> From: Steffen Nurpmeso
> This "We owe it all to the Hippies"
Well, yes and no. Read "Hackers". There wasn't a tremendous overlap between
the set of 'nerds' (specifically, computer nerds) and 'hippies', especially in
the early days. Not that the two groups were ideologically opposed, or
incompatible, or anything like that. Just totally different.
Later on, of course, there were quite a few hackers who were also 'hippies',
to some greater or lesser degree - more from hackers taking on the hippie
vibe, than the other way around, I reckon. (I think that to be a true computer
nerd, you have to start down that road pretty early on, and with a pretty
severe commitment - so I don't think a _lot_ of hippied turned into hackers.
Although I guess the same thing, about starting early, is true of really
serious musicians.)
> "The real legacy of the 60s generation is the Computer Revolution"
Well, there is something to that (and I think others have made this
observation). The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that
generation - including the computer nerds/hackers. Now, the hackers may have
had a larger, impact, long-term, than the hippies did - but in some sense a
lot of hippie ideals are reflected in the stuff a lot of hackers built:
today's computer revolution can be seen as hippie idealism filtered through
computer nerds...
But remember things like this, from the dust-jacket of the biography of
Prof. Licklider:
"More than a decade will pass before personal computers emerge from the
garages of Silicon Valley, and a full thirty years before the Internet
explosion of the 1990s. The word computer still has an ominous tone,
conjuring up the image of a huge, intimidating device hidden away in an
over-lit, air-conditioned basement, relentlessly processing punch cards for
some large institution: _them_. Yet, sitting in a nondescript office in
McNamara's Pentagon, a quiet ... civilian is already planning the revolution
that will change forever the way computers are perceived. Somehow, the
occupant of that office ... has seen a future in which computers will empower
individuals, instead of forcing them into rigid conformity. He is almost
alone in his conviction that computers can become not just super-fast
calculating machines, but joyful machines: tools that will serve as new media
of expression, inspirations to creativity, and gateways to a vast world of
online information.
Now, technically Lick wasn't a hippie (he was, after all, 40 years old in
1965), and he sure didn't have a lot of hippie-like attributes - but he was,
in some ways, an ideological close relative of some hippies.
Noel
Some pointers. Warren, worth grabbing these IMHO.
I will ask him if he's willing to donate whatever troff
he has.
Arnold
> Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2017 16:47:42 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Brian Kernighan <bwk(a)CS.Princeton.EDU>
> To: arnold(a)skeeve.com
> Subject: Re: CSTRs?
>
> There are a few things here:
> http://www.netlib.org/cgi-bin/search.pl
> but it seems to be mostly the numerical analysis ones.
>
> But Google reveals this one:
> http://www.theobi.com/Bell.Labs/cstr/
> which seems to be all postscript.
>
> I have some odds and ends, like the troff manual and tutorial,
> but otherwise only PDF.
>
> Sorry -- not much help.
>
> Brian
>
> On Wed, 22 Mar 2017, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
>
> > Hi.
> >
> > Do you by chance happen to have copies of the CSTRs that used to be
> > available at the Bell Labs web site?
> >
> > And/or troff source for any? The TUHS people would like to archive
> > at least the Unix-related ones...
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Arnold
I was thinking about Star Wars this morning and various parodies of it (like
Ernie Foss's Hardware Wars) and I rememberd the old DEC WARS. Alas when I
tried to post it, it was too big for the listserv. So here's a link for
your nostalgic purposes. I had to find one that was still in its
fixed-pitch glory complete with the ASCII-art title.
http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/decwars.txt
Early on when I was consulting for what would become my company, I got stuck
on a weekend to fix something with the coffee pot and a box of Entenmann's
chocolate donuts. These have a coating that's kind of like wax you have to
soften up in the hot coffee to be digestable. As a result of that weekend
any crunch time was referred to as waxy chocolate donut time. Another
crunch weekend I was working on the firmware for an esoteric digital data
tape player. I would test it. Find the fault. Go to one machine
running Xenix on a 286 which had the editor and the assembler. I'd then
floppy it over to a DOS machine that had the EPROM burner. I then would
take the eprom and stick it into the controller. The president of the
company had two jobs. He was to follow behind me and refill my coffee cup
and scarf up the used EPROMS and dump them into the eraser so we wouldn't
run out of ones to program.
For years, we were a six person company of which only me and the president
drank coffee. When the one pot we made in the morning was gone, that was
it for coffee. As the company got larger and there were more coffee
drinkers, people would just make a new pot. This coincided with me having
my office moved adjacent to the coffee maker. Every time I had a long
compile or something I'd look down and see my cup was empty and I'd pop
outside and get a new cup. Not surprisingly, I started to get heart
palpitations. The doctor asks how much coffee I drank, and I tell her
something like thirty cups a day. She tells me I may want to cut back on
that.
My best job was working for a friend whose company operates out of his home.
He'd make espresso for me and we'd drink that (and eat his wife's excellent
leftover food) until about six and then being another wine judge, we'd
switch to wine.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Bradshaw [mailto:tfb@tfeb.org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 8:51 AM
To: Ron Natalie
Cc: Dave Horsfall; The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?
I don't know about other people, but I think the whole dope thing is why
computer people tend *not* to be hippies in the 'dope smoking' sense. I
need to be *really awake* to write reasonably good code (if ever I do write
reasonably good code) in the same way I need to be really awake to do maths
or physics. So I live on a diet of coffee and sugar and walk around
twitching as a result (this is an exaggeration, but you get the idea). I
have the strength of will to not use stronger stimulants (coffee is mostly
self-limiting, speed not so much).
I was searching today to find where the Unix pipeline spell checking
method "tr | sort | uniq | comm" was first published. I found it in a
document by Brian Kernighan titled "UNIX for Beginners".
"The pipe mechanism lets you fabricate quite complicated operations out
of spare parts already built. For example, the first draft of the spell
program was (roughly) [...]"
http://www.psue.uni-hannover.de/wise2014_2015/material/Unix-Beginners.pdf#p…
Then my problem became properly citing the document. Searching on
Google, Google Scholar, and IEEE Xplore didn't help me. In the end I
found the reference in a 1993 refer file of all Bell Labs Computer
Science Technical Reports I had saved from my student days.
%cstr 75
%report Comp. Sci. Tech. Rep. No. 75
%keyword CSTR OBS
%author B. W. Kernighan
%title UNIX for Beginners
%date February 1979
%journal UNIX Programmer's Manual
%volume 2
%other Section 3
%date January 1979
%type techreport obsolete
I couldn't find the refer file online, so I'll send a copy to Warren for
archiving.
However, I'm wondering whether we should/could do something to also
archive the actual pages of all the Bell Labs Computer Science Technical
Reports. I think some are the only authoritative primary source for
many Unix-related gems and a lack of an electronic archive means they
will slowly fade into non-existence. I remember we had many of those at
the library of Imperial College London. Any suggestions on what we can
do to archive this material?
Diomidis
On Wed, 15 Mar 2017, Warren Toomey wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 10:24:22AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> > Then, perhaps a better news reader. Any preferences :-)
>
> So far I've though of (and found)
[...]
After going through several readers, I ended up with "trn". Also, Alpine
has a passable reader.
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Brings back memories...
Back in early 1981 I worked for a shipping line in Cranford NJ in their IT department. The company had just ordered 4 new super-wide cargo ships that just fit the Panama Canal and the Chief Marine Architect came to the IT department to ask for assistance in programming a PDP-8 to write a load distribution check program so that the ship would not keel over, or break in the middle - when being loaded 12 stack high containers. Had to take into account stress and strain - mathematical algorithms. My boss called me in to talk to him and he asked " if I knew how to determine the area under a curve..." - I knew my engineering math - Simpson's rule and also FORTRAN IV and was immediately drafted. What was needed also was a graphical way of entering the data, and displaying the results optionally graphically on the screen (tty ?). My friend Wayne Rawls knew BASIC - he wrote the front end - passed me the input on a large floppy - my FORTRAN IV program ran and did the stress/strain analysis for the ship - and I passed the output back to him on the floppy that he then displayed on-screen.
A lot of grinding of the floppy drives for the FORTRAN compiler - no spinning hard disks as the PDP-8 would be installed on-board ship - and in those days of A/C computer rooms would be a non-starter.
It all worked well - Wayne took the PDP-8 on a ship to Norfolk to get it checked out and the company used it for many years !
Atindra.
-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
>Sent: Mar 21, 2017 5:34 PM
>To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
>Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, PDP-8!
>
>OT, but of interest to a few people here :-)
>
>The venerable PDP-8 was introduced in 1965 today (or tomorrow if you're on
>the wrong side of the date line). It was the first computer I ever
>used, back around 1970 (I think I'd just left school and was checking out
>the local University's computer department, with a view to majoring in
>Computer Science (which I did)).
>
>--
>Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Maybe there's a generation / technology gap here. But from history, it
doesn't seem like there was much free - though most did indeed to be open -
I suppose much like the VMS model. At least not until the 80s (or maybe
bash predates that trend).
The C language might've been free, but I wonder if there were any free
compilers until gcc (hell I remember pirating Borland). Even most copies of
*BSD were mainly sold on CD vs downloaded until 10 years or so ago (even
though it was technically free - not including BSDi)
On Mar 20, 2017 7:28 PM, "Doug McIlroy" <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that
> generation - including the computer nerds/hackers.
I'm not sure what hippie attributes you had in mind, but one
candidate would be "free and open". In software, though, free
and open was the style of the late 50s. By the hippie heyday
p
p
> The hippie mentality had a lot of influence on everyone in that
> generation - including the computer nerds/hackers.
I'm not sure what hippie attributes you had in mind, but one
candidate would be "free and open". In software, though, free
and open was the style of the late 50s. By the hippie heyday
p
p
