Serendipity35

You may have heard the advice to speakers to open with a joke, so here we go.
A bunch of scientists created a huge machine capable of complex calculations and called it UNIVAC. Eager to test their invention, they asked it, “Is there a God?”The vacuum tubes hummed, and the tape spools spun for several minutes. Finally, the machine spat out a little card, on which was written, “THERE IS NOW.”

That's an old joke, but it seems fresh in this "Intelligence Age" of artificial intelligence and fears of a singularity. In this time of AI and having a computer in the palm of our hand, it is interesting to consider what was happening in tech history back in 1951. That was when the Remington Rand Corporation signed a contract to deliver the first UNIVAC computer to the U.S. Census Bureau.

UNIVAC I (which stands for Universal Automatic Computer) took up 350 square feet of floor space — about the size of a one-car garage — and was the first American commercial computer. It was designed for the rapid and relatively simple arithmetic calculation of numbers needed by businesses, rather than the complex calculations required by the sciences. It was intended to compete against IBM’s punch card-reading computers, but UNIVAC read magnetic tapes, not punch cards, so a special “card to tape converter” had to be designed.

Though the government contract was signed and a ceremony held on March 31, the computer wasn’t actually delivered until the following December. There was only one UNIVAC I, and Remington Rand wanted to use it for demonstration purposes. They asked for and received time to build a second computer.

The government was the first big customer of the UNIVACs, with subsequent models going to the Air Force, the Army Map Service, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Navy.

The computer first came to the notice of the general public in 1952, when CBS used one to predict the outcome of the presidential election. UNIVAC correctly picked Eisenhower and predicted his electoral count within 1 percent, but the network didn’t release the results until after the election was called, so as not to affect the outcome.

The first commercial sale was to General Electric, for their Appliance Division, followed soon after by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, in 1954.

There were 46 UNIVAC I’s built and delivered, in all.

It had been in the news in the United States all week, the federal government is moving to a policy that will require the power-hungry data centers to get out of the public energy pool and go swim in a plasma of their own making.  Big Tech companies are building and investing in their own energy supplies as they race to meet the huge energy demands of AI computing in 20th century datacenters.  It's estimated that a "traditional" (non-AI producing) datacenter rack can consume somewhere between 5 and 15 kilowatts of power --think central A/C units, commercial clothes dryers, banks of EV car chargers.  That same rack, running AI-capable hardware and processing power will consume 10 times as much -- up to around 100 kilowatts.

As robust as the United Stated power grid is, the demand for electricity to power these clustered artificial intelligence entities will exceed the current ability to support that demand. To feed this need for power, Amazon has begun developing small nuclear reactors (SMRs), Oracle and OpenAI are working on half trillion-dollar natural gas fueled electrical plants.  These solutions have their obvious drawbacks:  Amazon's quest for contemporary electricity using the nuclear option will produce the most-toxic waste ever thrown away, and it will last for thousands of years.  Oracle and OpenAI's investment in huge natural gas energy sources risks not only accelerating climate rot, but it risks exhausting energy supplies at scale.  The risks of expanding the electricity supply on a 20th century grid are substantial.  If the demand for electricity was reduced, those risks would subside.

The development of quantum computing has quietly been on the rise.  These computing instances, in total, consume about 25kilowatts for super computers that require extreme refrigeration to drive their super-conductor-based processors at temperatures near absolute zero.  The warmer weather loving neutral-atom computers operate around room temperature and use 7 kilowatts (or less) of power.  When optimization tasks or simulations are sent to their quantum algorithms, these computers produce solutions at orders of magnitude faster and use a tiny fraction of the energy that a traditional datacenter would require.

Quantum computing, now, can significantly enhance AI (Generative AI) by its speed.  Quantum computers are faster and deeper in data analysis and have now led to a new class of Generative AI called GenQAI (Generative Quantum AI) that can use quantum hardware to iterate complex problems and generate more human-like reasoning and intuition in AI.

Quantinuum, which is reported to be one of the world leaders in quantum technology, in November unveiled its Helios system, which has been described as the world's most accurate quantum computer. That quantum instance requires less than 40 kilowatts of power, about the same as a single data center rack average AI Generative load and configuration.  The company announced last week it was going public and would issue an IPO sometime in the first half of 2026.

With some clairvoyant disruption and a little bit of luck, we'll have frugal quantum computing cottages humming their 4-dimensional power song before we have natural gas caverns and poisonous landfill dirges to endure

 

 

 

Y2K, short for “Year 2000,” was a potential computer bug caused by how dates were formatted in older software. To save memory space, early computers used two-digit years—like “97” for 1997—which in the new millennium risked misreading “00” as 1900 instead of 2000, potentially disrupting systems that depended on accurate dates (read 101).

Though a kind of panic occurred in 1999, the Y2K issue surfaced in technical literature as early as 1984. Long before it became a global concern, researchers were already flagging the two-digit date flaw. A 1984 book, "Computers in Crisis," outlined how the year 2000 rollover could break financial, governmental, and technical systems if left unaddressed.

In the late 1990s, many feared this glitch could cause widespread failures in banking systems, power grids, transportation networks, and other critical infrastructure. This idea took hold of the public imagination, spawning doomsday predictions, a booming survivalist market, and a massive global push to audit and repair vulnerable systems before the deadline—work that cost an estimated $300B-$500B. 

Because of the extensive preparations, Y2K passed without significant disruptions, however, its legacy endures. The crisis helped modernize global IT systems, accelerated the outsourcing of programming jobs, and exposed society’s dependence on digital infrastructure—prompting long-term shifts in cybersecurity and software maintenance.

The Year 2038 problem is the next potential computer time rollover bug. Many older systems store time as a signed 32-bit integer counting seconds since Jan. 1, 1970. That counter maxes out on Jan. 19, 2038—overflowing into negative time and sending clocks back to 1901, potentially crashing any older software that depends on accurate dates. The Y2K38 bug is also known as the end of 32-bit Unix time and the year 2038 problem.

 

I found a reference this past week to the original Apple II AppleWorks and it got me thinking about how amazing the program was for its time. The software was light and efficient, and it ran on limited hardware.

The "light architecture" of AppleWorks (developed by Rupert Lissner and released in 1984 for the Apple II) was impressive for several reasons. It was an Integrated Suite that combined a word processor, database, and spreadsheet into a single application. On the 8-bit Apple II's limited resources (often starting with just 128K RAM), this level of seamless integration was no less than revolutionary. You could easily share data (via a "clipboard") between the modules.

AppleWorks was written almost entirely in assembly language for the 6502 processor. This gave it incredible speed and efficiency, allowing it to perform complex tasks much faster than programs written in higher-level languages like Pascal.

Its memory management system was highly flexible and sophisticated, allowing it to utilize not just the 128K of the Apple IIe/IIc but also various third-party memory cards. It effectively made up to two megabytes of memory appear as one contiguous space on an 8-bit machine, which was a remarkable technical feat.

It became the "killer application" that extended the life of the Apple II platform well into the late 80s and early 90s. That is when I was using it in my middle school classroom, and as the computer coordinator in my building, I worked with every teacher because they all had at least one Apple IIe in their room.

Although AppleWorks was thought of as something teachers would use most of the time, the user experience was very good, and students would use at least the word processing portion. All three modules shared a consistent, menu-bar-driven user interface with simple text-based controls (often utilizing the Apple II's "MouseText" characters for visual elements like folders and separators). This was highly intuitive and much easier to learn than many contemporary command-line programs. The design prioritized ease of use, making personal computing accessible to a much broader audience, especially in homes and schools.

AppleWorks, compared to other productivity suites of the time, such as Microsoft Works or the original Mac software, demonstrates a fundamental shift in design philosophy that prioritized integration and efficiency over raw power. Earlier Apple II programs were often monolithic (like stand-alone VisiCalc for spreadsheets) or required users to switch between separate, disparate programs with different interfaces to move data. This efficiency was its competitive edge, keeping the Apple II relevant years after more powerful Macs and PCs emerged.

In the AppleWorks vs. Microsoft Works (for Mac/PC) battle (Works eventually became Apple's main competitor in the integrated suite market) Apple demonstrated a different design approach. But Apple was constrained by the 8-bit Apple II. Microsoft Works and later versions of AppleWorks/ClarisWorks (for Mac and Windows) were developed for 16-bit and 32-bit systems (Macintosh, Windows PC), and these platforms had more abundant memory, faster processors, and graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

The last time I sat down at an Apple IIe was at a tech conference, it was in a "museum "display. As crude as it might seem to users almost 50 years later, I still marveled at what it could do. I was one of those people who found so many later programs, such as Microsoft Office, bloated memory hogs with more horsepower and features than most users would ever need.

Despite the technical differences, both AppleWorks and Microsoft Works shared the goal to provide an all-in-one, cost-effective, and easy-to-use suite for casual users, students, and small businesses who didn't need the complexity or expense of full-blown professional packages like Microsoft Office or Lotus Symphony. The key difference was that AppleWorks achieved this integration on an extremely limited architecture, which is why its design is often cited as a more remarkable technical feat.