The machines had a major influence on microprocessor designs and was probably the most widely sold minicomputer of its time.
Numeric sorts are the next step after “hello world” or “HELLO WORLD” on the Teletype as the drum only had uppercase letters.
]]>I think the “8” in the name of the computer stood for the 8KB memory, and the computer was donated to the school because even one of the more upper-crust New England prep schools couldn’t afford the price of the machine. I think today you have 8KB memory cards in your car key chips.
]]>I loved the step to the minis, the DECs and Data Generals, and Unix was a treat compared to working on an IBM 360.
Working back then enables us to understand what’s going on and what the error messages mean.
Writing source code on WordStar non-document mode was the greatest advance since sliced bread.
]]>Bryan, these kids, not having begun their careers in the days of punch cards and paper tape, have no concept… well, some of them do… what an advance vi and emacs were over everything that preceded them. Have you noticed that Firefox 2.0 spell check does not balk at “vi” or “emacs”? There must be a reason for that. It’s been probably 20 years since I’ve had occasion to edit a text file on a Unix/Linux/whatever system, and I doubt I could come up with the proper vi commands now. But understanding simple software is a minimal basis for understanding today’s bloatware. I don’t miss the old days, but I appreciate the general skills I gained from having lived through them.
(Back in the day, I rebuilt kernels to include drivers I needed. Corn jokes weren’t funny when I was in the middle of all that. I suppose page jokes shouldn’t be funny either, but no one observing the Foley scandal seems able to resist.)
]]>Come on, HyperText Mark-up Language is not nearly as cryptic as FORmula TRANslation. It’s a piece of cake, with a frosting rose on every piece.
Try it in vi or edmacs, if you want a thrill.
Kids today just push a button. No wonder they’re overweight. No search through the pizza boxes for the boot tape.
]]>Seriously, folks, after this last weekend of working through the fixes my brother told me about on my Blogger template, it’s like going back to high school and learning FORTRAN all over again. Except that there’s no paper tape and teletype chads all over my office floor.
]]>At least it wasn’t a corn joke.
]]>Any machine with a lot of services running on it takes a long time to reboot. My little laptop, with all the developer stuff I have running on it, not to mention Symantec counting its marbles, takes five… long… minutes… to boot.
Here’s hoping you didn’t lose anything. Like you, I keep local backups, not wishing to depend on someone else’s backup.
]]>It can take longer if the cause was a hardware failure.
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