November 2019 - COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Sir Maurice Wilkes FRS FREng on this day in 2010; he was known for his work on EDSAC, microprogramming, etc. -- Dave

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further off topic w.r.t. Unix - NTBACKUP [was Re: Someone wants to use an exabyte

by Charles H Sauer

[clearly not Unix related, so posting to COFF] On 11/27/2019 1:31 PM, John Foust wrote: > The tougher task was trying to find contemporary tools that could process the data stream from an old NTBACKUP, especially a stream with corruption from missing chunks, as I wasn't in the mood to try to rebuild an NT machine with SCSI to let NTBACKUP deal with the drive directly, and I think it would probably fail harder on direct drive errors. If I recall correctly, the XP Pro* version of NTBACKUP is compatible with, and an improvement over, the NT4 version in dealing with tapes and will also deal with file images of tapes. I will probably remember a lot better soon, because I want to look for some files that I thought I had archived on disk but seem to have lost. If I have them, they're on DDS-2 or DDS-3. Again, IIRC, SCSI is not hard to deal with with XP. An old Dell, with Dell XP install CD, should be relatively easy to setup with various Adaptec cards. I don't know about other brands w.r.t. license keys. I plan to use a Dell Dimension 8300 that I used to look at some Dell UNIX DDS-2 cartridges. It dual boots Fedora & XP, but I still need to verify that XP doesn't need anything more for the HP DAT drive I have, and dig out cartridges that might have what I want. My recollection is the NT4 required tape drive specific drivers but that XP does not. Lastly, again IIRC, Microsoft removed and/or broke NTBACKUP when Vista came out. CHS *XP Home didn't have NTBACKUP, but the Pro binary works on Home. -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

5 years, 2 months

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In memoriam: Ada Lovelace

by Dave Horsfall

Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, was lost to us in 1852 from uterine cancer. Regarded as the first computer programmer and a mathematical prodigy (when such things were unseemly for a mere woman), she was the daughter of Lord Byron, and a friend of Charles Babbage. -- Dave

5 years, 2 months

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EDSAC replica switched on

by Dave Horsfall

A replica of EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was switched on at Bletchley Park on this day in 2014; EDSAC was the first practical general purpose stored program electronic computer (and how's that for hair-splitting?). -- Dave

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RIP Brian Kantor WB6CYT

by Dave Horsfall

I heard we lost Brian Kantor WB6CYT recently. Those in the Amateur radio community (esp. packet radio) will have heard of him of course, but apparently he also had a hand in SMTP and NNTP (remember them?) both used heavily many years ago, along with IPIP. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/11/24/0051236/brian-kantor-internet-and-a… -- Dave VK2KFU

5 years, 2 months

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WWW proposal anniversary

by Dave Horsfall

In 1990 a certain Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir) published a proposal for the World Wide Web (often confused with the Internet by newbies). -- Dave

5 years, 2 months

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In Memoriam: Jay W. Forrester, happy birthday Gene Amdahl, and LSD

by Dave Horsfall

Weird day... Computer architect Gene Amdahl was born in on this day in 1922; he had a hand in the IBM 704 and the System/360, founded Amdahl Corporation (maker of /360 clones), and devised Amdahl's Law in relation to parallel processing. But we lost Jay W. Forrester in 2016; another computer pioneer, he invented core memory (remember that, with its destructive read cycle?). Oh, and LSD was first synthesised in 1938 by Dr. Hofmann of Sandoz Labs, Switzerland; it had nothing to do with Berkeley and BSD, man... -- Dave

5 years, 2 months

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Happy birthday, computer mouse!

by Dave Horsfall

On this day in 1970 computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart was awarded the patent for the computer mouse. It was a fugly thing: just a squarish box with two wheels underneath it mounted at right-angles and a button. Ergonomic it wasn't... -- Dave

5 years, 2 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6? (fwd)

by Dave Horsfall

Meant to go to the list... -- Dave ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 07:23:19 +1100 (EST) From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> To: Paul Winalski Subject: Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6? On Thu, 14 Nov 2019, Paul Winalski wrote: > I used to think that "Emacs" stood for > "escape-meta-alt-control-shift". :-) It's too finger-busy with all > that alt, escape, and meta stuff for my taste. Hey, that's a bit old :-) Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2014 17:28:41 +0000 From: Benjamin Huntsman To: "tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix taste (Re: terminal - just for fun) >> EMACS - eight megs and constantly swapping :) >I like my own version: "Enough Memory? A Concept Strange!" I thought it stood for Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift :) I thought I came up with it independently, but obviously it was in the back of my mind. -- Dave

5 years, 2 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] History of m6?

by Clem Cole

Moving to a COFF On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 4:16 AM Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de> wrote: > 'T'was before my time, but the legend has it that the original BLISS-10 bootstrap > compiler was a set of TECO macros that Chuck Geschke (Adobe's > founder) wrote.' > Really? TECO = Tape Editor and Corrector TECO started as that for PDP-1 or maybe TX-1 (at MIT I believe). But over time, TECO became the primary text editor on the PDP-10's for many, many people in the ARPA community. I learned it as my second, PDP-10 text editor (I learned a line editor, who's name I forget, that was similar to the IBM's editor when I got my first PDP-10 account, but quickly moved to TECO). FWIW: The original EMACS was a set of TECO macros. The historical truth is that besides being the primary text editor, it was so rich in function that TECO became for the PDP-10 what Jon Bentley describes as a 'little language' and was used for all sorts of small hacks. The later Unix world created other tools, be it sed, later awk, and the like. But for the PDP-10 world, TECO very much that low level engine that a lot of people used. When BLISS was written, CMU did not have UNIX (and thus nor any of the UNIX tools - as I had a small hand in making UNIX happen @ CMU in the early 1970s). But when I arrived, the two PDP-10's (CMU-A and CMU-B) reigned supreme as primary CS (and EE) systems, along with the CMU hacked version of IBM's TSS running on the 360 for everyone else (and where I got my first real programming job), plus CMU's own TSS/8 on couple of PDP-8s that were scattered about. FWIW: Chuck used the PDP-10's for his work as a grad student. He also is famous for being the first PhD to produce his thesis on a 'laser printer', the CMU XGP (it was not a laser as today, it was modified FAX machine made by Xerox). The fun story is that CMU's administration would not accept his thesis originally because the library wanted the 'originals' to put in the archives. It took 6-9 months for his thesis advisor (Bill Wulf) to convince the library, that they had the originals. Anyway, the use of TECO in such a manner was very much the way things were done in those days, so the legend is very much possible.

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COFF November 2019