What would Johnny do? Post: 302825085

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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? What would Johnny do? Post 302825085 by figaro on Sunday 23rd of June 2013 11:08:56 AM

06-23-2013

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What would Johnny do?

This year is the 110th birthyear of John von Neumann (born "Neumann Janos"). Interestingly, despite his achievements, both in number and in profoundness, he is hardly known among the general public. He played a fundamental role however in the development of the computer, being the first to understand that a computer program is a special type of data and that therefore a program fits as much in memory as does the data it works on. This is where the name "Von Neumann architecture" is from. This idea lead him to design a computer and he subsequently set out to build one. It was used in ballistics calculations and weather predictions.
He possessed a blazingly fast mind and a fearsome intellectual prowess:

He designed a self-reproducing program and is therefore considered to be the theoretical father of computer virology.
He is the co-inventor of Monte Carlo simulation methods and developed the field of cellular automata.
Among others he understood that having a faulty component in a machine, does not necessarily make it less accurate. This lead him to develop a random number generator by debiasing the output stream using an algorithm that he invented.
Then there are his many contributions he made to the fields of mathematics (both pure and applied), quantum machanics, nuclear physics and geometry, among others.

The fields most of us work in have an inherent level of problem solving that is required. Whenever I encounter a problem which even after a day seems intractable, I try to step back and think and wonder what he would have done. When faced with the same problem, no doubt a solution would have come to his mind which would have been both instantaneous and structural.

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sun

machid(1)							   User Commands							 machid(1)

NAME

       machid, sun, iAPX286, i286, i386, i486, i860, pdp11, sparc, u3b, u3b2, u3b5, u3b15, vax, u370 - get processor type truth value

SYNOPSIS

       sun

       iAPX286

       i386

       pdp11

       sparc

       u3b

       u3b2

       u3b5

       u3b15

       vax

       u370

DESCRIPTION

       The following commands will return a true value (exit code of 0) if you are using an instruction set that the command name indicates.

       sun	  True if you are on a Sun system.

       iAPX286	  True if you are on a computer using an iAPX286 processor.

       i386	  True if you are on a computer using an iAPX386 processor.

       pdp11	   True if you are on a PDP-11/45tm or PDP-11/70tm.

       sparc	  True if you are on a computer using a SPARC-family processor.

       u3b	  True if you are on a 3B20 computer.

       u3b2	  True if you are on a 3B2 computer.

       u3b5	  True if you are on a 3B5 computer.

       u3b15	  True if you are on a 3B15 computer.

       vax	  True if you are on a VAX-11/750tm or VAX-11/780tm.

       u370	  True if you are on an IBM(R) System/370tm computer.

       The  commands  that  do	not  apply will return a false (non-zero) value. These commands are often used within makefiles (see make(1S)) and
       shell scripts (see sh(1)) to increase portability.

ATTRIBUTES

       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWcsu			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

SEE ALSO

       make(1S), sh(1), test(1), true(1), uname(1), attributes(5)

NOTES

       The machid family of commands is obsolete. Use uname -p and uname -m instead.

SunOS 5.11							    5 Jul 1990								 machid(1)