TUHS

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Re: [TUHS] origin of C header files

by Lars Brinkhoff

The book "Expert C Programming" claims Alan Snyder suggested the addition of a preprocessor.

7 years, 3 months

2018: eighteen months to the Unix 50th anniversary

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, Happy New Year. As it's now only eighteen months to the Unix 50th Anniversary, I thought I'd poll you all to get an update of what is being done to celebrate the anniversary, and/or what could we organise that has not yet been organised. Cheers, Warren

7 years, 3 months

Happy birthday, C.A.R. Hoare!

by Dave Horsfall

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare FRS FREng was born on this day in 1934; a computer pioneer (one of the greats) he gave us things like the quicksort algorithm and ALGOLW (a neat language). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] 2018: eighteen months to the Unix 50th anniversary

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: George Michaelson > Try this on the birth of the ICL 2900. Along the same lines, there's this: https://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=GenesisForProjects with its great closing line.. Noel

7 years, 3 months

Happy birthday, Donald Knuth!

by Dave Horsfall

Computer pioneer Donald Knuth was born on this day in 1938; amongst other things he gave us the TeX typesetting language, and he's still working on "The Art Of Computer Programming" fascicles (I only got as far as the first two volumes). I really must have a look at his new MMIX, too; I love learning new programming languages (I've used about 50 the last time I looked, and I'm happy to post a list for my coterie of disbelievers). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} 2018: eighteen months of the Unix 50th anniversary

by Doug McIlroy

> I will be happy to forward pertinent suggestions. Here's one. If Bell Labs holds some kind of symposium on the lines of the dmr memorial, how about a plenary session with TV participation from remote venues (think Berkeley/Silicon Valley and Wollongong/Sydney--a nine-hour span of time zones). Any thoughts about this or other possibilities? Doug

7 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} 2018: eighteen months of the Unix 50th anniversary

by Doug McIlroy

I don't think I'm violating anyone's confidentiality by revealing that Marcus Weldon, current president of the Labs, at the suggestion of Martin Carroll, expects the Labs to embark soon on plans to mark the occasion. I, and no doubt Martin, will keep you posted. Meanwhile I will be happy to forward pertinent suggestions. Doug

7 years, 3 months

RIP John Mauchly

by Dave Horsfall

We lost a co-inventor of ENIAC, John Mauchly, on this day (that's 8th January like my headers say) in 1980. ENIAC is claimed to be the "first general purpose electronic digital computer", but I guess it comes down to a matter of definition[*], as every culture likes to be the "first" (just ask the Penguins, for example); for "computer" you could go all the way back to the Mk-I Antikythera (Hellenic variation, from about the 100BC production run)... [*] Analogue/digital/hybrid Mechanical/electrical/electronic/hybrid General/special Wired/programmable/Turing Prototype/production Harvard/Neumann/quantum Etc... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

7 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Andy Kosela > it appears this is a fundamental Intel bug that exists in all x86_64 > CPUs. I'm highly amused by the irony. Intel throws bazillions of transistors at these hyper-complex CPUs in an attempt to make them as fast as possible - and (probably because of the complexity) missed a bug, the fix for which involves... slowing things way down! I wonder how many other bugs are lurking in these hyper-complex designs? Didn't anyone at Intel stop to think that complexity is bad, in and of itself? But I guess the market demands for faster and faster machines outweighed that - until it bit them in the posterior. The real question is 'how many more times will it have to happen before they get a clue'? There's an interesting parallel between this, and uSloth's struggle with security and bugs. For a long time, it seemed it was more important to the market to add features (i.e. complexity), and security be damned - until poor security really started to become an issue. So now they're trying to catch up - but seemingly still haven't got there, in terms of the fundamental architecture of the OS, as the never-ending stream of bug patches attests. The sad thing is that how to provide good security (not perfect, but much, much better than what we have) was worked out a long time ago, and Intel hired Roger Schell to add the necessary hardware underpinnings when they did the 386: http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/133439/1/oh405rrs.pdf Mutatis mutandis. Noel

7 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] OT: American Culture

by Norman Wilson

Random832 (a good year for randomness, that): Who says right is positive? ===== Good question. Norman Wilson Toronto ON Left-handed

7 years, 3 months

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