I remember reading Unix source in Geoff Steckel‘s office at Harvard who got the first Unix distribution outside of their labs and the line printer would just would use overstrike on parentheses to designate curly braces and upper case (lower case was printed as upper since the line printer didn’t have lower).
Helped Carl Helmers start Byte along with another Intermetrics co-worker Dan Fylstra (who founded VisiCorp a bit later, the first PC software company that published VisiCalc) in the summer between semesters at Harvard.
Wrote a couple of articles and spent some time in Nashua (IIRC) with Helmers and Green (the publisher), but had to get back to school in the fall so faded out, and didn't overlap with Tinney's work.
Look up "where did the towers go?" on Youtube, a lecture by materials scientist Judy Wood. She argues I think conclusively that the towers were turned into dust by directed energy weapons.
(I know this will get downvoted to hell, but I suggest you find out for yourself.)
There are 300M guns in the USA spread across 3.8M m^2.
1M soldiers (O(current armed forces)), armed with all the equipment they have (unless they decide to nuke the whole country) could not take down a rebel force spread across most of the US (concentrated away from the coasts, of course ;-).
With a fast parsing algorithm, you could parse as a programmer types, unlike the current syntax highlighting editors which use only rough pattern matching instead of having a real parse tree. Imagine seeing syntax errors the moment you type them.
That's what Xcode 4 does with the new Clang/LLVM machinery inside.
No, it wouldn't help at all: let me point to the overwhelming success of standards (XML, HTML, Javascript, CSS, Postscript) that are character-based.
Think of Javascript as a (human-readable) virtual machine layer itself, below which the implementation is free to do as it pleases as long as it meets the JS standard semantics.
If things really HTF, you're gonna want to not be blocked by a closed bank, etc.