August 2016

I left the United States Navy in October of 1979 to begin a working career as a civilian. In the Navy, “computers” were rather simple devices made up of NAND gates and AND gates and OR gates, each of which occupied a chip, and some “core” memory – literally magnetic cores with two wires bisecting […]

The adjective FREE commonly appears with either of two meanings: “at zero price” (gratis) and “with little or no restriction” (libre). This ambiguity of free is both entertaining and generally on point in a whole lot of situations. Richard Stallman, referring to free and open software summarised the difference in a slogan: “Think free as