High School and Hi-Tech in Israel

I was going through some old documents and found my High School final projects presentation agenda from 1991. It’s almost 20 years old.

It is interesting to look back and remember some of the roots for Israeli Hi-Tech predate the army background.

The projects are quite impressive, given it was  1991 and they were developed by high school after hours.

• Drawing with Robots
• Hebrew Optical Character Recognition Engine ( That’s mine with Roy , It didn’t work very well, but it’s a hard problem )
• Robot and Algorithm to Solve Rubic’s Cube (Not the video from youtube which is much newer)
• An Internet Terminal connection  over RS232
• 8088 simulator
• Russian-Hebrew-English Dictionary
• Course-ware for Firefighters
• Sound Sampler for IBM PC
• An expert system to prove Theorems in Euclidean Geometry

Looking back at the technology is also fun. Lot’s of Robotics, Prolog,”Expert Systems“,  EGA, Turbo Pascal and 8088.

It’s true my school was not a standard in the Israeli education system. The principal used to show a map of the Silicon valley superimposed over Tel Aviv back in 1988, in order to present a vision to new candidates. But it was definitely not the only school encouraging technical innovation.

Naturally, I have not stayed in touch with most of the people. Random samples suggests that quite a few are leaders in various positions in Universities and in the Hi-Tech industry.

Israeli High School Final Project Day One

High School Final Projects Day Two

High School Final Projects Day Three

Israeli High School Final Projects Day Four

Five Best Software Development Products – Ever

This is just my biased and very personal opinion.

1. Turbo Pascal 3.0 (1986)

No Mouse, No Objects , No GUI. Great Fun.

However, it was one of the fastest, most productive IDE’s ever.

On an IBM AT “Compatible” system running at 11MHZ (Using the Turbo Button   ) and 1MB of memory it outpaced Visual Studio.Net on a Dual-Core 2000MB,2000GHZ machine.

Turbo Pascal Manual

2. Purify & Quantify (1995)

The Instrumentation masters.

For any developer that ever spent three months looking for a memory leak, Purify was a godsend.

Its main advantage – the technology actually worked.

It is amazing to see that even in .Net  environment we still keep having memory leak problems, but no Purify to the rescue. Even more amazing is that the inventor of Purify is also the inventor and founder of NetFlix.

3. Xemacs (1994)

Dynamic word completion, greatest and weirdest Keyboard shortcuts , real human multitasking.

The Editor that invented plugins, open source and tons of other cool features.

And it’s the only useful lisp program ever written.

If you didn’t write code in emacs-lisp you don’t know what how pleasure feels like.

Xemacs

4. VMWARE workstation 3 (2001)

The mother of everything virtualized. It hinted of the future. It was the first “emulation” software that actually worked.

Freezing code in time, replaying bugs, running SoftIce inside a VM , running Linux on windows, running Linux on windows, multiple servers on a single machine. All of that for $300 ( $240, if you bought many of them ).

VMWARE 3.0

5. Visual Basic 6.0 (1998)

While many people like Delphi and VB has its downsides, it had such a dramatic effect that it can’t be ignored.

A real simple environment for light weight programmers which is actually useful.

What do they have in common?

• Great performance.
• High reliability
• User simplicity ( maybe not emacs J )
• Solving hard problems

What do you think ?