User data and program failure

A paraphrase of Asimov's first law of robotics:

A program shall not harm a user's data or through inaction allow a user's data to come to harm.

Every software engineer should take this to heart when designing a program. A user's data (or content) is sacred. Under no circumstances should it ever be lost -- especially due to a failure of the program.

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BASIC turns 50

Well, the BASIC language actually turned 50 on May 1, 2014, and I'm very late to the party. Born at Dartmouth in 1964 (along with the first commercial time sharing), here is the university's tribute page . There is even a great 38 minute documentary that they made for the occasion. 10 PRINT "ENJOY" 20 GOTO 10

Run BASIC Hosting Service Launched

The new Run BASIC hosting service launched at midnight! Please visit http://runbasichosting.com for more details. Monthly and annual subscriptions are available. Run BASIC , a product by ShopTalk Systems, is a tool that makes it easy to create your own web applications. No computer science degree required . Run BASIC Hosting is a service that makes it easy to deploy your applications to the Internet. No IT experience required .

My wanderings today took me back to the beginning of the personal computer revolution: the MITS Altair kit computer. Click here for a look at Altair Basic. This was Bill and Paul's first BASIC language product at a time when Microsoft Corporation was called Micro-Soft. Check out the scans of the original manual as well as Bill Gate's complaint about hobbyist piracy in a 1976 issue of Radio Electronics. Some things change and some things remain the same.

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