Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
> We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other
> things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really,
> because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.
I think of FORTRAN as having established the very idea of high-level programming languages. For example, John McCarthy’s first idea for what became LISP was to extend FORTRAN with function subroutines written in assembly language for list-manipulation. (He had to give up on this idea when he realized a conditional expression operator wouldn’t work correctly since both the then-expression and the else-expression would be evaluated before the condition was tested.) The original FORTRAN compiler pioneered code optimization, generating code good enough for the users at the physics labs and aerospace companies. For more on this compiler, see:
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/
Disclosure: I worked with John in the 1970s (on functional programming) — see:
http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2007/04/01/60/ .
Paul McJones
The first Internet domain, symbolics.com, was registered in 1985 at 0500Z
("Zulu" time, i.e. UTC).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
> So what are its origins? Where did it first appear?
It was a direct copy from CTSS, which already had it
n 1965 when we BTL folk began to use it.
The greatest MOTD story of all time happened at CTSS.
To set the stage, the CTSS editor made a temp file,
always of the same name, in one's home directory.
The MOTD was posted by the administrator account.
The password file was plain text, maintained by
editing it.
And multiple people had access to the administrator
account.
It happened one day that one administrator was
working on the password file at the same time
another was posting MOTD. The result: the password
file (probably the most secret file on the system)
got posted as the MOTD (the most public).
Upon seeing the password file type out before him,
an alert user shut the machine down by writing
and running one line of assembly code:
HERE TRA *HERE
(The star is for indirect addressing, and indirection
was transitive.)
Doug
One of the things that's always fascinated me about Unix is the community
aspect; in particular, I imagine that in the early days when machines were
multiplexed among many simultaneous users, I wonder whether there was a
greater sense of knowing what others were up to, working on, or generally
doing.
I think of the /etc/motd file as being a part of this. It is, in some very
real sense, a way to announce things to the entire user community.
So what are its origins? Where did it first appear? I haven't dug into
this, but I imagine it was at Berkeley. What was it used for early on at
individual sites?
- Dan C.
> From: Dave Horsfall
> he would've been the registraNT, no?
Symbolics was the registrant.
I may have spoken too soon, Postel/ISI might not have been the registrar when
".com" was set up, so maybe it was someone at SRI/NIC. (The memory is dim.) I
don't remember how "MIT.EDU" got registered - I'm not sure if I did it. It
was definitely Jon handing out addresses, not SRI - I do recall us going to
Jon to get 128.30 & 31.
Noel
> From: Michael Kjörling
> the DNS RFCs (initially 1034, 1035) were only published in 1987...
Ah, those were later versions; the originals were:
0882 Domain names: Concepts and facilities. P.V. Mockapetris. November
1983.
0883 Domain names: Implementation specification. P.V. Mockapetris.
November 1983.
Both were updated by RFC0973 before being replaced by 1034/1035.
You might also want to look at:
0881 Domain names plan and schedule. J. Postel. November 1983.
0897 Domain name system implementation schedule. J. Postel. February 1984.
0921 Domain name system implementation schedule - revised. J. Postel. October 1984.
Note that ".com" didn't exist in the early revs.
Noel
> From: Lars Brinkhoff
> Is this "Network Unix" available?
??? This was announced here not long ago:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SRI-NOSC
It's called 'NOSC' because that's where it came from, but it has the Illinois
NCP code in it.
Noel
