Meeting William Gibson

Not many novelists bring out the fanboy in me, but Gibson is one of them. Neuromancer was, literally, the book that changed my life. It's why I decided to become a computer programmer.

In the summer of 1986 I was a disillusioned History student about to become a disillusioned History graduate. I had finished my finals, I had no job lined up and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. It was in this state of aimlessness that - inspired by an article by William Leith in the NME - I purchased Neuromancer. It was the first pure SF novel I had read in years and it was completely gripping. I can still recall the adrenal rush of the last few chapters, racing through them just to discover how the story ended.

I had read SF as an adolescent but discovering JG Ballard had derailed me: nothing else in the genre could quite match the intensity of his prose. At university I had read mainly non-fiction: there was so much reality to discover, it seemed pointless to read to stuff people had made up. When I was studying European heresy my tutor John Critchley advised me to read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (I was chuffed to explain to him that the blind librarian Jorge of Burgos was a reference to Jorge Luis Borges, because that joke had passed him by). I also read Mishima because I did courses on both medieval and modern Japan, and he seemed appropriate. For light relief I read Italo Calvino's short stories and the Blandings novels of P.G.Wodehouse.

I realise that list probably makes me sound like an insufferable prick. But then I probably was an insufferable prick at university, so that's fair.

I'm not going to do a review here. I presume everybody who reads blogs has read Neuromancer. If that's not the case stop reading this right now and go read it. Like most SF it has dated but not as badly as some. Few SF authors have changed the world. My quasi-namesake Arthur C Clarke did, with his invention of the geosynchronous satellite, but largely his vision has not been realised. No lunar explorers have disinterred mysterious black slabs because there are no bases on the moon. Heck, nobody's even been to the moon for over thirty years. Whereas it's a measure of the impact Gibson's writing has had on the world that he has stopped writing SF and moved into regular fiction without any meaningful change of tone or subject matter. (I guess Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison and others have also had something to do with it).

Gibson's insight was to take the glamour which traditionally attached to spaceships and astronauts and transfer it to computers and programmers, who were - it's fair to say - not glamourous. At Exeter the Comp Sci students were pimply-faced youths in brown and beige, as boring as accountants. In fact, more boring: at least there were some girls amongst the accountancy students. Neuromancer changed that image by making computers cool, sexy and edgy. Which is why it has had such a profound effect on modern life. All over the world, pimply-faced youths in brown and beige set about immanentising a world in which computers - and by extension the people who worked with them - were cool sexy and edgy.

Neuromancer was Gibson's first novel. In 1986 it was a bit frustrating to discover that there wasn't anything else to read by him. I just had to wait until Count Zero came out. On the other hand it does mean that every few years there is a new novel to look forward to.

So today I joined the line of people to buy a signed copy of Gibson's new novel, Spook Country, at Forbidden Planet. I told him I was grateful to him for writing Neuromancer because it had directed me into a career in software development. His face crinkled with recognition. "Oh you're one of those guys," he said. Yep, I'm one of those guys.

Why DUAL?

One of my colleagues has just started reading Oracle Insights: Tales From The Oak Table. He is halfway through Dave Ensor's chapter on the history of Oracle. This explains many things - why that ubiquitous file is called afiedt.buf, why Oracle had the world's first commercial RDBMS even though it was based on IBM's System-R, why nobody ever used MTS. One thing it doesn't cover is why the DUAL table is so named.

Now the reason for this appeared in an Oracle Magazine column a few years back. I clicked on my bookmark so I could forward the URL only to get a 404 error. Turns out there's been a recent purge of the Oracle Magazine online archive. I presume this is because of a desire to retire stale and potentially misleading information rather than because OTN is running out of disk space.

Fortunately the Wayback Machine still has a copy of the web page in question. But it is the Internet Archive only works if we know what and when we know what we are looking for. So, s a public service and to keep this information in a Google-isable domain, I reproduce the text here.

The History of Dual
In the November/December issue of Oracle Magazine you recount the history of the company, so I'm wondering if you can tell me how the DUAL table got its name. People I've asked, including seasoned Oracle gurus, have not been able to answer this.
Sean O'Neill

I created the DUAL table as an underlying object in the Oracle Data Dictionary. It was never meant to be seen itself, but instead used inside a view that was expected to be queried. The idea was that you could do a JOIN to the DUAL table and create two rows in the result for every one row in your table. Then, by using GROUP BY, the resulting join could be summarized to show the amount of storage for the DATA extent and for the INDEX extent(s). The name, DUAL, seemed apt for the process of creating a pair of rows from just one.
Chuck Weiss, Oracle

Source: Oracle Magazine "Sendmail column" January 2002

Update

In the Comments Marco Gralike linked to a thread on AskTom. That URL was broken by the migration of AskTom to a new version of ApEx. Here is the new URL for the thread.

In my Inbox this morning

We provide the ointments you require at really reasonably priced.

Hmmm. Seems like the spammers are moving into haemoroid treatments.

The easter egg was the random text added to defeat the spam filters. This comprised a snippet of Hans Christian Anderson and two nibbles from Jane Austen's "Persuasion". I'm particularly taken with the phrase "all histories are against you" which from now on I shall regularly drop into arguments.