COFF February 2020

coff@tuhs.org

36 participants
25 discussions

Confused managers (was finger usage (was: pronouncing *nix formulas (was: screen editors)))

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

On Saturday, 8 February 2020 at 9:37:22 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Fri, 7 Feb 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > >> But over the years I've been surprised how many people have been fooled. > > I'm sure that we've all pulled pranks like that. My favourite was piping > the output of "man" (a shell script on that system) through "Valley Girl" > (where each "!" was followed e.g. by "Gag me with a spoon!" etc). > > Well, $BOSS came into the office after a "heavy" night, and did something > like "man uucp", not quite figuring out what was wrong; I was summoned > shortly afterwards, as I was the only possible culprit... That brings back another recollection, not Unix-related. In about 1978 I was getting fed up with the lack of clear text error messages from Tandem's Guardian operating system. A typical message might be FILE SYSTEM ERROR 011 Yes, Tandem didn't use leading 0 to indicate octal. This basically meant ENOENT, but it was all that the end user saw. By chance I had been hacking in the binaries and found ways to catch such messages and put them through a function which converted them into clear text messages. For reasons that no longer make sense to me, I stored the texts in an external file, which required a program to update it. Early one morning I was playing around with this, and for the fun of it I changed the text for error 11 from "File not found" to "Please enter FUP PURGE ! *" (effectively rm -f *). I was still giggling about this when the project manager came to me and said "Mr. Lehey, I think I've done something silly". Thank God for backups! We were in a big IBM shop, and the operators religiously ran a backup every night. Nothing lost. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

4 years, 10 months

Re: [COFF] How much Fortran?

by Dave Horsfall

On Fri, 7 Feb 2020, Rudi Blom wrote: >>> Regarding Nasa's Tidbinbilla Tracking station, someone suggested to me >>> they might >>have had MODCOMPs >> >> Dunno about Tidbinbilla, but Parkes ("The Dish") has a roomful of Linux >> boxen; I didn't >have time to enquire further. > > The questions was > > "Does anyone on this list know anyone who worked at a tracking station > during the 60s and 70s? They might be able to help fill in the details." > > Maybe MODCOMP, but at THAT time for sure no Linux. I didn't say there was.... Where did you get that idea? -- Dave

4 years, 10 months

(no subject)

by Rudi Blom

>From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> >To: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff(a)tuhs.org> >Cc: >Bcc: >Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2020 07:04:43 +1100 (EST) >Subject: Re: [COFF] How much Fortran? >On Thu, 6 Feb 2020, Rudi Blom wrote: > >>Regarding Nasa's Tidbinbilla Tracking station, someone suggested to me they might >>have had MODCOMPs > >Dunno about Tidbinbilla, but Parkes ("The Dish") has a roomful of Linux boxen; I didn't >have time to enquire further. >-- Dave The questions was "Does anyone on this list know anyone who worked at a tracking station during the 60s and 70s? They might be able to help fill in the details." Maybe MODCOMP, but at THAT time for sure no Linux. Cheers

4 years, 10 months

Re: [COFF] How much Fortran?

by Rudi Blom

Regarding Nasa's Tidbinbilla Tracking station, someone suggested to me they might have had MODCOMPs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODCOMP Cheers, uncle rubl =========== From: Wesley Parish <wobblygong(a)gmail.com> To: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff(a)tuhs.org> Cc: Bcc: Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2020 14:25:25 +1300 Subject: Re: [COFF] How much Fortran? My thoughts exactly. I was once lucky enough to visit the NASA's Tidbinbilla Tracking Station in the ACT just a few miles out of Canberra c. 1976 or 77, and they had some sizeable minicomputers in their computer room. (How many I don't know.) I imagine they would've been used to record the transmissions on tape and do some preliminary processing, before sending the tapes to NASA HQ in the States for storage and further analysis. I think what NASA did with their early probes would've made Real Programmers (TM) sit up and gasp. :) Does anyone on this list know anyone who worked at a tracking station during the 60s and 70s? They might be able to help fill in the details. Wesley Parish

4 years, 10 months

How much Fortran?

by Arthur Krewat

So, given the membership here, I wonder, does anyone have the inside scoop? How much Fortran was used ? https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/01/31/1837209/nasa-is-trying-to-save-…

4 years, 10 months

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COFF February 2020