13 Sep
2014
13 Sep
'14
12:28 a.m.
On 12 Sep 2014, at 02:54, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
Dude! Trying to answer questions about the origins of
BC by looking at
systems this late is like trying to learn Latin by studying Italian! :-)
[I'm not a latin scholar, so this is second-hand information.]
Curiously, I understand that studying Italian (or romance languages in general) turns out
to be a fairly good way of learning about the Latin, where by "Latin" they mean
the language people actually *spoke*, as opposed to the deformed version of it that some
tiny minority of people wrote.
In a thousand years, it will also turn out that the best way to learn about Unix will be
by reading the archives of some mailing list where people discussed their memories of the
early versions of it.
--tim