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?”
Nothing to do with UNIX, but a reminder that occasionally long thought
lost manuals still pop-up.
"Researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what’s
considered the world’s oldest surviving (digital) computer after its
long-lost user manual was unearthed. The Z4, which was built in 1945,
runs on tape, takes up most of a room and needs several people to
operate it. The machine now takes residence at the Deutsches Museum in
Munich, but it hasn’t been used in quite some time."
https://www.engadget.com/oldest-computer-manual-zuse-z4-161214346.html
I finally got around to tidying up a little shell tool I wrote that turns a network interface you specify into a bridge, and then creates some tap devices with owning user and group you specify and attaches them to that bridge.
This gets around having to run emulated older systems under sudo if you want networking to work.
It’s mostly intended for the PiDP-11/simh, but it also works fine with klh10 and TOPS-20.
Maybe it will be useful to someone else.
https://github.com/athornton/brnet <https://github.com/athornton/brnet>
Adam
Moving to COFF
On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 7:56 PM John Cowan <cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote:
> Rereading that made me wonder: if someone retargeted an old compiler (pcc,
> say) to produce i386 code,
>
I thought SVR3's was PCC (maybe PCC2). But I thought I remember that is
had a i386 code. Certainly by SVR4 time.
IIRC, the time frame of SVR3's front end would have been original ANSI
(i.e. White Book V2).
> how much faster would it run than a VAX?
>
In the time frame of the SVR3 (mid/late 80s), the Intel processors was
faster than the 1MIP (780 circa 1977) in raw computes. The issue was
always I/O. Most PC did not have the same amount of I/O HW that much
earlier Vaxen.
> I see that there is a pcc derivative at <http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/>, but
> supposedly it has been heavily rewritten for C99 compliance and other
> things.
>
And my point is that by the time of C99, it was a different language than
the early 1970s when Dennis created fit or the original PDP-11/20 he and
Ken used for the first UNIX kernel and tools implementations.
"When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often
think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a
worldwide crowd." dmr
