The US Army is starting a venture fund, similar to the CIA's In-Q-Tel. They'll be specializing in investments in portable power systems. To see why, just count up all the batteries that today's Special Ops troops drag over hill and dale, let alone the future half-borged Land Warrior. [Note to wannabe VCs: I'd be very careful about applying for associate jobs on this fund. The customer diligence work could be something else...]
3:20:27 PM    

Just upgraded to Safari v73. Now all of the sudden some of the blog headings are wacky sizes and the background color on my posting screen has gone to white (which is just wonderful with off-white text). Anyone else seeing strange things while reading with this version? [And no, I'm not going to black text. Not yet, at any rate.]
3:14:04 PM    

Died at the age of 69, in San Mateo, CA, George Morrow, member of the Homebrew Computer Club, one of the designers of the early S-100 hardware bus, and founder of Morrow Designs, which shipped one of the early CP/M based microcomputers built around that bus.

I met George circa 1984 when I was working with Gary Kildall at Digital Research. I'm not sure if it was there or in a talk or interview I saw elsewhere, but he came up with a wonderful description of one part of Silicon Valley 'culture' (paraphrased):

Marketing is almost an unknown concept in Silicon Valley. It's like we stand on one side of wall, and the customers are on the other. Periodically, we throw some food over the wall, and listen for chewing sounds. If we hear it, then everyone else clusters around and throws things over the wall at the same point, until they quit eating. Then repeat.

Once one of the great things about computer science and engineering was it was such a young field that you could meet and work with the greats whose work you were busy plagiarizing. Now they're starting to go: Ted Codd, Adam Osborne, George Morrow. Could we have a few month's moratorium on ripping holes in our community memory and reminding the rest of us we're just mortal? Thank you.
3:08:56 PM