

Kaspersky Labs: How scary can an old school programmer be? - dsl
http://blog.kaspersky.com/the-history-of-programming/

======
btilly
Pretty, but no demo will ever touch the Dec 9, 1968 demo by Engelbart.

See
[http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayint...](http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/12/dayintech_1209)
for a description. In one demo they introduced the computer mouse, video
conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object
addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, AND a collaborative real-
time editor. This was running on a SDS 940 which apparently supported up to 12
simultaneous users in their lab.

On what kind of hardware? According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_940>,
it could have stored no more than 200k of memory on drum memory. (It may have
had additional storage attached - hard drives were available for 2 MB.)

It took decades for these technologies to become commonplace. But once they
did, the nickname "mother of all demos" was completely appropriate.

------
ebiester
Now, this is not to disparage the scene in any way... I mean, what they did
and do is awesome, and Scream Tracker 3 (and later Impulse Tracker) was a
large part of my teenage years.

But ultimately, graphics routines are a completely different beast than
finding weaknesses in a security system that you don't own. Many programmers
on here, given a bit of guidance and some gfx/sound guys, could put together a
respectable demo. I don't think the same about something like Stuxnet.

~~~
unimpressive
I often upvote stories using the metric "Would I add this to my 'saved
stories' if it was a stand alone feature?". Very often the answer is yes even
though I disagree with large portions of an article/don't think it's a good
fit for HN.

What is a good heuristic for upvoting articles?

------
p6v53as
A conclusion that if they create good graphics with 64kb then they could be
able to steal your money from the bank is pretty huge slippery slope logical
fallacy.

------
dlitz
Wow. Kaspersky's alarmist PR has reached a new low.

