There was such a tool, called Purify.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs343/resources/purify.pdf

Purify was great until Rational bought it and jacked up the price 10x.

I was choosing what to study at university in 1982, and I was advised not to pick computing since AI was going to take over programming and there would be limited careers for humans.

Particularly the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst... was cited.

> university in 1982, and I was advised not to pick computing since AI was going to take over programming

Don't you think they made that call way too early? You could've had a full career between then and now.

I was getting into university around the same time. I don't recall any sentiments like this at all. And when discussions about automating programming came up it was usually dismissed as impossible - which it was back then. People didn't necessarily say it would never happen, but it was going to be a very long time in the future. It basically became possible to do in 2024 (and much better since then), way earlier than I would've have expected it to happen. But in the meantime from 1984 - 2024 I was able to have a pretty good career (I'm glad to be able to be retired now, I wouldn't want to be facing this in my 40s or 50s.)

I have a copy of The Bell System Technical Journal July-August 1978 (third printing, 1982). This contains "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" by Ritchie and Thompson, plus about 10 other papers about UNIX.

I barely know anyone who would understand why I treasure it, let alone own a copy.

https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1905

Two others listed here: https://sre.google/books/, "Building Secure & Reliable Systems" and "The Site Reliability Workbook".

I would also mention "The Datacenter as a Computer: designing warehouse-scale machines". https://research.google/pubs/the-datacenter-as-a-computer-de...

Tommy Flowers is known for Colossus which broke a different code, Lorenz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe cites Turing, Welchman and Rejewski.

It’s a 28 year old project.

Some of the same people bounced around implementing it in different places, but they started from scratch each time.

Some things to search for:

JP Morgan Athena BofA Quartz Kirat Singh Mark Higgins

Full respect to this piece for including the phrase “the simplest possible thing”.

I get the following banner:

> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website.

Thank you. I was missing that info because I do not get that banner, currently surfing that site from the EU without any login.

Visiting the same URL on the .co.uk version gives me a multi-article scroller with different layout and links (including a "What is BBC Future?"), but no trace of that banner. Guessing that you're in the UK from your comment history, my best guess is that they decide whether to serve that banner via geofencing.

From @patio11 a week ago: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/delve-into-co...