Memo To The Programmer: Fill & Download for Free

When I worked at General Electric, a memo was circulated listing the things for which a programmer could get fired immediately. Most were obvious cases of gross misconduct like stealing from the company, fighting in the office or being drunk on the job. The last one left us wondering what about the story behind it. “Hiding with intent to sleep.” Use your imagination. Somebody got tired of writing code and crawled under his desk for a nap. Management walks the offender to the door amidst protests.

How about clever problem solving… to clean up after lazy developers?In 2019, we take System time as a God-given right. An entitlement, in the echelons of air, water, freedom, and student loan forgiveness. When we call:➜ ~ dateMon Sep 9 08:09:57 PDT 2019OrSystem.currentTimeMillis()It returns the date, down to the millisecond, or nanosecond, just like the sun rises in the east and bread falls butter-side-down. Time is the floor we stand upon. The concrete foundation upon which we build our house of horrors.But there was a a time, long long ago — like, the 1970s — where System time was a fuzzier concept. Computers ran code, in a void detached from space and time. The universal constant was not Planck's constant, the ticking of the universe — it was the ticking of the microprocessor.And it was a simpler time. A time with no timesharing. A time where the Operating System never had to choose which program to run. Your program was the only program which mattered. Today, we expect our (desktop) code to run at the whim of fickle OS scheduler gods:Norton Antivirus, king among mortals, takes the CPU he wants. Norton does not ask for CPU time, Norton takes CPU time.When your Mac enters Energy Saving mode be grateful for any CPU you are granted.How much CPU can browsing a simple HTML5 website require?A: All of it. And all of your grandchildren’s CPU. Nine generations of CPU.But no, back in simpler days, this loop was enough to metronome the heartbeat of a virtual universe:int i = 0; while(true){  System.out.println("I am a universal constant!: "+i);   i++; }  And so, programmers — and especially game designers — used this as a foundation. When they wrote code, they expected it to run at a fixed rate, limited only by the bloat of their own creation. If they built their game against a 1.023 MHz processor, that processor speed was the only clock that mattered. Users could expect the game to run at that speed, forever.There was no need — and often, no ability — to reference the System time to check whether to render another frame. Of course you rendered another frame — if your program ran too quickly, just add more Dragons to your Dungeon.But hardware engineers, focused on their transistors and zealotous quest to ascend Moore to sainthood, didn’t get the memo. They kept making microprocessors faster — first by a bit, and then by a lot.This was a disaster to the software designer. They never anticipated a CPU which could run 5x as fast. Games run on these new processors flickered like the beating of a hummingbird’s wings — but high-frame rate DSLR cameras were a generation from mass production, so actually viewing the game in realtime was out of the question.So hardware engineers, in their mercy and wisdom, added a hardware fix to this most software of problems — the Turbo button:[source]When the Turbo button was not engaged, the CPU ran at the legacy speed. When the turbo button was depressed, it ran with every electron it could muster. So if a user needed to run a “legacy” game — just turn off turbo button, and the universe would drop back to the slow, comfortable ooze of time the programmer expected.(“Why a turbo button, and not a slow button?” the astute observer might ask. A: because marketers. Marketers are the telomere degradation of the economy. The rot inside the redwood of civilization. No fact can be stated as it is, only as the marketer can best sell it.)So there you go. Was “assuming CPUs ran at a fixed rate” clever problem solving? Yes, in the same sense that “not tipping the pizza deliveryman” is a clever financial life-hack. But the true clever hack came from the outside — when the hardware engineers threw programmers a lifeline and gave them a simple button to fix their folly.

Have you ever heard of the British Death Ray, the terrifying weapon that wreaked havoc on Nazi armies during WW2?Well, probably not. They did try to develop it though, and it failed. Before it even started, actually. The funds the British government dedicated to this weapon were diverted by two cunning scientist, who used it for a different purpose entirely.How the British thought their would defeat the Nazis.Let me explain.So, the money the British government tried to invest in Death Ray research led to a failure. But a productive one. Sometimes, all we need for a revolutionary invention is a failed attempt at a ludicrous invention. Many industries and fields of human knowledge have leaped forward this way - from Fleming’s discovery of Penicilin to Percy Spencer’s microwave.For the aviation industry, that story starts with the invention of the death ray, or at least an attempt to design a death ray, back in 1935. Officials in the British Air Ministry were worried about falling behind Nazi Germany in the technological arms race.The death ray idea intrigued them: they had been offering a £1,000 prize for anyone who could zap a sheep at a hundred paces. So far, nobody had claimed it. But should they fund more active research? Was a death ray even possible?Unofficially, they sounded out Robert Watson Watt, of the Radio Research Station. And he posed an abstract maths question to his colleague Skip Wilkins."Suppose, just suppose," said Watson Watt to Wilkins, "that you had eight pints of water, 1km [3,000ft] above the ground."And suppose that water was at 98F [37C], and you wanted to heat it to 105F."How much radio frequency power would you require, from a distance of 5km?"Skip Wilkins was no fool.He knew that eight pints was the amount of blood in an adult human, 98F was normal body temperature and 105F was warm enough to kill you, or at least make you pass out, which - if you're behind the controls of an aeroplane - amounts to much the same thing.So Wilkins and Watson Watt understood each other, and they quickly agreed the death ray was hopeless: it would take too much power.But they also saw an opportunity.Clearly, the ministry had some cash to spend on research. Perhaps Watson Watt and Wilkins could propose some alternative way for them to spend it?Wilkins pondered. It might be possible, he suggested, to transmit radio waves and detect - from the echoes - the location of oncoming aircraft long before they could be seen.Watson Watt dashed off a memo to the Air Ministry's newly formed Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence. Would they be interested in pursuing such an idea? They would indeed.What Skip Wilkins was describing became known as radar.Credits to the BBC and Tim Harford’s amazing programme ’50 Things that Made the Modern Economy’. You can find the rest of the story here, particularly on how a disastrous plane crash forced the widespread development of radar for civil aviation. I really recommend the podcast.