"Reflections on Trusting Trust" plus the fact that no one has designed new
real computers at the gate level for at least 30 years, maybe longer--it's
done in an HDL of some kind, which is to say, software--means it's already
way, way too late.
I for one welcome our new non-biological overlords.
Adam
Hi all,
Given the recent (awesome) discussions about the history of *roff and TeX, I
thought I'd ask about where Brian Reid's Scribe system fits in with all this.
His thesis is available online here:
http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU-CS-81-100.pdf, and in my
opinion is very interesting (also cites papers on roff and TeX). Does anybody
know if Scribe was ever used on Unix systems? Does it exist at all today?
Thanks :)
Josh
Moving to COFF.
John Labovitz wrote:
>>> The earliest known text-formatting software, TJ-2, was created by
>>> MIT-trained computer scientist Peter Samson in 1963.
>>
>> I see claimed predecessors are JUSTIFY and TJ-1. How do you feel
>> about those?
>
> I’m sure I looked for TJ-1 when I did this research — an obvious
> question, given the ‘2’ suffix — but didn’t find anything then. I’m
> not familiar with JUSTIFY.
Note, later there was also a TJ6 for the PDP-6, written by Richard
Greenblatt.
> Do you have links/info for those?
This one mentions TJ-1 near the end:
https://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/_media/pdf/DEC.pdp_1.1972.102650621.p…
The TJ-2 page on Wikipedia mentions JUSTIFY and links here:
http://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/
Moving to COFF, but Brian Dear's "The Friendly Orange Glow", about Plato,
talks a lot about some of the cool stuff happening in the middle of the
country.
https://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Orange-Glow-Untold-Cyberculture/dp/11019736…
And later, of course, NCSA Mosaic.
On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 4:15 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 January 2022 at 14:34:16 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 1:37 PM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >> It seems like Unix is largely a child of the coasts.
> >
> > We can add the eastern coast of Australia, where the original
> > Wollongong group made the first V6 port to the Interdata 7/32 (not
> > to be confused with the Labs port to the 8/32).
>
> To be fair, in the case of Australia almost everybody is on the east
> coast, though we have had our share of FreeBSD core team members from
> the "west coast" (which is really only Perth).
>
> 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.php
>
Taking this to COFF...
> On Jan 10, 2022, at 7:13 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) <lyndon(a)orthanc.ca> wrote:
>
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey writes:
>
>> As long as man pages are formatted with ?roff, I don't see it going
>> away. I don't suppose many people use troff any more, but there are
>> enough of us, and as long as man pages stay the way they are, I don't
>> think we're in any danger.
>
> Well there is mandoc(1). But as time goes by they just seem to be
> re-implementing nroff. Of course that *must* be easier than just
> learning n/troff in the first place :-P
As someone who did a lot of a Ph.D. in the history of computing, and then went into IT because he liked eating protein sometimes:
The great secret is that NO ONE EVER READS THE LITERATURE.
We have now made all the mistakes at least four times:
Once for each of mainframes, minis, micros, and mobile.
You can be a rock star at any development or operations job, even if you are, like me, a Bear Of Little Brain, simply by having some idea of what was tried already to solve a problem like this, and why it didn't work.
Which you can get by actually stopping to read up about your problem before diving headfirst into coding up a solution for it.
If you happen to get stinking rich from this advice, you can buy me a bottle of whiskey sometime.
Adam
I think I've posted this question before, perhaps on TUHS, but I'll ask
again.
I have a PDP-11/03 with a Sykes Twin 8" Floppy Drive unit. It has it's own
controller card, so I'm not sure if it's RX01/RX02 compatible. Problem is,
I need a bootstrap program for it. I can't find a technical manual for it,
so I'm stuck.
I see the source for LSX has a driver for the Sykes, so I may be able to
install and mount it on MX, which I'm preparing with Noel's help for my
machine, without booting from it. I'm hoping that Heinz, or someone who had
a Sykes drive in that era still has the bootstrap code.
Paul
*Paul Riley*
