Poet Ponders the Digital

An Apple II advertisement from the December 1977 issue of Byte magazine, pages 16 and 17. The second page was described the features of the Apple II. The ad originally ran in May 1977 and was updated that December. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley January 5, 2015 Deadline February 2015 Issue BYTE magazine stopped appearing on newsstands in July 1998. The name lived on for a time as an online publication, without many of its best columnists and without its definitive test lab reports. Finally, in 2009, the real BYTE ceased to exist. Other online publishers revived the name, but it was never the same as the legendary print publication. In November 2014, my favorite online technical resource for Apple power users and developers, OS X Hints, went into archive mode. A month later, on December 16, 2014, Dr. Dobb’s Journal followed BYTE into the virtual sunset after 38 years of publication. In fact, they call it “sunsetting” the publication: Dr. Dobb’s wil...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 2, 2010 Deadline September Issue Learning to Program, Learning to Think Several times a month I create or modify computer code, but I use the skills I have gained from programming on a daily basis. The more I learn about computer languages and programming, the more I learn to think creatively to solve problems. Our schools are asked to prepare students for standardized tests, primarily on English and math skills. We frequently claim we want students to learn creative problem solving, but we test memorized knowledge. State and national tests focus on knowing such things as the meanings of words and how to solve math problems with memorized equations. I don’t question the value of memorizing Latin and Greek roots or the quadratic equation, but teaching how to think is essential to the future. Computer programming requires analyzing a problem, breaking a possible solution into small parts and then writing the code to perform the steps requir...