- COFF - www.tuhs.org

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, 7 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, 7 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 the 6502 and got Xinu up and running (with a shell, with my own ls, with redirection etc.) on my Apple ][+ clone: ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/pub/apple2/apple2xinu.tar.gz Yes, crazy I know. Cheers, Warren

5 years, 7 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, 7 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 is compatible with, and an improvement over, the NT4 version in dealing with tapes and will also deal with file images of tapes. I will probably remember a lot better soon, because I want to look for some files that I thought I had archived on disk but seem to have lost. If I have them, they're on DDS-2 or DDS-3. Again, IIRC, SCSI is not hard to deal with with XP. An old Dell, with Dell XP install CD, should be relatively easy to setup with various Adaptec cards. I don't know about other brands w.r.t. license keys. I plan to use a Dell Dimension 8300 that I used to look at some Dell UNIX DDS-2 cartridges. It dual boots Fedora & XP, but I still need to verify that XP doesn't need anything more for the HP DAT drive I have, and dig out cartridges that might have what I want. My recollection is the NT4 required tape drive specific drivers but that XP does not. Lastly, again IIRC, Microsoft removed and/or broke NTBACKUP when Vista came out. CHS *XP Home didn't have NTBACKUP, but the Pro binary works on Home. -- 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

5 years, 7 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, 7 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, 7 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, 7 months

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WWW proposal anniversary

by Dave Horsfall

In 1990 a certain Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir) published a proposal for the World Wide Web (often confused with the Internet by newbies). -- Dave

5 years, 7 months

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In Memoriam: Jay W. Forrester, happy birthday Gene Amdahl, and LSD

by Dave Horsfall

Weird day... Computer architect Gene Amdahl was born in on this day in 1922; he had a hand in the IBM 704 and the System/360, founded Amdahl Corporation (maker of /360 clones), and devised Amdahl's Law in relation to parallel processing. But we lost Jay W. Forrester in 2016; another computer pioneer, he invented core memory (remember that, with its destructive read cycle?). Oh, and LSD was first synthesised in 1938 by Dr. Hofmann of Sandoz Labs, Switzerland; it had nothing to do with Berkeley and BSD, man... -- Dave

5 years, 7 months

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