- COFF - www.tuhs.org

by Jacob Ritorto

5 years, 6 months

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by Clem Cole

At the risk of this drifting, it probably should move over to the COFF mailing list, which I have CC'ed. I'll do this one last one here so people not yet on COFF that want to follow up can see it. On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 2:27 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote: > It was bizarre and ugly. The only thing that made it anywhere > near usable were the Software Tools. > Amen... (more in a minute) > > There's a reason Prime died pretty quickly once Unix started to > spread. The architecture also was strange; the characters used > mark parity (8th bit always on). > Yeah, it was an interesting box. Fast and cost-effective for its time and an excellent Fortran system which why they did as well as they did. > > My 2 cents. > > Arnold > You probably know this but you folks had a huge influence on the Pr1mates. So much so when Bill P, Paul L, and Michael S. left Pr1me to create Apollo, the used your version of the SWT as their first command system for Aegis (*a.k.a.* DOMAIN OS). They did not quite get it that they needed a real UNIX, so they roped tjt and myself from Masscomp went we all formed Belmont (*a.k.a.* Stellar in a later renaming). But they did recognize it was useful and people wanted to use that style of interface, not something dreamed up specific to that machine. I remember trying to explain to Bill the difference - he's a vision guy, but primarily a hardware type, although one of the most amazing people I have ever known. IMO: Leach never really understood the Unix ideas of being simple (which is one of the reasons why Windows has that forsaken registry sin from Aegis, he brought it with him from Apollo to MSFT). I used to argue with him about it in the 1980s (he hated/thought ASCII text files were terrible and he should control everything in some framework or privileged API).

5 years, 6 months

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Stallman resigns under pressure from CSAIL and FSF.

by Dan Cross

Richard Stallman, known colloquially as 'RMS', has resigned from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Free Software Foundation, after making comments defending Jeffrey Epstein, the late sexual predator. Those comments sparked wide-spread outrage across the MIT community and beyond. https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#16_September_2019_(Resignat… https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-m-stallman-resigns - Dan C.

5 years, 7 months

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Re: [COFF] Stallman resigns under pressure from CSAIL and FSF.

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > If it really was just about his views, his views have been consistent > for a long time and MIT didn't care. The outrage over Epstein is so un-balanced I have a strong desire to vomit. Not that I have any feeling at all that Epstein didn't deserve what he got. My disgust is that Roman Polanksi, who did exactly the same thing to a 13-year old, was defended and lionized by a long list of entertainment world figures after his arrest in Switzerland - many of whom are now falling all over themselves to condemn Epstein. If and when the mob howling over Epstein takes out after Polanki in the exact same manner, then I'll take them seriously. Until then, they're a bunch of virtue-signalling cretins. Noel

5 years, 7 months

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Eternal September

by Dave Horsfall

'Twas back in 1993 when AOL joined USENET (I don't have an exact date) and the joint was never the same since... Me too! These days, of course, it's been taken over by the spammer scum. -- Dave

5 years, 7 months

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Happy birthday, John Mauchly!

by Dave Horsfall

We gained computer pioneer John Mauchly on this day in 1907; he was best known as the co-inventor of ENIAC, one of the world's first computers. -- Dave

5 years, 7 months

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Minsky and Epstein

by John P. Linderman

Two names I never expected to appear in one article. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/business/media/mit-jeffrey-epstein.html?…> Very sad, whether true or not. I knew Minsky in the way students know their professors. He was on my thesis committee. I liked and admired him.

5 years, 7 months

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Happy birthday, Marvin Minsky!

by Dave Horsfall

We gained Marvin Minsky on this day in 1927; he was an AI researcher, computer scientist, invented neural networks etc, and is now thought to be cryogenically preserved. -- Dave

5 years, 8 months

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Happy birthday, WWW!

by Dave Horsfall

In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee outlined plans for something he called the "world wide web". -- Dave

5 years, 8 months

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Harvard Mk I

by Dave Horsfall

Dedicated on this day in 1944, it was conceived by Dr. Howard Aiken; the Wikipedia entry for it has a fascinating history, and it's a wonder that it worked at all! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I -- Dave

5 years, 8 months

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