15 May
2018
15 May
'18
10:49 p.m.
On Mon, 14 May 2018 19:22:58 -0700 Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote:
Jon Steinhart writes:
Bakul Shah writes:
:-)
My point was when Murphy's Law strikes, you can't rely having
even "ed". And it did strike us at a bad time -- 24 hours
before our flight to Las Vegas (for Comdex) where we wanted to
show off our *only* working prototype computer.
As for entering stuff from the front panel switches, my first
boss in Silicon Valley had told me that as a postdoc he had
entered an experimental *compiler* through the front panel
switches on a Minsk-2! I never got around to asking him for
the details though.
[Minsk-2 was a discrete transistor Russian computer, with 4K
of 37 bit words. I/O via paper tape.]
On Tue, 15 May 2018 11:21:22 +1000 Dave Horsfall
<dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
Dave Horsfall writes:
If we're gonna get into "when I was young" stories we need to get
back to repairing filesystems from the front panel switches. On Sat, 12 May 2018, Noel Chiappa wrote:
Your boss must've been an optimist.
I once had to rescue a system where the root dir block was
lost. No ed. Luckily our bootrom had commands for peek/poke
& disk block IO. The v7 filesystem layout was simple enough
and I remembered enough of it that I was able to patch it
enough to bring it up and run fsck. I'm pretty sure 'ed' was the only
editor available at that point.
I boss I used to work for insisted that we all learn "ed", because one day
it might be the only editor available to you; well, one day he was right,
when /usr on a client's box got creamed after a head crash...