On the early afternoon of Saturday, January 3rd, 1981, my mother took the 7-year old me to the “Atlas Belgrano” cinema in Buenos Aires (near the corner of Cabildo Avenue and Juramento street) to watch the recently released “The Empire Strikes Back”.

In the past few months I’ve been writing about my software archeology experiments, including how to convert old HTML code from 1999 to run in today’s browsers, how to run Macromedia Flash movies with Ruffle, or even how to run Java applets now that they aren’t supported anymore.

Last Monday I published the 60th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum, also known as “DPI”, the “unusual magazine about programmers, code, and society, written by humans since 2018.” De Programmatica Ipsum has been published continuously every first Monday of each month since October 2018.

My life rebooted in July 1996; the day I decided to drop out from college, to get my driving license, to start going out at least twice a week, and to take a sabbatical from everything. Yes, I pretty much took all of those decisions at the same time.

Here’s more dabbling in programming languages to re-create my venerable interpretation of Conway’s Game of Life, this time using three stereotypical languages of the IBM galaxy: the Rexx scripting language, good old COBOL, and Fortran 95.

I was talking recently with Graham and an observation came to my mind, one that I hereby state as Kosmaczewski’s Law: “The flow of knowledge is inverse to the flow of fascism”.

Last Monday I released the 59th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, my dear monthly magazine about code, developers, and society, and this month I talked about BASIC in all of its flavors. As part of the preparation of this issue, I dived into the world of Minimal BASIC code, the one with source code line numbers, the one that would start immediately after powering up your computer, and the one that brings endless nostalgia.

As I’ve said in the past, producing videos in Linux isn’t very straightforward or stable; it can be a bit of bumpy ride. But I’m stubborn, and Linux is the platform I want to use, so when I was tasked with the creation of “Getting Started” video guides for our products at VSHN, I used Linux to create them.

We can all agree that the first half of the year has been co-opted by the rise of generative AI, in particular ChatGPT, being used for anything and anyone in any context, disrupting any kind of market or industry just for the sake of it.

As suggested in a previous article, this year’s candidate of my lifetime programming language learning activity is Zig, and I decided to reimplement Conway with it.