Erich Bloch, Who Helped Develop IBM Mainframe, Has Died | Hacker News Reader

Erich Bloch, Who Helped Develop IBM Mainframe, Has Died

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158 pointsmooreds23 comments

Great quote about computers: “You have to make sure your technology doesn’t take more time to keep up with than to actually use.”

Desktop Linux in a nutshell.

That's not true and it's a disservice to Linux. Ubuntu will work out of the box. So will it variants. Probably applies to current Fedora variants as well.

Depends on your hardware.

I have a Asus laptop here, that was bought with Linux support and Ubuntu had its share of issues with the wlan card.

To this day still doesn't take advantage of AMD GPU as it should.

Ubuntu have done really well with 'it just works'; it's the only distro that installs out of the box with the correct Broadcom driver for my Mac Mini. While I could of gone for Arch like I normally do, it was nice for a change to have an installer I can walk away from and let it do its thing and come back to a working machine.

Fedora is great out of the box. Unless you want to use something other than GNOME 3. Or play MP3s.

I've been a lifetime Windows user and I just recently switched to Linux Mint. It's really come a long way since I last tried it 1-2 years ago.

Actually, I've been having far more problems with Windows 10 than with Linux (just today it decided to make my speakers sound awful and nothing seems to fix it). And for some reason, Windows problems seem a lot more difficult to solve, even though I've been using it for 20 years.

My grandfather almost certainly would have known him. He worked in the Poughkeepsie lab in the 50's and into the mid 60s. He led the development team for the IBM 1620. I wish he was still around to ask.

What a loss!

fuck 2016.

reference to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhnUjf2gDWw ?

Why does 2016 seem so much shittier than previous years?

Nostalgia is funny that way. D'you remember how crappy 1988 was? Of course not. Maybe, maybe you remember some good stuff, but anything lousy probably either gets forgotten or attributed to something else.

In 20 years, you'll be looking back fondly.

It's been a running joke for 2016 in particular though. I see it all over the place. Every time some musician or actor dies, people personify 2016 in particular as a murderer or such.

I wonder if this is just due to the contentz of this year's zeitgeist, rather than to the particular events of this year.

I think it started with a lot famous, beloved people dying and we are way more sensitive to it now.

but it's so weird, why 2016, and why so many famous ppl dying this year.

I do look back at 1988 fondly. I graduated college and went to work at Boeing. :)

1988 was pretty good but 1991 was pretty crappy. 1988 saw the premiere of Star Trek TNG. Of course, I was in 5th grade, so my perspective was child-like. 1991 saw mass layoffs at multiple companies, such as GE. There was also the Gulf War and the recession.

1991 saw tens of millions of people gain a liberty they'd never experienced before, as their countries became independent from the USSR. Ask them and I don't think they'll agree that 1991 was "pretty crappy".

The dude was 91 years old. 91-year-olds have been dying every year since the start of things. It's hardly some new phenomenon 2016 created.

Well, I'm just under two-thirds of the way to 91 and I can safely say that more 91 year olds are dying this year than have died in previous years (on average). I think that this is a good thing because more people are living into that age range to do the dying.

Dementia is a concern, and there is an Erdos-like irony about the chap who invented a reliable reasonably fast memory system developing Alzheimer's.

The post above yours may have been commenting on the number of IT/Computer related deaths this year - I suppose that is inevitable given the explosive growth in computing technology that occurred in the 60s/70s.

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