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C00002 00002	Harangue: (you REALLY didn't think you'd get away without one, did you?!!]
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Harangue: (you REALLY didn't think you'd get away without one, did you?!!]

What is  the point  of this  demonstration. Certainly --assuming  the
damnable machine is  up--certainly, the use of the displays is flashy
and impressive. But that is not the point. Certainly  the opportunity
to "play" is omnipresent; but that,  too, is not the point. The point
is  that a computer can become a quite  useful tool when it is but in
the larger context of  a device to perform mechanical  tasks.  Indeed
the term "computer" is archaic and should be retired. 

At the  labs we compose, edit,  debug and run all  programs on line. 
There has  never  been  a card  punch  or  card reader  even  in  the
building.  The  appropriate philosophy is to let  the computer become
an integral part of the research environment. This philosophy is best
demonstrated in the editor-document compiler-XGP cycle. Several of us
are  actively interested  in extending  this kind  of support  to the
domain  of program construction. Perhaps it  snobbish, but goddamn it
if research is supposed to be done by reasonably sophisticated people
then  they  should expect  to  have comparable  equipment.   Yes  its
expensive  but  so  are  buggy,  over-budget,  and  late  programming
projects. 

I would hope that universities would expect to have at least a subset
of  such  facilities  available for  students.  For  several reasons:
universities should be leaders, particularly in a field as chaotic as
software and program  methodology.  Sending people  out to perpetuate
the  facilites of poor programming simply  because they can then "get
jobs" is no excuse. Universities must teach "the way things SHOULD be
rather  than the  way  things ARE."  A  final note:  all the  display
programs were conceived and implemented 8 years ago. 

SOS
a "good" teletype editor.

E
"what you see is what you get"
descendant of TVEDIT, super display editor. First written in 1966
for PDP-1.

LISP
"it was the best of languages, it was the worst of languages"
Most venerable list processing language

REDUCE
A system for symbolic mathematics and algebrai simplification.
Written by mad Anthony Hearn.

DCHESS
A display-oriented version of the MIT chess program.

PARRY
Son of Colby's Mad Doctor. Attempts to simulate paranoid behavior
by acting like a programmer.

RAID
A debugging program (get it??) for the displays. First written
in 1966 for PDP-1.

WISE
Weiher's Instant Shit Emitter. A polish stack desk calculator (c.1966).

ARMDPY
Graphics show of Stanford Arm. Good fun

LCF
Robin Milner's mechanisation of Scottery.

SWR
Space War: The most incredible program ever written.  Written
by Steve Russell (c. 1963). TTY22

COPILOT
Dan Swinehart's on-line programming aids for high-level languages.

PROVER
Resolution-based theorem prover. Written by John Allen, whota krok.