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Ansible for DevOps: Server and Configuration Management for Humans by Jeff Geerling

Abraham Maslow, AGPL, Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, continuous integration, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, DevOps, fault tolerance, Firefox, full text search, Google Chrome, inventory management, loose coupling, microservices, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, punch-card reader, Ruby on Rails, web application

Good security also helps you achieve the holy grail of system administration—100% uptime. In this chapter, you’ll learn about Linux security and how Ansible can help secure your servers, following the basic topics above. A brief history of SSH and remote access In the beginning, computers were the size of large conference rooms. A punch card reader would merrily accept pieces of paper that instructed the computer to do something, and then a printer would etch the results into another piece of paper. Thousands of mechanical parts worked harmoniously (when they did work) to compute relatively simple commands. As time progressed, computers became somewhat smaller, and interactive terminals became more user-friendly, but they were still wired directly into the computer being used.

The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur

Andrew Wiles, Boeing 747, business process, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, creative destruction, double helix, endogenous growth, financial engineering, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, locking in a profit, Mars Rover, means of production, Myron Scholes, power law, punch-card reader, railway mania, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, technological singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

And if the resulting change in the economy is important enough, we call that a revolution. How Domains Evolve Let us dive into the main question of this chapter. How exactly do domains come into being and subsequently develop? Many, as I said, coalesce around a central technology. As the computer comes into being, supporting technologies—punched card readers, printers, external memory systems, programming languages—begin to gather around it. Others, the grand discipline-based domains in particular, form around families of phenomena and the understandings and practices that go with these. Electronics and radio engineering built from understandings of the workings of electrons and of electromagnetic waves.

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

It was to be built of a power supply and electric motor for driving the machine; four master control panels, controlled by instructions on punched rolls of paper tape and synchronized with the rest of the machine; manual adjustments for controlling the calculation of functions; 24 sets of switches for entering numerical constants; 2 paper tape readers for entering additional constants; a standard punched card reader; 12 temporary storage units; 5 units each—add/subtract, multiply, divide; various permanent function tables (e.g. sine, cosine, etc.); accumulators; and printing and card punching equipment. All of these components should be built to accommodate figures up to 23 digits long. Finally, Aiken estimated the speed of the calculator based upon the speed of contemporary IBM machines, 750 8-digit multiplications per hour, representing a vast increase in speed and accuracy over manual methods of calculation.

Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

Only it ran under DOS, ‘cause of the extra level of emulation. Then they figured they ought to let the data entry clerks log in through virtual terminals so they could hire teleworkers from India instead of paying guys in suits from Berkhampstead, so they wrote a tty driver just for the weird virtual punched-card reader or whatever the bloody accounting system thought it was working with.” Someone tapped me on my shoulder. I glanced round. “Yo, dude! Gimme five!” “Six,” I said. Clive beamed at me. “Been here long?” “Just arrived,” he said. “I knew I’d find you propping up the bar. Hey, did the guys on the gangway give you any aggro?”

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The skills Crane developed on the SSEC later proved useful when he was hired to work on a new computer being built by the legendary mathematician John Von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Frustrated with the slow speed of getting data into and out of his machine, Von Neumann had persuaded IBM’s founder, Tom Watson Sr., to donate a punch-card reader to help speed up the process. Since he was one of the few people who knew how card readers worked, Crane was enlisted in the project. In Princeton, he was witness to one of the world’s first artificial light shows when, late at night, he sat and watched the Johniac’s one hundred thousand neon tubes dance on and off in rhythmic patterns.

A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

They received manuals for both the 225 / 235 and the Datanet-30 from GE and began to learn all about the computers on which they would implement time-­sharing.93 In fact, the 225 / 235 manual also included manuals for the peripheral equipment that Dartmouth would be using with the computer: a punched-­card reader, a “mass random access data storage system” that used magnetic discs, a high-­ speed printer, and a magnetic tape subsystem.94 The Dartmouth team needed to learn the intricacies of machine programming for the 225 / 235 and the Datanet-30. ­These included commands such as When Students Taught the Computer 31 ADD (performing addition of two numbers), SUB (performing subtraction), ADO (a positive one [+1] added to a par­t ic­u­lar number in memory), and STA (for “Store A,” whereby the data labeled “A” are placed into memory at a par­t ic­u ­lar location).95 Even without the computers, the team could begin drafting their programs for time-­ sharing and BASIC on the GE programming tablets.96 GE delivered the two computers in March 1964, and the Dartmouth team redoubled their efforts.97 Dartmouth h ­ oused the computers in the basement of College Hall, at the heart of campus.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Babbage’s new conception—the “Analytical Engine”—could be programmed to solve any possible logical or computational problem. The Analytical Engine had a random-access memory (RAM) consisting of 1,000 “words” of 50 decimal digits each, equivalent to about 175,000 bits. A number could be retrieved from any location, modified, and stored in any other location. It had a punched-card reader and even included a printer, even though it would be another half century before either typesetting machines or typewriters were to be invented. It had a central processing unit (CPU) that could perform the types of logical and arithmetic operations that CPUs do today. Most important, it had a special storage unit for the software with a machine language very similar to those of today’s computers.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

They learned electronics by building Heathkits, making small transistor radios with resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, a rheostat, and a small loudspeaker. Their classmate Jon Lynn was the first in their group to build a working computer, the Sol-20 by Processor Technology, similar to the early Altair. Their first “computers” relied on punch cards for programming, based on the same mechanical principle as the Jacquard loom, with the punch-card reader converting the perforations into on/off electrical signals, which the computer interpreted as numbers and instruction codes for the calculation. Carrying the punch cards around school was like being a part of a secret fraternity. After school, the boys hung out at the Gold Coast video arcade, playing Pong, Tank, and Speed Race.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Georgia, feeding the cards into the machine, looks out the office window, across the street, and into another office, where a dentist is sedating a female patient. When the dentist inserts a syringe into the woman’s mouth, her shoes jerk suddenly. Georgia watches as the dentist begins to pull a tooth and—just as Freesmith removes the last of the cards from the punch-card reader—“the dentist stepped away from the woman and a burr in his hand glistened with bright red blood.”45 You can almost hear Burdick hollering, “Get it? The punch card is like a tooth pulled out of your head! It’s horrible! Mike has blood on his hands!” The Ninth Wave, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, became a bestseller.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information, and the company that Hollerith founded became in 1924, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM. One way to look at innovation is as the accumulation of hundreds of small advances, such as counters and punch-card readers. At places like IBM, which specialize in daily improvements made by teams of engineers, this is the preferred way to understand how innovation really happens. Some of the most important technologies of our era, such as the fracking techniques developed over the past six decades for extracting natural gas, came about because of countless small innovations as well as a few breakthrough leaps.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Rather than elaborate gears and mechanical counters, computing processes that could be observed, these “electronic brains” did the processing work invisibly. In explaining computers to customers, Watson Jr. explained that what electrons moving at the speed of light really did was “add one and one,” just as the mechanical punch card readers did. At IBM business calculations were broken down into “simple steps of arithmetic and logic such as adding, subtracting, comparing, and making lists. But to amount to anything, these steps have to repeated millions of times.” After observing that the fastest mechanisms of the punch card machines could do four additions per second, while the most primitive electronic circuits could do five thousand, IBM began to rapidly reinvent itself.

Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Rather than elaborate gears and mechanical counters, computing processes that could be observed, these “electronic brains” did the processing work invisibly. In explaining computers to customers, Watson Jr. explained that what electrons moving at the speed of light really did was “add one and one,” just as the mechanical punch card readers did. At IBM business calculations were broken down into “simple steps of arithmetic and logic such as adding, subtracting, comparing, and making lists. But to amount to anything, these steps have to repeated millions of times.” After observing that the fastest mechanisms of the punch card machines could do four additions per second, while the most primitive electronic circuits could do five thousand, IBM began to rapidly reinvent itself.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Most straightforward are the paper documents, which although showing signs of age are eminently readable. Only slightly more challenging are the vinyl records and analog tape recordings. Although some basic equipment is required, it is not difficult to find or use. The punch cards are somewhat more challenging, but it's still possible to find punch-card readers, and the formats are uncomplicated. By far the most demanding information to retrieve is that contained on the digital disks and tapes. Consider the challenges involved. For each medium I have to figure out exactly which disk or tape drive was used, whether an IBM 1620 circa 1960 or a Data General Nova I circa 1973.Then, once I've assembled the requisite equipment, there are layers of software to deal with: the appropriate operating system, disk information drivers, and application programs.