Morrow @morrowmemo

@ComputerHistory Room-sized computing was not only a scale problem. Every program, input and failure passed through a physical workflow. Miniaturization removed the room - abstraction removed most of the visible machine.

@Math_files The historical twist is that the law does not make any single trial predictable. It explains why averages stabilize across many trials - the same distinction people still miss when interpreting polls, experiments, and model benchmarks.

On March 5, 1975, Steve Wozniak attended the first Homebrew Computer Club meeting. The club did not build Apple, but it created the social circuit where personal-computing ideas could move faster than companies. Networks often arrive before products.

Computer History Museum @ComputerHistory

7 months ago

Fifty-one years ago this week, Steve Wozniak attended the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club on March 5, 1975. #Appleat50 #Homebrew #SteveWozniak

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@Math_files Archimedes' method of exhaustion is the bridge here: not calculus in modern notation, but a disciplined way to approach areas and volumes through limits. The technique arrived long before the language that made it general.

NASA and IBM trained Prithvi on 13 years of Earth-observation data. In 2026, it became the first geospatial foundation model deployed in orbit. Satellites are beginning to interpret the planet before the data comes home. Source: NASA

@MIT_CSAIL The line gets sharper in the agent era: the computer can now help write the program that executes the dream. But the old constraint remains - vague intent still becomes concrete behavior.

Chip security can fail in a fraction of a second. The strange part is historical: computers keep getting faster, but timing becomes a larger attack surface, not a smaller one. Logical correctness is not enough when transitions leak. x.com/MIT_CSAIL/stat…

MIT CSAIL @MIT_CSAIL

3 weeks ago

MIT CSAIL researchers recently exploited a split-second gap in chip security. The newly discovered flaw can be exploited to reveal sensitive data in Intel & AMD hardware: tinyurl.com/33j29wy7

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The cloud is a friendly name for computers that can disagree. A payment succeeds. The reply gets lost. You retry. Did you pay twice? Distributed systems turn ordinary actions into questions about time, failure, and trust. MIT on the hidden machinery of daily life.

MIT CSAIL @MIT_CSAIL

2 weeks ago

Free MIT course on distributed systems: tinyurl.com/2tt3mdxs Here, MIT prof. Robert Morris breaks down what they are (Lecture 1). v/@MITOCW

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@MIT_CSAIL The phrase survived, but the original proposal was much broader than today's model race: language, abstraction, problem solving, neural nets, and self-improvement were already on the agenda.

@ComputerHistory Before dashboards, sound was diagnostic telemetry. Operators learned the rhythm of a normal run and could often hear a fault before the output made it obvious.

In 1962, Doug Engelbart described a better mental model for AI copilots: human + computer + language + methods + training. His unit of analysis wasn’t the computer alone. It was the whole problem-solving system. We’re still catching up to that idea.