If you've got five minutes to spare--and let's face it, you're reading this, so you definitely do--and want to take in a bit of interesting reading, it'd be worth your while to direct the browser of your choosing over to Technology Review. Once there, you'll find a fascinating story about how the same style of economic coding used to program the Apple II by Steve Wozniak is still being used today by researchers at IBM.
The difference between now and then? Back then, Wozniak was programming for cutting-edge 1977 era hardware that topped out at 8 kb of RAM and 64 kb of storage. Today, IBM researcher Thorsten Kramp is tinkering with systems that yield the same specs in order to develop miniscule environmental sensors, or "smart dust," that could be imbedded in just about anything and make the Internet of Things a reality."
In speaking about working on such low-powered smart-dust, Kramp admits that in a way, his programming career has come full-circle. "I started with an Apple II...ten years ago I came to IBM Zurich, and I worked on a virtual machine implementation on a smartcard," he tenderly recalls in the article.
Anyway, you can read more on this fascinating history at Technology Review.
