April 2020 - COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Dan Cross

He announced it on Twitter. I'm sure we all wish him well and a speedy recovery. Note, his tweet says that he is recovering. https://twitter.com/vgcerf/status/1244636584508604417?s=20

2 years

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On the rise and fall of Gopher

by Michael Kjörling

The EFF just published an article on the rise and fall of Gopher on their Deeplinks blog. "Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses" https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperabil… I thought it might be of interest to people here. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

2 years

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] "7th Edition UNIX TM?? Summary" => "â??7th Edition UNIX â?? Summaryâ => â?????7th Edition UNIX â?????? Summaryâ???

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[redirecting to COFF] On Wednesday, 15 April 2020 at 18:19:57 +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Wed, 15 Apr 2020, Don Hopkins wrote: > >> I love how in a discussion of how difficult it was to publish a book on >> Unix with the correct punctuation characters 42 years ago, we still >> can???t even quote the title of the book in a discussion about Unix >> without the punctuation characters degrading and mutating each round >> trip. > > Well, I'm not the one here using Windoze... Arguably Microsoft does it better than Unix. Most of the issues are related to the character encoding. And as Don's headers say: X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.3608.60.0.2.5) I agree with Don. I use mutt, which has many advantages, but sane character encoding isn't one of them. 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

3 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Plan 9 from outer space ?

by Adam Thornton

So it could be the lack of televised sports getting to me in these shelter-in-place days, but, I mean, sure, I guess I’ll throw in some bucks for a pay-per-view of a Pike/Thompson cage match. FIGHT! Followups set. > On Apr 18, 2020, at 6:28 PM, Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: > It wasn't my intention. > On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 11:12 AM Ken Thompson <ken(a)google.com> wrote: >> >> you shouldn't have shut down this discussion. >> On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 3:27 PM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> ``because''.

3 years, 1 month

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COBOL.

by Dan Cross

So I imagine that most readers of this list have heard that a number of US states are actively looking for COBOL programmers. If you have not, the background is that, in the US, a number of unemployment insurance systems have mainframe backends running applications mostly written in COBOL. Due to the economic downturn as a result of COVID-19, these systems are being overwhelmed with unprecedented numbers of newly-unemployed people filing claims. The situation is so dire that the Governor of New Jersey mentioned it during a press conference. This has led to a number of articles in the popular press about this situation, some rather sensational: "60 year old programming language prevents people filing for unemployment!" E.g., https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-j… On the other hand, some are rather more measured: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/cobol-programmers-an… I suspect the real problem is less "COBOL and mainframes" and more organizational along the lines of lack of investment in training, maintenance and modernization. I can't imagine that bureaucrats are particularly motivated to invest in technology that mostly "just works." But the news coverage has led to a predictable set of rebuttals from the mainframe faithful on places like Twitter; they point out that COBOL has been updated by recent standards in 2002 and 2014 and is being unfairly blamed for the present failures, which arguably have more to do with organizational issues than technology. However, the pendulum seems to have swung too far with their arguments in that they're now asserting that COBOL codebases are uniformly masterworks. I don't buy that. I find all of this interesting. I don't know COBOL, nor all that much about it, save for some generalities about its origin and Grace Hopper's involvement in its creation. However, in the last few days I've read up on it a bit and see very little to recommend it: the type and scoping rules are a mess, things like the 'ALTER' statement and the ability to cascade procedure invocations via the 'THRU' keyword seem like a recipe for spaghetti code, and while they added an object system in 2002, it doesn't seem to integrate with the rest of the language coherently and I don't see it doing anything that can't be done in any other OO language. And of course the syntax is abjectly horrible. All in all, it may not be the cause of the current problems, but I don't know why anyone would be much of a fan of it and unless you're already sitting on a mountain of COBOL code (which, in fairness, many organizations in government, insurance and finance are...) I wouldn't invest in it. I read an estimate somewhere that there are something like 380 billion lines of COBOL out there, and another 5 billion are written annually (mostly by body shops in the BRIC countries?). That's a lot of code; surely not all of it is good. So....What do folks think? Is COBOL being unfairly maligned simply due to age, or is it really a problem? How about continued reliance on IBM mainframes: strategic assets or mistakes? - Dan C. (PS: I did look up the specs for the IBM z15. It's an impressive machine, but without an existing mainframe investment, I wouldn't get one.)

3 years, 1 month

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OT BitKeeper: Creating a remote SSH repo

by Angel M Alganza

Hello: Im apologize for the OT but Im desperately looking for the answer to a question regarding BitKeeper and, since I heard about its vitues and also about it becoming open source in this list, I thought you guys wouldn't mind helping me find the answer to my problem. I've been using Git for some time now, but after hearing here about BK, Im trying it out to see if I can change to it. At the moment I'm quite happy with it and I very much like it's smaller than Git. In Git I use a remote SSH "original" repo instead of a public (HTTP) service, since I want to have distributed copies (several workstations and laptops) and a "non interactive" copy on a server of mine. I'm not sure I am making a lot of sense, since I'm not very expert on Git either (I just use a few basic functions) and English isn't my first language. What I actually need/want is to create a remote SSH repo from my local (working) repo. I haven't found how to do that neither in the documentation nor the Users Forum. Alas I havent found a mailing list to subscribe to and ask for help. That's why I'm asking you guys for help. Again sorry for the OT and thank you so much for reading until here. :) Cheers, Ángel

3 years, 1 month

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On having a slash

by Dave Horsfall

Way back then, when dinosaurs strode the earth and System/360 reigned supreme, we were taught to slash our zeros and sevens (can't quite find the glyphs for them right now) in order to distinguish them from Oscars and Ones for the benefit of the keypunch girls (yes, really; I had the hots for one of them at one time, but someone else took her) on those green sheets. In the time-mean I also saw a slash through "Z" (Zulu, Zed, Zee) in order to distinguish it from a "2" (FIGURES TWO); WTF? And you *never* slashed your ones, lest thou ended up with the contents of an 029 chad-box over thine head... These days, I merely slash my sevens by habit and it doesn't even raise an eyebrow; even Oz Pigeon Post's mail mangler seems to accept it[*]. What're other bods' experiences? [*] Don't even mention Redfern, OK? Just don't... And as for getting off at Redfern, well, I did a few times when I had a contract job around there. -- Dave, bored at home

3 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] On having a slash

by Rudi Blom

Remember I learned slashing my zeroes, small bar in sevens and zets, curly letter X. This was when a studied Mathematics fro a while at the University of Technology in Delft, the Netherlands.. I think it had to do with avoiding misunderstandings in scribbled formulars in a time we still did a lot of real writing semester papers. This was around mid-70tish for me.

3 years, 1 month

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Discord chat in about 13 hours?

by Warren Toomey

Anybody feel like a text/voice chat on the ClassicCmp Discord server in about 13 hours, say 2200 UTC? #coff and the General voice channel. I'll pop on for an hour but start whenever you feel like. Cheers, Warren -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

3 years, 1 month

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Happy birthday, ARPAnet!

by Dave Horsfall

RFC 1 "Host Software" was published on this day in 1969 by Steve Crocker; it described the IMP (the forerunner of today's routers). -- Dave

3 years, 1 month

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COFF April 2020