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Re: [COFF] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Peter Jeremy

On 2020-Nov-06 10:07:21 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: >Will, I do still the same thing, but the reason for 72 for email being that >way is still card-based. In FORTRAN the first column defines if the card >is new (a blank), a comment (a capital C), no zero a 'continuation' of the >last card. But column 73-80 were 'special' and used to store sequence #s >(this was handy when you dropped your card deck, card sorters could put it >back into canonical order). Since no-one has mentioned it, the reason why Fortran and Cobol ignore columns 73-80 goes back to the IBM 711 card reader - which could read any (but usually configured for the first) 72 columns into pairs of 36-bit words in an IBM 701. -- Peter Jeremy

4 years, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

On Tuesday, 10 November 2020 at 16:52:58 -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > If 4.3BSD is old enough, the System Administrator's Manual (e.g. > http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/isi/bsd/490197C_Unix_4.3BS…) > section 4.2 _et seq_. > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 4:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: > >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for >> a big computer was from source. Now I've been asked for a reference, >> and I can't find one! Can anybody help? > > How olden days do you mean? Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was thinking commercial systems of the 1960s and 1970s, not any form of Unix. 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, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Clem Cole

Moving to COFF. below. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 10:40 AM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Clem, > > It figures. I should have known there was a reason for the shorter lines > other than display. Conventions are sticky and there appears to be a > generation gap. I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors > used 2... who knows why? :). > You never use a real typewriter. Double-space allows you to edit (physically) the document if need be. This was how I did everything before I had easy computer access. I went to college with an electric typewriter and all my papers were done on it in the fall of my freshman year (until I got access to UNIX). I did have an CS account for the PDP-10 and they had the XGP, but using it for something like your papers was somewhat frowned upon. However, the UNIX boxes we often bought 'daisy wheel' typewriters that had RS-232C interfaces. Using nroff, I could then do my papers and run it off in the admin's desk at night. Clem

4 years, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[Coff, etc] On Saturday, 7 November 2020 at 0:29:01 +0100, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: > Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in > <20201106225422.GD99027(a)eureka.lemis.com>: >> On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote: >>> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification, >>> we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of- >>> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than >>> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get >>> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. >> >> FWIW, this is the US convention. Other countries have different >> conventions. My Ausinfo style manual states >> >> There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the >> end of a sentence. >> >> I believe that this also holds for Germany. I'm not sure that the UK >> didn't have different rules again. > > Yes, the DUDEN of Germany says for typewriters that the punctuation > characters period, comma, semicolon, colon, question- and > exclamation mark are added without separating whitespace. The next > word follows after a space ("Leerschritt", "void step"). Thanks for the confirmation. Where did you find that? I checked the yellow Duden (âRichtlinien fÃ¼r den Schriftsatzâ) before sending my previous message, but I couldn't find anything useful. 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, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Clem Cole

Exactly -- just re-read Will's question. 2 spaces after punctuation is a fix-size typeface solution to the 1.5 typographer layout. I was referring to why typed papers were traditionally double spaced between the lines. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 11:02 AM Chris Torek <torek(a)elf.torek.net> wrote: > >I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors > >used 2... who knows why? :). > > Typewriters. > > In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification, > we have "stretchy spaces" between words. The space after end-of- > sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than > the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get > stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space. Note that this is > all in the variable-pitch font world. > > Since typewriters are fixed-pitch, the way to emulate the > 1.5-space-wide gap is to expand it to 2. > > Chris >

4 years, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Dave Horsfall

[ Moving to COFF (if your MUA respects "Reply-To:") ] On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote: > But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and > asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur. You've never experienced the joy of having your code suddenly working when inserting printf() statements? Oh dear; time to break out GDB... -- Dave

4 years, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[Following clemc's example and moving to COFF] On Friday, 6 November 2020 at 7:19:24 -0800, Chris Torek wrote: >> I'm lazy. > > I am too, but I still use a big screen: I just fit a lot of smaller > windows in it. Agreed. There's a second issue here: for reading text, 70 to 80 n widths is optimal. For reading computer output, it should be much wider. I've compromised by fitting two 120 character wide xterms on my monitors, left and right. I still display only 70-80 characters for text. > I'd like to have a literal wall screen, especially if I'm in an > interior, windowless (as in physical glass windows) room, so that > part of the wall could be a "window" showing a view "outside" (real > time, or the ocean, or whatever) and other parts of the wall could > be the text I'm working on/with, etc. The issue there is perspective. I could do that (modulo cost) in my office, but I'd have a horizontal angle of about 90Â°, and that's uncomfortable. > (But I'll make do with these 27" 4k displays. :-) ) Yes, that's about the widest I find comfortable, and it took me a while to adapt. 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, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

by Clem Cole

I'd be curious to hear from the folks a few years older than I (I started in the later 60s with the GE-635), but my own experiences of having lived through some of it, I personally think it was more to do with all of the systems of the time switching from cards to the Model 28 and later the 33 then Unix or AT&T. Unix was just one of the systems that we used at the time of the transition from cards. But the other timesharing systems of those days began to transition to the tty's requirements. On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 12:27 PM Stephen Clark <sclark46(a)earthlink.net> wrote: > On 11/6/20 12:13 PM, Adam Thornton wrote: > > I’m going to chime in on pro-80-columns here, because with the text a > comfortable size to read (although this is getting less true as my eyes > age), I can read an entire 80-column line without having to sweep my eyes > back and forth. > > > > I can’t, and never could, do that at 132. > > > > As a consequence, I read much, much faster with 80-column-ish text > blocks. > > > > I also think there is something to the “UNIX is verbal” and “UNIX nerds > tend to be polyglots often with a surprising amount of liberal arts > background of one kind or another,” argument. That may, however, merely be > confirmation bias. > > > > Adam > May have had to do with the first terminal commonly used with UNIX. > > The Model 33 printed on 8.5-inch (220 mm) wide paper, supplied on > continuous > 5-inch (130 mm) diameter rolls and fed via friction (instead of, e.g., > tractor > feed). It printed at a fixed 10 characters per inch, and supported > 74-character > lines,[13] although 72 characters is often commonly stated. > >

4 years, 7 months

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Views of the future from 1970?

by Finn O'Leary

Hey all, I was browsing my small corner of the fediverse, when I came across a post that said: > @pastelpunkbandit@hellsite.site > i wonder if people from the 70s would make fun of us for still using vi It got me wondering -- what /was/ the view of the future of computing, by people working deeply with the systems of the time? I know that people worked on what they felt was the future -- and returned bearing the gifts of Smalltalk. Prolog, etc ad nausem. Surely there was the expectation that things would be improved, but what form did those expectations take? Incidentally, if there /were/ jokes about people using $program in the future -- I think that would be of interest too :) Thanks! -- "Too enough never much is!"

4 years, 7 months

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Views of the future from 1970?

by Rudi Blom

Just watched this the other day. The original story is from 1958 written by Isaac Asimov, the short movie was made in 1978 All the Troubles of the World https://youtu.be/svIXTDeZzDg

4 years, 7 months

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