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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, 8 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, 8 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, 8 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, 8 months

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German Z4 User Manual from 1945 found

by Rudi Blom

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

4 years, 9 months

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A little networking tool to reduce having to run emulators with privilege

by Adam Thornton

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

4 years, 9 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] reviving a bit of WWB

by Clem Cole

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

4 years, 9 months

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three performance modeling books available again

by Charles H Sauer

In the early 1970s, when computing capabilities were tiny, tiny, tiny compared to even a cell phone today, and those resources were typically time-shared across multiple users, queueing network models became a primary tool to analyze and improve system performance. Queueing models had been studied for years before regarding communication systems and other systems, but networks of queues seemed especially apropos for understanding time-sharing systems. Computer Systems Performance Modeling, which Professor K.M. Chandy and I wrote in 1978-9, previously published by Pearson Education, Inc. is now out of print. We are making PDF copies of lightly edited versions available under a Creative Commons license. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2020/08/25/computer-systems-performan… Ed MacNair and I published two books based on The Research Queueing Package, RESQ: Simulation of Computer Communication Systems and Elements of Practical Performance Modeling. Those books, previously published by Pearson Education, Inc. are now out of print. We are making PDF copies of lightly edited versions available under a Creative Commons license. Though we have written two prior articles about RESQ history, those did not cover subsequent development, so another recap seems appropriate now. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2020/08/25/remembering-resq/ (Mainstream Videoconferencing: A Developer’s Guide to Distance Multimedia, which Joe Duran and I wrote from 1994-96, became available again in 2008: https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/02/14/mainstream-videoconferenci…) -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

4 years, 10 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Monitoring by loudspeaker (was: BTL pranks)

by Michael Kjörling

(This should probably be on COFF because I don't think this has much to do with UNIX.) On 11 Jul 2020 22:22 -0400, from doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy): > a loudspeaker hooked to the low-order bit of the accumulator played > gentle white noise in the background. The noise would turn into a > shriek when the computer got into a tight loop, How did that work? I can see how tying the low-order bit of the accumulator to a loudspeaker would generate white noise as the computer is doing work; but I fail to see how doing so would even somewhat reliably generate a shrieking sound when the computer is in a tight loop. Please, enlighten me. :-) -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

4 years, 10 months

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Translating Schopenhauer (was: Style command source available?)

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

On Friday, 21 August 2020 at 17:23:11 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: > > It was Schopenhauer who definetely said > > Neminem laede, imo omnes, quantum potes, juva! How about that, I even understood that. But for the fun of it I put it through Google Translate, and the result is worth showing: Truth injures no one, nay more, all, as much as you are able to: strengthen the faint! Of course, if you drop the !, it changes to: Truth injures no one, nay more, all, as much as you can, help the How I love syntax-independent translation! 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

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