>>> 2021-06-12 ieee 1394 for grilling
To begin with, a reader emailed me an objection to my claim that Smalltalk has never been used for anything. They worked at an investment bank you have heard of where Smalltalk was used for trading and back office systems, apparently at some scale. This stirred a memory in me---in general the financial industry was (and to some extent is) surprisingly interested in "cutting edge" computer science, and I think a lot of the technologies that came out of first-wave artificial intelligence work really did find use in trading especially. I'd be curious to hear more about this from anyone who worked in those environments, as I know little about finance industry technology (despite my interest in their weird phones). Also, I am avoiding naming this reader out of respect for their privacy and because I neglected to ask them if it's okay to do so before going to publish this. So if you email me interesting facts, maybe do me a favor and mention whether or not you mind if I publish them. I'm bad at asking.
Years ago, at a now-shuttered Smith's grocery store in my old home of Socorro, New Mexico, I did a dramatic double-take at a clearance rack full of Firewire. This Firewire was basically a steel cable used like a skewer but, well, floppy. The name got a chuckle out of me and this incident somehow still pops into my mind every time I think about one of my "favorite" interconnects: IEEE 1394.
