Workhorse

IEEE Spectrum posts a short article and lovely slideshow documenting the restoration of IBM 1401 mainframe by volunteers at the Computer History Museum.

In the 1401's heyday, in the 1960s, some 9300 units were in use. Together with 6000-odd units of various successor models, by 1967 the 1400 line accounted for half of all the computers in the world.

The 1401 was a decimal arithmetic machine, designed expressly for business applications. It preceded the unifying System/360 line (all apps, commercial and scientific) by about five years.

Where's the COME FROM statement?

The new systems programming language on the block is Go.

Someday, maybe

Mark Pilgrim reminds us that less than seventeen years ago, the web's forefathers were trying to figure out how to incorporate images into HTML. He carefully extracts from and annotates the relevant threads, explaining acronyms that even I don't remember.

This proposal was never implemented, although the idea of text-if-an-image-is-missing is an important accessibility technique which was missing from Marc [Andreesen]’s initial proposal. Many years later, this feature was bolted on as the attribute, which Netscape promptly broke by erroneously treating it as a tooltip.

(Via kottke.org.)

Oracle numeric test

A colleague and I found ourselves needing to write a one-off bit of SQL that used a character column in a join condition. The character column is performing double duty, sometimes acting as a (numeric) foreign key, and sometimes holding other data.

I was perplexed by the lack of some kind of "is numeric" test in Oracle's dialect of SQL. I scrounged around forums and found something that I thought would work, but my colleague finally put me straight and we used this condition:

REGEXP_LIKE(char_column, '^[[:digit:]]+$')

News from Montevideo

The Economist reports on the success of the XO laptops in Uruguay. Interim results: mixed to negative.

In Escuela 95, up to half of the students in some classes have broken their machines, usually by cracking the screen or snapping the antennae that pick up a Wi-Fi signal.