The recent issue of ACM Queue is about virtual machines and has some excellent articles that explicitly look at the drift in the concept of a VM from the 60s when a VM was a hardware simulation for sharing to today when the a VM, like the Java VM, can simulate a machine that does not really exist.
The two articles I liked were:
ACM Queue – Simulators: Virtual Machines of the Past (and Future) – Why would anyone ever want to write software for machines that no longer exist – and even if they did want to, how would they go about it? – This discusses an interesting historical simulation project – The Computer History Simulation Project. There is also a fascinating short discussion of the types of problems they encountered creating a machine simulator.
ACM Queue – The Reincarnation of Virtual Machines – Like the best of the 1970s and 1980s, VMs have returned to the scene — and they’re a lot cooler than polyester pants. This article has some good general definitions of types of virtual machines.
ACM Queue – For Want of a Comma, the Meaning Was Lost – What does punctuation have to do with software development? – this is by Jef Raskin (of the Macintosh project fame, Canon Cat, and the book, The Humane Interface) and is a letter addressed to Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots and Leaves fame. Nice to see a punctuation writer being addressed in an ACM document.