- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Dave Horsfall

Bit hard to classify this one; separate posts since COFF was created? Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (and daughter of Lord Byron), was born on this day in 1815; arguably the world's first computer programmer and a highly independent woman, she saw the potential in Charles Babbage's new-fangled invention. J.F.Ossanna was given unto us on this day in 1928; a prolific programmer, he not only had a hand in developing Unix but also gave us the ROFF series. Who'ld've thought that … [View More]

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Lars Brinkhoff >> PARC's MAXC appears in the mid-1970s. > Maybe this is a good time to ask if anyone knows whether any of those > diverse systems has software preserved? Specifically, the > implementation of the NCP and 1822 Host-to-IMP protocols? Both MAXC's were PDP-10 re-implementations, and ran TENEX. So the basic system is still around, not sure if they had any interesting local hacks (well, probably PUP support; MIT tried to put it in MIT-XX, … [View More]

5 years, 4 months

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ARPAnet now 4 nodes

by Dave Horsfall

The ARPAnet reached four nodes on this day in 1969 (anyone know their names?); at least one "history" site reckoned the third node was connected in 1977 (and I'm still waiting for a reply to my correction). Well, I can believe that perhaps there were only three left by then... Hmmm... According to my notes, the nodes were UCSB, UCLA, SRI, and Utah. -- Dave

5 years, 4 months

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Happy birthday, John Backus!

by Dave Horsfall

As every computer programmer should know, John Backus was emitted in 1924; he gave us the BNF syntax, but the sod also gave us that FORTRAN obscenity... Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any syntax; it is completely ad-hoc. -- Dave

5 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] Xinu

by Warren Toomey

Wesley wrote: > I would second that. His Xinu book was one of the two that helped > demystify operating systems for me. > Wesley Parish I've moved this over to COFF as it's only tangentially related to Unix. As a undergraduate I found Doug Comer's Xinu book in the library. At the time, I was learning C but I only had an Apple ][+ clone which didn't have a C compiler. Therefore (obviously), I hand-recoded Xinu in assembly, built a 555 timer circuit, connected it to the IRQ line on … [View More]

5 years, 4 months

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In memoriam: Maurice Wilkes

by Dave Horsfall

We lost Sir Maurice Wilkes FRS FREng on this day in 2010; he was known for his work on EDSAC, microprogramming, etc. -- Dave

5 years, 4 months

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further off topic w.r.t. Unix - NTBACKUP [was Re: Someone wants to use an exabyte

by Charles H Sauer

[clearly not Unix related, so posting to COFF] On 11/27/2019 1:31 PM, John Foust wrote: > The tougher task was trying to find contemporary tools that could process the data stream from an old NTBACKUP, especially a stream with corruption from missing chunks, as I wasn't in the mood to try to rebuild an NT machine with SCSI to let NTBACKUP deal with the drive directly, and I think it would probably fail harder on direct drive errors. If I recall correctly, the XP Pro* version of NTBACKUP … [View More]

5 years, 5 months

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In memoriam: Ada Lovelace

by Dave Horsfall

Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, was lost to us in 1852 from uterine cancer. Regarded as the first computer programmer and a mathematical prodigy (when such things were unseemly for a mere woman), she was the daughter of Lord Byron, and a friend of Charles Babbage. -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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EDSAC replica switched on

by Dave Horsfall

A replica of EDSAC, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, was switched on at Bletchley Park on this day in 2014; EDSAC was the first practical general purpose stored program electronic computer (and how's that for hair-splitting?). -- Dave

5 years, 5 months

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RIP Brian Kantor WB6CYT

by Dave Horsfall

I heard we lost Brian Kantor WB6CYT recently. Those in the Amateur radio community (esp. packet radio) will have heard of him of course, but apparently he also had a hand in SMTP and NNTP (remember them?) both used heavily many years ago, along with IPIP. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/11/24/0051236/brian-kantor-internet-and-a… -- Dave VK2KFU

5 years, 5 months

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