billy Bass (the singing fish)
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This gadget was the bane of Christmas 2000. Several people have published hacks on the web for changing the basic mechanism to do other things! |
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Recreational Computing on the web
Two Computer Fantasy Simulations from Recreational Computing
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http://sciences.aum.edu/~furman/RC_2CFS.htm describes two CFSs by Furman H. Smith originally published in Recreational Computing. |
B A L R O G
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B A L R O G is Erik I. Bols's Roguelike Information Site: Obscure Downloads including some from Recreational Computing (Wizard's Castle). http://www.mo.himolde.no/~knan/roguelike/obscure_dl.htm |
Wizard's Castle
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Source code for the PCC game, Wizard's Castle. http://www.ashland.edu/~acm/Castle.html |
Melody Transformations
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Simple ways to manipulate melodies drawn from the pages of Recreational Computing. http://www.cs.nps.navy.mil/people/faculty/rowe/melody.html |
ALIEN NAMES for those Aliens Among Us
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Pronouncable alien names--a resource for parents to be and others. Ralph Roberts' genearation technique was published in Recreational Computing http://www.abooks.com/alien/ |
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Projects and Computer Art
The LongNow Project
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The LongNow project (the brainchild of Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis) plans to build a clock which will last for 10,000 years. Building anything which will work that long is a daunting task. The LongNow model is a fascinating one. Rather than try to build mechanical artifacts which very long lifetimes, the LongNow Project envisions creating a human organization which will care for a reliable but imperfect mechanism. |
Cambrian Art
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Evolved art using genetic programming techniques pioneered by John Koza. You can bias the evolution process with your own aesthetic and evolve the perfect picture, to your taste. The site has a gallery of other people's evolved art. |
Undesign–A Plan For All Seasons
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A participatory art site inspired by the work of Maria and Tibor Kalman.
"Everything is an experiment" –Tibor Kalman. |
Marrow Monkey
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A different kind of literature. Erik Loyer's post-post-modern approach to graphics, art and literature. This could be the future of books. |
Alice
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Alice is a Python-based 3D graphics system created at CMU. It runs only on the PC but provides a great environment to learn 3D graphics. |
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Experiments and Demonstrations (Don't Do This At Home)
Tesla Mania -- The power of electrical discharges
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This site, http://www.teslamania.com/ describes the effects of using a high discharge capacitor system to create an enormous magnetic field that literally crushes quarters. The amazing part is that it does so without necessarily destroying the quarter--the coin retains legible features, but is reduced in diameter to smaller than a dime (albeit a bit thicker). |
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Cool Web Things
WikiWiki Web Instant Web Pages
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Ward Cunningham's instant web page experiment in community and communication. Very cool. Read the FAQ. You can run your own--see WikiWikiClones at the site. Does this site need a Wiki? |
Cooperative Prime Search and other Distribute Computing Projects
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Distributed computing projects to find mathematical things like VERY LARGE primes using the computation power of the swarm of personal computers worldwide. http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm. |
| http://starmap.causeway.co.uk/epidemic.asp |
SETI@HOME
Looking for E.T.
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A distributed computing project at UC Berkeley that organizes volunteers to use their home PC to help in the search for extraterresterial life. Take a look at their other projects too. |
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Cool Things
A SUPER Digital Camera
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Foveon.com has recently (Feb 01) announced a super digital camera chip with very good resolution, great color mapping, and good dynamic range. A bit pricy for the moment, the cost will come down rapidly. And it's a good example of how all things are related. The Foveon chip is likely to put a big dent in the silver market--60% of all silver is used in film. Kudos to developers Carver Mead and Richard Lyon. |
A Keychain camera
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A really tiny camera--about the size of a Zippo lighter--that takes 26 pictures before running out of memory. Not great resolution (640X480) but really tiny. http://www.dynamism.com/spyz/index.shtml. |
Multi-use cell phones
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There are a number of these appearing from companies like Nokia, IBM, NTT, Motorola, and so forth. They are a cross between a cell phone, a personal digital assistant, a minature computer, a pager, an email machine, and so forth--they are, pretty much, all things to all people. We like the Danger.COM unit which is really just an agent for a sophisticated back end application server. Coming soon to a multi-use cell phone near you: a tremendous selection of computer games including (maybe) some of the old PCC games updated to the 21-st century. |
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Finding stuff on the web.
The Open Directory Project
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The open directory project (http://www.dmoz.org) is a volunteer maintained directory. It's used by many of the commercial systems as a jumping-off point for their search engines. A directory is a human created list of sites and is very different from a search engine which traverses the web and discovers content. |
Google
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Webbased searches work by actually visiting each page in the web and building an index of the content found there. The effectiveness of the search depends upon the size of the webbase and the way it gets searched. The trick is to find a good way to rank the many pages which match the query so the important ones come up first. Google is an amazing search engine, the best of the best. Short queries usually work well. |
WebZinger
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ImaginOn's report writing search engine searches the web and constructs an illustrated report on the queried topic. There's a special version for little kids. |
Information on Search Engines
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The Search Engine Watch site (http://www.searchenginewatch.com) has lots of helpful information about search engines and how they work. |
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Transportation and Computers
Teleportation (Beam me up....)
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For things the size of people, teleportation is likely to remain a dream. You might find this talk excerpt amusing. |
The Moller Aircar
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Transportation for the 21-st century? A VTOL personal aircraft that's simple to fly: just key in your destination on a keypad and the computer does all the rest. It's said to be fuel efficient and fast. And possibly too good to be true. The aerodynamics look to be unstable, too many difficult problems are said to have been solved. Still it does pique the imagination. And who knows... |
Hypercars - a better kind of automobile
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Amory Lovins has been arguing not for the abolition of the automobile but for its refinement into a better vehicle, a hypercar. He's been doing his work out of the environmentally responsible http://www.rmi.org where you can find a decsription of their proposal. Recently Amory has founded a start-up to develop and promote hypercars; for information go to http://www.hypercar.com for more information. Hypercars are an interesting mix of high tech and computers with very low tech design. |
Segway's Human Transporter
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Now named Segway and disclosed in public, inventor Dean Kamen's personal transportation unit (aka "IT" and "Ginger") has been demonstrated on TV and is successful if only as a toy for Morning Show hosts. |
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Online News, Newsletters, and Virtual Communities
The New York Times
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All the news that's fit to print. Great on-line coverage. If you are an educator, be sure to check what the NY Times has to offer. |
SlashDot (http://www.slashdot.org)
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News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. What more is there to say. |
The Amateur Computerist
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A newsletter in the tradition of PCC Newspaper. |
Farber's Interesting People List
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A mailing list run by Dave Farber, University of Pennsylvania Professor and (until the change of administration) Chief Technologist of the FCC. The IP list covers breaking events and news in the computing field. If you want to join, send a note to Dave explaining who you are and why you want to be on the list. The list is archived at http://www.interesting-people.org. |
Dave Winer's Davenet
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Dave Winer usually has an interesting take on the issues of the moment. His commentaries are well worth reading. |
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Natural Language Processing
Wordnet
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Wordnet is a cool tool for natural language processing. A step beyond a dictionary. And there's a good reference book. |
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Software
4K BASIC by Bill Gates and Paul Allen (pre-Altair Harvard version)
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Source for pre-Microsoft Altair BASIC. http://www.rjh.org.uk/altair/ian.htm
http://www.rjh.org.uk/altair/4k/
A paper copy is in the Harvard library. [I've taken a brief look at the code and it looks similar, as you would expect, to the 8K Microsoft code I remember. Take the comments about code quality and style by the page's author(s) with a grain of salt. Lots of people have looked at the Gates/Allen code and found it to be good if not inspired. -dra] |
 Linux
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Linux a real operating system with source code. Lots of applications, lots of suppliers. Good Networking support. And the standard response to problems is not "reload the system". |
GNU Software
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Real systems created as open source. Often the best of the best or close to it. A good place to begin when looking for systems software. Many of the gnu softwares have been ported to Windows. |
The Opera Browser
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The home of the Opera Browser -- not Netscape and not Internet Explorer. Not even open source. But it is fast and well-designed. Free if you can stomach ads, $40 if not. |
SourceForge
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SourceForge is the home of many open source projects. All of the initiatives are understaffed, but if you are looking for something to do.... |
PHP-based Portal Software
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PHP is a open source HTML scripting language. If your web host runs Linux it's likely to already be availalble. The phpnuke site has all the tools needed to put up a classy portal. The graphical style is a bit like that of Slashdot and seems oriented towards lots of small articles. This site does not use it (yet), but it sure seems classy. |
Gimp
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The Gnu Image Processing system is a first rate picture editor available as open source. It runs nicely on a PC running Linux. |
Fourmilab Pages
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Actually there are two sites, the primary site in Switzerland and a North American mirror site. The latter is likely to give better response. The Fourmilab site is owned and operated by John Walker, one of the founders of Autodesk. There's lots of interesting stuff here--it's always worth a browse. |
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Webware
Equations in HTML
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HTML was not designed to display mathematics. The HTMX system is a preprocessor that adds some new tags to HTML documents. Inside these tags you can write equations using the LaTex metalanguage for mathemetical symbols. When the HTMX document is processed by the htmx program (a Perl script) it replaces the LaTex fragments with references to gifs it creates for the equations. Cumbersome, perhaps, but oodles better than anything else. The HTMX homepage is http://www.math.uic.edu/~fields/htmx. Warning: This is not a standalone system--it requires both Perl and Latex2e to work. |
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Mathematics
Cryptography
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An increasingly imporant area of study. Once was, the study of number theory was done for its beauty alone, but now it has important practical applications. Bruce Schneier, one-time DDJ Contribuiting Editor, wrote Secrets and Lies, a popular overview of crypto and Applied Cryptography, a serious book with code--both worthy of being on your bookshelf. The CRC Press Handbook of Applied Cryptography does a good job of covering the heavy-duty math which underpins cryptographic methods. |
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Books and Special Publishers
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
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A great book to start out learning about programming. Now in it's second edition. Harold Abelson, Gerald Sussman, and Julie Sussman. Structure and Interprestation of Computer Programs, MIT Press. |
Structure and Interpretationof Classical Mechanics
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A new way to look at one of the primary underpinnings of physics (and, indeed, all of science), classical mechanics. Computer science provides both simulations and a structure for analysis and understanding. Gerald Sussman, Jack Wisdom, Meinhard E. Mayer. Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, MIT Press, 2001. |
Lindsay Books
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Lindsay Books has republished how-to books from the heyday of do-it-yourself science. Food for the inventive mind, a guidebook for anyone who wants to learn the process of experimental science and technology first hand. |
O'Reilly Books
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The O'Reilly series has become the standard reference publisher for a major part of modern comptuer systems. They publish books which augment and supplant the manuals for most contemporary systems. Kudos to Tim O'Reilly for making it happen. |
Project Gutenberg
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Electronic books on the net. No markup, just text. Lots of cools stuff. The majority of the material can be put up because it is out of copyright. |
Out of Print Books
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While the Net has taken some of the the joy of the search for old, out of print, books and made it less likely that you'll find a bargain on the shelves of a used (previously-owned?) bookshop, it has also made it easier to find the book you want. Bookfinder is a meta-search engine for used and out of print books worldwide. |
New Books
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For convenience and reasonable prices, Amazon.com is a clear leader. This PCC Alumni site is an Amazon affiliate. Books purchased through us give a small rebate which will be used to pay expenses. |
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Journals and Zines
Doctor Dobb's Journal
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The original PCC publication now a commercial publication (that means, it has ads). It's still a great resource and one of the few publications which really published code and system detail. |
Software Practice and Experience
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Costly, but an outstanding resource. Published by John Wiley and Sons. The focus here is on the creation of software and the underlying algorithms. |
Recreational and Educational Computing
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This journal, published by Dr. Michael Ecker of Penn State, contains interesting and useful stuff in the style of the old PCC. Some of the old PCC authors can be found there. |
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Papers and Reports
How to be a Hacker
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Eric Raymond's insightful paper. You may find his other FAQs and writings of interest. |
Hackmem
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An MIT report which includes many wonderfully clever tricks of the trade. Many are for the DEC PDP-10 and have to be translated from a 36-bit world to a 32-bit world, but it's of minor consequence. |
Hacker's Delight
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A GREAT monograph written by Hank Warren at IBM. Lots of great and wonderful trickery which depends upon deep mathematical insight and a bent mind. Not publically available (yet) but Hank will occasionally share copies. |
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Resources for Teachers
KnowledgeContext.ORG
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KnowledgeContext provides curriculum to teachers of grades 5 to 12 that prepares young people for rapid technological change. It does this by teaching them how to understand and evaluate technology. |
A MathBackpack for teachers and kids?
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One of the Dragon's latest projects. Contact the dragon. |
Starship Gaia
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Another of the Dragon's projects, this one about Starship Earth. Resource for teachers. |
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Future Science & Technology
Nanotechology
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Making things molecule size out of only a few atoms. |
Quantum Computing
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Things behave very differently when they are small. |
Bio Computing
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At the interface of biology, organic chemistry, and computing. |
Materials Science
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Cool new forms of matter. Buckey balls, nanotupes. Light emitting polymers. Crystals which can store holographic images. Plastics with programmable properties. |
Space Science
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Travels to outer space. Mars. Extraterrestial life. |
Dr. Sparks Science Fiction Index
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Dr. Sparks Science Fiction Index http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/sfindex.html, is a great reference for Science Fiction books. Science Fiction is one place to explore possible Future Science & Technology. |
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Business and Economics
Predicting the Future
http://www.downside.com
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Predicting the future is not always difficult. The crystal ball at www.downside.com is a huge Perl script which scrapes financial information from SEC filings and other public records and then precicts the demise of various high-tech companies using trivial predictors. The model is very simple: companies go away when they run out of money. Not Investment Advice per se, but interesting. |
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