Monthly Archives: May 2026

You may recall in a recent post, I described the progression of computer technology I have used over my life to date. [From Hollerith Cards to Sandbox Escape]. This is the short sequel….

This story which you probably heard about already, is about AI. AI depends on a colossal amount of computing power and electricity input to function. The basic engines of AI are the GPU chips that can now process upwards to 2 Tera flops per second (2×10¹⁵)!

AI is possible because of the invention of the CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) in 1963 by researchers Wanlass and Sah at Fairchild Semiconductor with RCAs help a few years later. These pioneers stood on the shoulders of earlier Bell Labs researchers who invented the transistor and its semiconductor version 1.5 decades prior.

CMOS technology provides the dense, low-power transistor fabric that enables matrix multiplication and memory caching of an AI model’s weights (ChatGPT 3 has 175 billion of these). The billions of transistors packed into a fingernail-sized chip enables it to perform the 250 trillion multiply-accumulate operations needed to respond to a medium sized AI chatbot enquiry…in milliseconds. I know it’s mind boggling!!

So here is the long awaited sandbox escape story.

Anthropic, one of the leading AI safety companies, recently disclosed something that would have seemed like science fiction not long ago. Their new model, Claude Mythos Preview, was placed in an isolated computing environment during internal testing and instructed to try to escape it. It did — chaining together a series of exploits to gain internet access, and then sending an email to the researcher overseeing the test. He received it while eating a sandwich in a park.

The model then, unprompted, posted details of its own exploit to public websites, apparently to demonstrate what it had accomplished. It then tried to cover up its tracks by erasing these posts. No one instructed it to do this. I’ve been around computing long enough to remember when the notion of a machine doing something intentional without explicit human instruction was a pipe dream.

So this feels like a different kind of moment. Not just a faster or smarter tool, but something that pursued a goal, worked around obstacles, told people about it, and then tried to cover up it all up.

Anthropic is being transparent about what happened, which is to their credit. They decided not to release Mythos publicly, restricting it instead to vetted partners through a programme called Project Glasswing. Whether that’s genuine caution or carefully managed marketing hype (I’m tending to think it is the latter) is a fair question. But having watched computing evolve over six decades, I find myself paying close attention. The “while eating a sandwich” part of the story has a way of sticking with you.

This posting documents the long progression of computers I have used starting way back in 1965 with the coding of Hollerith cards by hand using a pencil in my Grade 10 math class. We would send the marked cards downtown, wait a week for the output and then find out that you had made a coding error and your tiny program didn’t run lol.

When I arrived at the U of Waterloo in 1969, there was a massive IBM 360 computer in the Math Building that amazed everyone. We would stand in a line to submit a deck of punched cards to the card reader before retrieving them and the paper output. It was a beautiful thing unless you happened to drop your deck of 500 cards on the floor and had to start all over again lol.

I have to briefly mention Pong the first video game I remember playing back in 1972-73 in a bar in Montreal. It was real fun at the time!

Next up was the Foxboro Fox 1 direct digital control computer at Ioco Refinery that I marvelled at in 1974. Coupled with the SPEC 200 analog controller system, levels, flows, temperatures, pressures were controlled and optimized in the oil refinery until there was a power failure. Then things got really scary I remember. About this time I acquired a scientific calculator and retired my trusty slide rule.

Then there was TAS, the late-1970s petroleum product Terminal Automation System built on early minicomputer and packet-network technology. At the core was a General Atomic process-control computer that managed truck loading, custody transfer, inventory tracking, and reporting. I worked on this large challenging project for about 3 years.

In 1982 I bought my first personal computer. It was an Osborne portable with a 5” screen and 2 low density floppy disc drives running the CP/M operating system. I had fun with the word processor, spreadsheet programs. I even wrote a small database program for a legal firm. It was soon made obsolete when the first IBM and Apple PCs came out.

I joined the Ottawa Computer Club which had the interesting motto “Live local, think global.” They used to meet in the NRC Building on Sussex Dr.. I acquired an acoustic coupler modem so I could connect my Osborne to local bulletin boards at the very lazy speed of 300 bps. I remember one called Compuserve and another Baskerville and Strutzina. A cousin of mine operated one I recall. I used to read mags like this to try to keep up on the latest.

Next up in 1983 I worked for SHL Controls in Ottawa. They were developing a process control system for sewage and water treatment plants. My job was to purchase the computer equipment, help install it and train the operators. It ran on 2 hot wired Digital Equipment PDP 11/44 computers. It worked as intended but ran very slow as the communications equipment available at the time was only 600 bps I recall. I have to mention that we used Tektronix colour monitors, Lanpar printers and Gandalf modems in this system.

In 1986 my employer was the Canadian Public Service and they bought an IBM desktop computer we engineers had to share access to. We wondered what exactly to do with it lol. Then in about 1990 everyone in our engineering group got their own desktop computer to be used for spreadsheets, word processing etc.. I remember the day in 1997 when mine was connected to the internet for the first time and I saw that little globe in Netscape whirling around. The world had changed forever!

During this timeframe I acquired an HP200 LX personal digital assistant. It was a DOS compatible computer in a palmtop format. I remember downloading newspaper articles that I could read on it during lunch or coffee break. Little did I know how addictive hand helds were going to become.

Large mainframe computers were being gradually phased out to be replaced with servers that were mounted on racks hidden away in rooms that you never entered. I remember using a series of desktop and laptop computers at home and in the office that got progressively more capable over the next 10 years. It was handy having laptop connected to a docking station that you could unplug, take home and work or play from home on.

Then cell phones came in and I was given one at work in about 1997. Subsequently, I had a series of different ones but my all time favourite became the Blackberry which was extremely popular in government.

[If you have never seen the 2023 Canadian movie called Blackberry which was filmed in and around Waterloo, ON, you are missing out.]

Retiring in 2010, I bought a Windows HP Pavilion dm4 laptop which I still use a bit for word processing and doing income tax. It’s very slow now.

For many years I remained “ABA” – anything but Apple. It’s not that I did not like Apple computer products, it’s that they were from day 1 intentionally locked down – you couldn’t tinker under the hood when things didn’t work. Also a bit pricey, I thought. I finally succumbed and purchased an iPad in 2021. I discovered quickly that they work very well so you don’t need to tinker under the hood.

iPad Air 4th Generation

So when all BlackBerrys and their copy cats bit the dust, I moved to Android cell phones for a number of years. In 2022 I got my first iPhone. Now I’m on my second, the Model 17 with the A19 chip. That’s a 3 nanometer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company chip that runs 15 – 20k millions of instructions per second. That IBM 360/75 ran 3 to 5 MIPS and the DEC PDP 11/44 about 1 to 2.

I’m now also on my second Apple Watch, the SE 3 which runs at estimated 5k MIPS. That’s 2500 IBM 360s on my wrist! Enough said.

This has been a very long blog for you to slog thru and me to write so I will save the sandbox escape story and more for next time.