test-drb April 2016

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

203 participants
299 discussions

by blstuart＠bellsouth.net

On Thu, 4/28/16, Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote: > How about morse by a key made in 1898 . Then cw to ascii serial > converter and? normal program input after that. I've often thought of doing that! Though my key dates from more like the '40s or '50s. I see a weekend Raspberry Pi hack in my future... BLS

8 years, 7 months

strangest systems I've sent email from

by blstuart＠bellsouth.net

On Thu, 4/28/16, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: > Oh, yes, indeed! I have a Plan 9 VM, and I intend to try it on my Pi. > But it's had relatively little impact on mainstream Unix. I would agree, given the qualification "relatively." There are several things that have made their way from the late research UNIX editions and Plan 9 to the mainstream UNIX world. The unfortunate part is that they're little bits and pieces and as a result miss the major advantages by not bringing in the big picture. For example, the proc file system that most UNIXs have today was originally in either 9th or 10th edition and is a central part of the design of Plan 9. The _clone() system call that now underlies good old fork() in Linux is basically the Plan 9 rfork() call. Several UNIXs are starting to graft in per-process name spaces. There are also a number of research systems that are bringing in a lot of Plan 9 influence. The only one whose name comes to mind at the moment, though, is Akaros. BLS

8 years, 7 months

Calling all typographers

by blstuart＠bellsouth.net

On Thu, 4/28/16, Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote: > On 28/04/2016 16:32, Jon Elson wrote: >> Have you tried MetaFont?? I've never actually created a font with it, >> just used it automatically within the TeX environment.? But, there is >> a human-readable language that defines the characters. > > I haven't where would I find it? It should be part of pretty much any TeX installation. I don't know if anyone has packaged it up independently of TeX though. If you don't already have TeX installed, I'll warn you that the mainstream TeX distributions are pretty huge. There's a build-from-source distribution called kerTeX that I use. It's much closer to Knuth's original packaging and I find to be quite a bit more managable. If all you need is METAFONT, then that might be a nice way to go. BLS

8 years, 7 months

strangest systems I've sent email from

by blstuart＠bellsouth.net

On Wed, 4/27/16, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: > ... with a few weirdos saying that 6809 was better than > ... and a few weirdos maintained that Forth was better. > ... while the weirdoes use FreeBSD. I've never been more proud to be classified as a weirdo :) > The efforts to fix and improve Unix -- Plan 9, Inferno -- forgotten. Plan 9 and Inferno are still around. There are quite a few of us who still use them on a regular basis. In fact, the Plan 9 updates for the new Pi 3 should be out very soon, and I have a student currently working on a port of Plan 9 to the Allwinner A20 found in the Banana Pi and several of the low-end tablets. > That makes me despair. I feel much the same way, but it leads me to a little different place. While I'll probably never be there entirely, I am now at a point where I am giving serious thought to only running software I write myself. For example, the file system I run on my home file server (a Plan 9 box) is something I wrote myself. The version of Scheme I use on Inferno is one I wrote, etc. The truth is if you're willing to be one of the weirdos, there are still some pretty interesting places to be in the computing world. There are still interesting languages both old and new to learn. (I had a blast last summer working with MCPL, an experimental offshoot of BCPL, and the ENIAC simulator I'm developing is written in Go.) I find life to be much more enjoyable and my blood pressure to be much lower as long as I steer away >from anything that's mainstream or popular. BLS

8 years, 7 months

It has been quiet.

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dwight Kelvey > Has the list gone down or just dropped me again? Consulting the list archive via the Web: http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/ is a good way to see if things are moving. Noel

8 years, 7 months

Digital (Was RE: Mac "Workgroup Server" (or "network server") hardware & AIX)

by dave.g4ugm＠gmail.com

> > > > Don?t fret, once OpenVMS v9.0 is released, on x86-64, there won?t be any doubt > as to who won. :-) > Sadly, no one won. I doubt any one (well perhaps not anyone) would consider OpenVMS for a new deployment. Upgrading existing environments, yes, but a new green field site. It would have to have very good reasons. (I know you will all come out with some, but perhaps one for every 10,000 Linux and/or Windows Server deployments.) Digital is now a fond memory for most. Both VAX and Alpha are no longer manufactured. I actually wonder if an FPGA VAX chip could be made that would run faster than existing real VAXEN. That could perhaps form the basis of a nice VaxStation... ... on browsing I found this... http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/journal/v7/vax_6000_emulator.pdf Dave

8 years, 7 months

Data General Nova Star Trek

by shermanfoy＠att.net

under the heading of d?j? vu, if this unit is a Rockwell Collins mil hand paper tape puller, my old roommate ran the qualification tests on the development of that system. That happened here in Santa Ana @ their Harbor & Warner facility. They drove around the parking lot in the bed of pickup trucks pulling tape and loading systems w/ potholes & speedbumps in the way.

8 years, 7 months

It has been quiet.

by dkelvey＠hotmail.com

Has the list gone down or just dropped me again?

8 years, 7 months

REMEX paper tape interfaces

by useddec＠gmail.com

A few list members wanted me to hold on to some boards until they were ready for them. While looking for then, among hundreds of other non DEC boards, I came across the following REMEX boards. As far as I can tell they are for 8s. Please contact me off list if you are interested. REMEX 109381, one is a reader only,should be an easy upgrade reader/punch 109883 114143 / 114141 Thanks, Paul

8 years, 7 months

strangest systems I've sent email from

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > while Unix is reasonably secure, application writers have managed to > create massive numbers of security holes that have nothing to do with > defects of the OS, and aren't cured by a better OS. On a secure system (i.e. OS plus underlying hardware), _nothing_ an application does (whether merely buggy, or guidely malevolent) can i) write data it's not supposed to have write access to, ii) read such data, iii) interfere with any another application, etc, etc. Google '"Roger Schell" oral history', and read that, and the other documents he mentions there. (By itself, it's a very entertaining and educational read, even if you ignore the others. It contains an interesting discssion on his contributions to the security mechanisms of the x86 - which I expect Intel will someday ditch, because nobody is using them - just like they apparently ditched segmentation in the latest x86 chips because nobody is using it. Sigh.) Yes, a buggy application won't work right, and may crash, but there's no way to prevent that (although better languages, and programming style, can help a lot). Noel

8 years, 7 months

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test-drb April 2016