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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

6 years, 1 month

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Happy birthday, Per Brinch Hansen!

by Dave Horsfall

Computer scientist Per Brinch Hansen was born on this day in 1938; he was known for his work on "monitors" (now known as operating systems), concurrent programming, parallel processing, etc. -- Dave

6 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

6 years, 1 month

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In memoriam: Gene Amdahl

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

6 years, 1 month

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BWK's latest tome

by Nemo

PUP sent out an announcement of BWK's latest tome (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/14171.html) I am bemused that his accolades do not mention UNIX (and yes, target audience and all that). N.

6 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

6 years, 1 month

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DECUS fall 1982

by Arthur Krewat

Anyone interested in this? I did a quick Google, and cannot find any record of this. http://pdp10.kilonet.org/images/decus-1982-fall-coversheet.jpg I have a few microfiches containing the entire thing (I assume). It's a pain to scan with my current scanner but I'll do it if someone is genuinely interested. thanks! art k.

6 years, 2 months

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AT Commands still in use

by Nemo

There was some reminiscing a while back on AT commands. At the time, I should have noted that AT Commands still live and are still used in all cellphones (https://portal.3gpp.org/desktopmodules/Specifications/SpecificationDetails.…) N.

6 years, 2 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] RetroNet… Virtual is cheap.

by Grant Taylor

On 08/31/2018 10:24 AM, Cornelius Keck wrote: > But, I liked the way to have physical control over my setup, still do, > so there was, is no reason to switch at this time. Given different > circumstances, I might. I've actually seen / discussed some options to combine the static IP that you get with inexpensive VPSs with the only dynamic nature of some residential connections. I'd be happy to talk about details on COFF if people are interested. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

6 years, 3 months

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The IBM 305 RAMAC

by Dave Horsfall

The IBM 305 RAMAC was introduced to the public on this day in 1956. The first commercial computer with a hard drive that used magnetic disk storage, it weighed over a ton. -- Dave

6 years, 3 months

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