- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Dave Horsfall

We lost computer architect Gene Amdahl on this day in 2015; responsible for "Amdahl's Law" (referring to parallel computing), he had a hand in the IBM-704, the System/360, and founded Amdahl Corporation (a clone of the 360/370 series). -- Dave

5 years, 1 month

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In memorium: Douglas Rain

by Dave Horsfall

We lost him on this day in 2018; he was the voice of the rogue computer HAL on "2001" (hence the tenuous computer connection). -- Dave, who can't do that

5 years, 1 month

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Happy Birthday, Donald Michie and Robert Fano!

by Dave Horsfall

Donald Michie, a computer scientist, was born in 1923; he was famous for his work in AI, and also worked at Bletchley Park on the "Tunny" cipher. And Robert Fano, computer scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, was born on this day in 1917. He worked with Claude Shannon on Information Theory, was involved in the development of time-sharing computers, and was Founding Director of Project Mac, which became MIT's AI Lab. -- Dave

5 years, 1 month

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Manipulating time_t values (was: Unix half-billion years old 1985)

by Greg 'groggy' Lehey

[Moved to COFF] On Monday, 4 November 2019 at 16:59:22 -0500, John P. Linderman wrote: > I wrote a near-trivial "timestamp" command to make it easier to do time > arithmetic > > TZ=udt timestamp > 119 11 04 21 50 06 18204 1572904206 Mon Nov 4 21:50:06 2019 > TZ=udt timestamp 0 > 70 01 01 00 00 00 0 0 Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 > ... FreeBSD has this functionality in date(1): TZ=UTC date -r 500000000 Tue 5 Nov 1985 00:53:20 UTC TZ=UTC date -r 1500000000 Fri 14 Jul 2017 02:40:00 UTC 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

5 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Happy birthday Morris worm

by Michael Kjörling

On 4 Nov 2019 15:27 -0500, from crossd(a)gmail.com (Dan Cross): > On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 1:58 PM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)bitblocks.com> wrote: >> I am surprised no one mentioned *The Shockwave Rider *by John Brunner, >> published in 1975. Excerpt: > > In the 1983 movie "Wargames", at the very end as the staff at NORAD > desperately try and disable the rogue artificial intelligence hell-bent on > starting World War III, at one point they make a suggestion to send a > "tapeworm" into the system", but it's judged too risky. In the 1984 movie _2010_, it seems using a tapeworm was more of a standard, if unusual, procedure for solving a very different problem. Copying from <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact#Dialogue> > Dr. Chandra: I've erased all of HAL's memory from the moment the > trouble started. > > Dr. Vasili Orlov: The 9000 series uses holographic memories, so > chronological erasures would not work. > > Dr. Chandra: I made a tapeworm. > > Dr. Walter Curnow: You made a what? > > Dr. Chandra: It's a program that's fed into a system that will hunt > down and destroy any desired memories. > > Dr. Floyd: Wait... do you know why HAL did what he did? > > Dr. Chandra: Yes. It wasn't his fault. I also suggest to migrate this part of the discussion to COFF as it has very little to do with UNIX history per se. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

5 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by Rudi Blom

>From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> >To: Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> >Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers <coff(a)tuhs.org>, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>, >The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> >Bcc: >Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2019 14:55:19 -0700 >Subject: Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Happy birthday, Morris Worm! >+1. Well said Dan. > >We all have made and will make mistakes in the future. It was an error and we all learned >from it. It’s not helpful to continue to hark back on it. Of course after having had my monthly Windows update session I really wonder if we learned from it. Cheers, uncle rubl

5 years, 1 month

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Happy birthday, Morris Worm!

by Dave Horsfall

The infamous Morris Worm was released in 1988; making use of known vulnerabilities in Sendmail/finger/RSH (and weak passwords), it took out a metric shitload of SUN-3s and 4BSD Vaxen (the author claimed that it was accidental, but the idiot hadn't tested it on an isolated network first). A temporary "condom" was discovered by Rich Kulawiec with "mkdir /tmp/sh". Another fix was to move the C compiler elsewhere. -- Dave

5 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] UNIX Backslash History

by Dave Horsfall

On Mon, 28 Oct 2019, Steve Nickolas wrote: > 86-DOS actually did use ":" as a prompt character. This was changed for > IBM's release, for some clone releases, and for MS-DOS 2.0. The best I've ever seen was RT-11's "." - talk about minimalist... Actually this thread probably belongs on COFF by now. -- Dave

5 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] Comparative promptology

by Arthur Krewat

Sorry, sent a picture along with this, but it got rejected because it was too big ;) > On 10/28/2019 3:10 PM, Lars Brinkhoff wrote: >> I was bound to happen. List all the prompts! >> "*" seems popular on PDP-10s. > > Que? The only PDP-10 prompt that matters is "." > > The other less-desired (by me) is @ > > art k.

5 years, 1 month

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Space Travel, was New: The Earliest UNIX Code

by Peter Jeremy

[Redirecting to COFF] On 2019-Oct-20 00:02:56 +0530, Abhinav Rajagopalan <abhinavrajagopalan(a)gmail.com> wrote: >Forgive me for both hijacking this thread, and to address my amateurish >gnawing concern, but how was it be possible to write differential/integral >equations at an assembly/machine level at the time, especially in machines >such as the PDP-7 and such which had IIRC just 16 instructions and operated >on the basis of mere words, especially the floating point math being done. My 1st edition Wilkes, Wheeler, Gill[1] documents that, by 1951, EDSAC[2] had a floating-point library that supported addition, subtraction and multiplication (no division) of numbers with 23-27 bits of precision and a range of 1e-63 to 1e63. EDSAC was much less powerful than a PDP-7. Writing a floating-point library is not that difficult, though getting the rounding correct for all the edge cases is tricky. Actually using floating-point and avoiding the pitfalls can be harder - see (eg) https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html (though https://floating-point-gui.de/ may be more approachable). [1] https://archive.org/details/programsforelect00wilk [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC -- Peter Jeremy

5 years, 2 months

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