- Photos
suitable
for desktop art on your PC or Mac. Eight photos, mostly on nature themes
(trees, clouds, etc.) at 1600x1200, 1024x768, 832x624 and 800x600 resolutions,
with gamma (darkness) tuned for Mac or PC.
Scarsdale High Class of 1962
- If you're a member, and if you were not successfully contacted this year by the reunion committee, please email me at
- The Doormat Singers--In the years 1964-1966, listeners to MIT campus radio station WTBS were sometimes privileged to hear the songs of the Doormat Singers: Matt Fichtenbaum, MIT '66 and Dan Murphy, MIT '65. Four songs are available here in .mp3 format, about two megabytes each. (Dan Murphy's post-Doormat-Singers folksinging is chronicled here)
- Bullets--Personal college nostalgia. These are photographs of bullets in flight. I took them myself. Sort of. I took them in Dr. Edgerton's lab in 1962. Entire page is about 40 KB including all jpg's.
- Nocturnal Aviation More spoofs of commercials from the golden age of Apple Gunkies (see below). Digicomputronimatics ("when you think of Dynadigitrons, think of Digicomputronimatics"), "Flexopneumohydroservosystematization and Control" ("Yesterday's future is here today..."), Apple Gunkies Physics Lecture, more...
- Neon Visions OK, it's just a silly animated GIF which you may find amusing and nostalgic if you lived in a West Campus dorm at MIT in the sixties. Otherwise, don't bother...
- Apple Gunkies In celebration of Scarsdale High School's upcoming thirty-fifth reunion, RealAudio clips of five "Apple Gunkies" (fake, humorous) radio commercials as aired on WTBS (MIT student radio) circa 1964. Three of them were written and performed by Sue Lasdon, SHS '62, and her dormmates at Goucher College. The others were written by me.
Computer History/Nostalgia
- Munching Squares--a program than runs on a G3 or G4 Mac and simulates a classic "display hack" on a PDP-1 computer.
- Project Whirlwind (No, folks, this was way before my time). Based on a 1953 documentary movie, Making Electrons Count. This Web edition includes: transcript of the soundtrack illustrated with 108 frames from the movie, forming a storyboard version of the film (approx 600K total); three minutes of edited audio (200K); 1 minute of compressed video (3 MB) showing Whirlwind's engineer walking through and around the huge racks, ending by holding up a core plane. The portions of the film dealing with 1953-style debugging from the point of view of a user are fascinating and hysterically funny to modern ears. "My consultant notices and corrects several logical programming errors. I express my confidence that the program is now ready to run. On the basis of his experience with other programmers, my consultant feels that my confidence is unfounded."
- Bush Differential Analyzer in action??? This 732K QuickTime movie reproduces a very, very short clip from the 1951 George Pal sci-fi epic, "When Worlds Collide." I think this must be a real shot of the Bush Differential Analyzer (1940's 100%-mechanical analog computer).
- TJ-2: A Very Early Word Processor. Reproduction of some "antique" documentation, with my comments.
Harvard Nostalgia
- Philosophy
4 Etext of Owen Wister's charming, nostalgic account of two Harvard
undergraduates off on a spree in 1880's Cambridge.
Miscellaneous Humor
- The Year-2000-Is-A-Leap-Year FAQ--In the years leading up to 2000, to my astonishment, I saw various discussions in USENET and elsewhere debating whether or not the year 2000 was a leap year. ComputerWorld once published a letter in which someone upbraided a major piece of software--VMS, I think--for treating 2000 as a leap year. After making several unsuccessful attempts to convince skeptics in comp.software.year-2000 that the year 2000 was really a leap year, I wrote this, in an effort to find something, anything, that would actually close off debate.
- FAUXBIZ--This page uses Javascript to generate fake business addresses. (It's a joke, folks... like a poetry generators or random sentence generators. Every few years a new interpretive language comes along... BASIC or Hypertalk or VB and now Javascript... and we get to relive our past, writing hundred-line adventure games and the like). Well, things of this kind do have one practical use: populating databases for demonstrations...
- Remembering Mrs. Pentstemmon, the elementary school music teacher who almost killed my interest in music
- SCSI FAQ: Everything you never wanted to know about SCSI