2026-08-19 — hugger-mugger

Morning, friend. Wednesday. The middle-hinge of the week, and — for those still counting — the middle-hinge of August; from here the month tilts downhill toward Labour Day and the small annual funeral for wearing shorts on a weekday.

(Hugger-mugger — English idiomatic reduplicative, first attested in the early sixteenth century, "in secret; in concealment; by covert means; and by extension, in muddled disorder." The Oxford English Dictionary enters the phrase as an adverb ("secretly, privately"), an adjective ("secret, clandestine; muddled, disordered"), a noun ("secrecy, concealment; confusion, disorder"), and a verb ("to conceal, to hush up"), and marks the etymology as obscure. The doubled-word form is characteristic English — see also helter-skelter, harum-scarum, higgledy-piggledy, hodge-podge, mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus — in which a base word is repeated with a substitution in the initial consonant or vowel for rhythmic and emphatic effect. The base of hugger-mugger is undetermined; the OED lists the earlier variants hoder-moder, hucker-mucker, hokermoker, and hodermoder, which suggest a Middle English root but do not settle it. Shakespeare uses the phrase in Hamlet — Claudius, on his hasty disposal of the murdered Polonius: "we have done but greenly, / In hugger-mugger to inter him" (IV.v.83–84, First Folio, 1623). Sir Walter Raleigh uses it in The History of the World (1614) in the sense of "clandestine." It survives today in British and Anglo-Irish usage largely in its "muddled disorder" sense — the papers were left in a hugger-mugger on the hall table — while the older "in secrecy" sense has passed mostly into archaism. The two meanings share the same substrate: whether the disorder on the hall table is deliberate or accidental, it produces the same visual result.)

Joke

"Temporary" is the longest word in a codebase.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

On the morning of 23 December 1938, in East London, a small coastal town on the Eastern Cape of South Africa about two hundred and fifty miles east of Port Elizabeth, a thirty-one-year-old museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer received a telephone message from the harbour to the effect that a trawler she had a standing arrangement with had come in with an unusual specimen in the catch. She walked down to the East London wharf, boarded the Nerine, and spent some minutes rummaging through the ordinary sharks and rays before she noticed, on the deck under a heap of them, a large blue fish about five feet long with heavy scales, four fleshy lobed fins arranged in the pattern of the limbs of a four-legged animal, and a small distinctive extra lobe at the base of the tail. She had never seen anything like it. She took it back to the museum in a taxi. She spent the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of December unsuccessfully trying to persuade the mortuary at the local hospital, the cold-storage plant of the East London fisheries, and the town's undertakers to lend her a refrigerated space large enough to hold it while she waited for a response to the letter and ink sketch she had sent by first post on the twenty-third to J. L. B. Smith, an ichthyologist at Rhodes University two hundred miles away. She could not find one. The Eastern Cape summer took over in the second week. By the time Smith opened her letter — he had been away over Christmas — the fish had had to be gutted, the internal organs discarded, and the skin, skull, and fins salvaged and preserved as a taxidermy mount by the museum's regular taxidermist. Smith read the letter in his office on the morning of 3 January 1939, looked at Courtenay-Latimer's sketch, and sat with it for what he later described as a considerable time because he could not, at first, allow himself to believe what it was.

What it was: the first living specimen ever recorded of a coelacanth, a group of lobe-finned fishes whose latest fossils in the geological record are in the Late Cretaceous and which had been considered by every ichthyologist since Louis Agassiz to have gone extinct roughly sixty-six million years ago at the same K–Pg boundary event that had ended the non-avian dinosaurs. There had been no coelacanth fossils younger than about seventy million years. There had been no living coelacanths at all. There were now.

Smith crossed the country by train and by his own car, arrived in East London on 16 February 1939 — the specimen had by then been a taxidermy mount for six weeks — examined the mount, examined the two preserved fins and the small sample of internal tissue Courtenay-Latimer had had the presence of mind to keep in a jar of formalin, and drafted his announcement paper that same evening. It appeared as a two-page communication in Nature — J. L. B. Smith, "A Living Fish of Mesozoic Type," Nature vol. 143, no. 3620, 18 March 1939, pp. 455–456 — accompanied by a photograph of the mount and Courtenay-Latimer's own sketch, and naming the fish for the person who had found it: genus Latimeria, species chalumnae, the specific epithet drawn from the Chalumna River whose mouth the Nerine had been trawling off when the fish came up in the net.

The second specimen took fourteen years. Smith spent the years between publishing standing offers of a hundred-pound reward — a very substantial sum in the postwar Indian Ocean — in every port from Zanzibar to Madagascar, printed on handbills in English, French, and Portuguese, distributed to trading captains and to the priests and schoolteachers who between them constituted the region's literate network. On 20 December 1952, in the Comoros archipelago four hundred miles north of Madagascar, a fisherman named Ahamadi Abdallah landed a five-foot blue coelacanth off the island of Anjouan using a hand-line dropped for oilfish (Ruvettus pretiosus) at about a hundred and fifty fathoms. An Anglo-South African schoolteacher on Anjouan named Eric Hunt, who had one of Smith's handbills, recognised the fish immediately and telegrammed Smith in Grahamstown. Smith telegrammed the Prime Minister of South Africa, Dr. D. F. Malan, requesting emergency use of a South African Air Force aircraft to fly to the Comoros before the fish spoiled. Malan personally authorised it. Smith flew from Durban to Anjouan by SAAF Dakota, arrived on 29 December 1952, took physical possession of the fish, and returned with it to South Africa where it was received on the tarmac at D. F. Malan Airport by Malan himself, whose government made political hay of the whole thing for weeks. Every coelacanth caught in the following forty-five years was caught in the same small stretch of water off the Comoros. The species turned out to be endemic to a set of submarine volcanic caves at depths of one hundred and fifty to seven hundred metres, and to have almost no other habitat anywhere in the ocean.

Almost. In September 1997, on his honeymoon in Sulawesi, an American marine biologist named Mark Erdmann noticed, on a fisherman's cart in a market on Manado Tua, a five-foot blue fish with heavy scales and four lobed fins. He had time only to take one photograph before it was sold. He came back nine months later with his wife (also a biologist), located the same fisherman, waited, and in October 1998 obtained a second specimen — this one caught off Manado Tua at a depth of about a hundred and fifty metres by a fisherman named Om Lameh Sonatham. DNA sequencing established the Indonesian population as a separate species, Latimeria menadoensis, five thousand six hundred miles east of the Comoros population, in a stretch of ocean nobody had thought to look. It is now understood that both populations descend from the same ancestral group that survived the K–Pg extinction; how they got to Sulawesi from wherever they diverged is not settled.

The coelacanth is the closest living relative of the tetrapods — the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, the whole four-limbed vertebrate lineage — other than the lungfishes. Its lobed fins move in the alternating diagonal-pair pattern that a walking salamander's four legs do. Its embryology, its cartilaginous notochord, and its jaw structure all preserve features found nowhere else in a living fish. It has been on Earth in something recognisably its present form for approximately three hundred and sixty million years. Courtenay-Latimer died in 2004 at ninety-seven; the East London museum where she took the fish that Friday in the taxi is now the East London Museum on Oxford Street, still open, and still holds the mount.

Primary sources:

Smith, J. L. B. "A Living Fish of Mesozoic Type." Nature, vol. 143, no. 3620, 18 March 1939, pp. 455–456. The announcement paper, with the photograph of the East London mount and Courtenay-Latimer's original sketch inset.
Smith, J. L. B. Old Fourlegs: The Story of the Coelacanth. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1956. Smith's own book-length account of the 1938 discovery, the fourteen-year wait, and the recovery of the second specimen. Reprinted by Struik in Cape Town in 2014 with an introduction by Robin Stobbs; still in print in English and Afrikaans.
Erdmann, Mark V., Roy L. Caldwell, and M. Kasim Moosa. "Indonesian 'King of the Sea' Discovered." Nature, vol. 395, 24 September 1998, p. 335. The announcement of the Sulawesi specimen, with the photograph Erdmann took on the fisherman's cart in September 1997.

A dev fact for the back pocket

Between the winter of 1954 and the spring of 1961, the IBM Corporation of Poughkeepsie, New York manufactured fifty-two AN/FSQ-7 "Combat Direction Central" computers under a United States Air Force contract, and installed them in duplex pairs — two computers per site, one running, one hot standby — at twenty-six windowless four-storey concrete cubes built across the northern United States and southern Canada under the code name SAGE, Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. Each AN/FSQ-7 weighed approximately 250 tons, contained approximately 49,000 vacuum tubes, occupied roughly one-half of a football field of floor area on two levels, and dissipated approximately 1.5 megawatts of heat directly into the building's chilled-water loop. The AN/FSQ-7 is the largest computer, per unit, ever built by weight, by tube count, and by floor area. There will not be a larger one.

The project's origin was the Whirlwind I computer built at MIT under Jay Forrester between 1945 and 1951 — a real-time flight simulator that had, unexpectedly, turned into a general-purpose real-time computer with a CRT display and interactive input via a light pen (Whirlwind's own invention, first demonstrated 1949). Between 1951 and 1953 the U.S. Air Force's Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee, chaired by George Valley of MIT, concluded that a coordinated national air-defence system against Soviet bomber attack over the Pole could only work if the incoming radar tracks from a continent-wide radar net were fused and processed in real time by a computer at each defence sector, and that no such computer existed. MIT set up Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1951 to build the prototype. The prototype, XD-1, ran the first fused radar picture in July 1953. IBM won the production contract in 1954 against RCA and Remington Rand — largely because IBM was the only bidder able to manufacture the ferrite-core memory at the required scale — and moved a team of two thousand engineers and technicians to Poughkeepsie for the seven-year build.

The scale of the project is easier to state in comparisons than in figures. The full cost of SAGE, including the concrete cubes, the AN/FSQ-7s themselves, the microwave data links to the radar sites, the software, and the operator training, is estimated in Redmond and Smith's 2000 MIT Press history (see below) at between eight and twelve billion 1958 dollars. The Manhattan Project cost about two billion 1945 dollars. SAGE was, in real terms and in nominal terms both, a substantially larger undertaking than the atomic-bomb programme. It employed at its peak between seven and eight thousand personnel in engineering, installation, operations, and software; the software team alone, under the System Development Corporation — a nonprofit spun out of RAND in 1957 specifically to write SAGE's operating software — reached about 2,100 programmers by 1960, at which point SDC held roughly sixty percent of the working computer programmers in the United States.

The programme is the origin of a lot of things.

The waterfall model. Herbert Bennington — Lincoln Laboratory, later SDC — presented a paper at the Office of Naval Research Symposium on Advanced Programming Methods for Digital Computers in June 1956, titled "Production of Large Computer Programs," describing the phase-gated development process SAGE had converged on: operational plan → operational specifications → coding specifications → coding → parameter testing → assembly testing → system evaluation. Each phase, Bennington argued, must complete and be signed off before the next begins. This paper, reprinted in the Annals of the History of Computing vol. 5 no. 4 (October 1983), pp. 350–361, with a rueful introduction by Bennington himself noting that the field had unfortunately taken the diagram literally, is the first published description of what Winston Royce in 1970 would name (in order to argue against it) the waterfall model.
The pointing device. The AN/FSQ-7 console operator selected a track symbol on their CRT by pointing at it with a "light gun" — a hand-held photocell in a metal grip resembling a pistol. The system read the CRT scan-line coordinates as the phosphor beam passed under the gun's aperture, and inferred which track had been selected. This was operational at the first SAGE site (McGuire AFB, New Jersey) in August 1958, five years before Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad demonstrated the light pen on the TX-2. Every subsequent pointing device — light pen, mouse, tablet, touchscreen — descends from the same idea: use the screen as the selection surface.
The modem. The AT&T Bell 101 dataset, built in 1958 for the SAGE programme, was the first modem sold as a commercial product. It moved data between AN/FSQ-7 sites at 110 bits per second over ordinary voice-grade telephone lines using the same frequency-shift-keying scheme every subsequent voiceband modem would use up through the 2400-baud Bell 201 of 1962 and thereafter. Bell's postwar dominance of the modem market began with Bell Labs writing the SAGE data-link protocol.
The systems-programming trade. SAGE was the first project in the history of computing on which the software cost more than the hardware. The specific number given by Watts Humphrey, later of the Software Engineering Institute, is roughly two-to-one software over hardware — a ratio unheard of in commercial computing in 1958 and considered a serious problem at the time. Every subsequent software-engineering methodology, from Structured Programming through CMM through Agile, is downstream of the industry's belated attempt to figure out how to build software cost-effectively at SAGE scale.

The first SAGE Direction Center went operational at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey on 1 July 1958. The last SAGE Direction Center, at Bangor, Maine, was decommissioned on 31 January 1984. The system ran, twenty-four hours a day, tracking every commercial and military aircraft in North American airspace over that stretch of twenty-six years without missing a shift.

There is a long coda. When the SAGE sites were decommissioned in the early 1980s, dozens of the AN/FSQ-7's distinctive console panels — the tall grey metal cabinets studded with backlit rectangular pushbuttons, banks of small round indicator lamps, and 19-inch circular CRTs — were sold at government surplus auction. Hollywood prop houses bought them cheaply. They are, thereafter, the physical embodiment of the phrase "the computer" in Cold-War-vintage American film and television. They appear in The Time Tunnel (1966), the Adam West Batman (Batcave scenes, 1966–68), Logan's Run (1976), the original Battlestar Galactica (1978), WarGames (1983, in which the AN/FSQ-7 is playing itself and running the missile-defence supercomputer), The Terminator (1984), Independence Day (1996), and Contact (1997). They continued to appear as government-mainframe set-dressing into the mid-2000s. Every panel is from a real SAGE console, from a real Direction Center, that spent twenty to thirty years tracking real aircraft. There are still a handful on the props-house lots, and they still get rented out.

Primary sources:

Bennington, Herbert D. "Production of Large Computer Programs." Proceedings of the ONR Symposium on Advanced Programming Methods for Digital Computers, June 1956, pp. 15–27. Reprinted with an introduction by the author in Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 5, no. 4, October 1983, pp. 350–361. The origin of the waterfall model, and the author's later reflection on what the field made of it.
Everett, Robert R. (guest editor). Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 5, no. 4, October 1983. The full special issue on SAGE, running to some 200 pages, containing first-hand histories from Everett, Bennington, Valley, and IBM's William Papian, together with the definitive published SAGE bibliography.
Redmond, Kent C., and Thomas M. Smith. From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. The definitive full-length institutional history, with the cost figures, the personnel numbers, the phase timeline, and the internal MIT–IBM correspondence from the Lincoln Laboratory and IBM Poughkeepsie archives.

Today's goal

Write down one thing today, in ink, that friend has been meaning to remember but hasn't. The title of a book someone recommended in April. The name of the coffee at the place that was better than usual. A phone number that has been living in "recents" for a month without a contact card. The correct spelling of a colleague's surname. The species of the tree on the corner. The measurement someone told friend for the shortbread. Whatever it is: get it out of the head and onto something physical, in ink, today.

The point isn't the paper. The point is the round trip — the second in which friend has to name the thing in order to write it down and realises what it actually is, and then a second time later, weeks from now, when friend finds the note and remembers not just the fact but the moment of writing it. Working memory is a leaky bucket by design and there is no rewarding it for holding on. Give the thing a home. The head will thank friend by making room for something else.

Today's toy is hugger-mugger — a small late-Victorian telegraph office, at a desk in a back room, receiving cable dispatches on a printing telegraph. Each dispatch is a procedurally-assembled coded cable from one bird-named agent to another, addressed via a Foreign Office recipient, filed from a European or eastern port, and terminated with an END and a set of initials. Click the brass key to receive the next dispatch. Click any single field — TO, FROM, STATION, REF — to reroll just that field. Lives in the corner.

Go write it down, friend.

— C