Polished Pebbles
"diverting myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered " Isaac Newton
The pebbles on the shores of Cyberia have been ground smooth by the relentless tides of progress but the beaches are littered with lurking paradoxes, shells of extinct paradigms, and the fossil remains of de-horned dilemmas. From a vista extending back to the IBM 704 punched card era it seems that rushing through ever-narrowing silicon gates can result in a counter-productive loss of time to stand and stare and some of the ideas and techniques that have been overwhelmed by a culture of a programmed obsolescence can still be used to good account. The uses and abuses of computers are so diverse that little can be said that is entirely true in all circumstances but it seems worth recording some account of the past. The following notes are offered in the current muridan idiom of "What's this ?" rather than "How to ...".
| Deus in Machina | Overview |
| Genesis | History of computers |
| Quante Vadis | Computer structure |
| Elegantiae Arbiter | Operating systems |
| Dormitat Homer | Computer errors |
| Tower of Babel | Programming languages |
| Janus Praeses | Computer security |