19 Oct
2010
19 Oct
'10
1:29 p.m.
On 19 October 2010 01:22, Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com> wrote:
From: Patrick Finnegan
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 4:42 PM
On Monday, October 18, 2010, Rich Alderson wrote:
Well, that little bit of information made my day. Thanks for that!
I think there is currently-much-underappreciated value in preserving
knowledge of old computers because of the things they did that modern
ones do not.
I know full-time senior IT professionals who have never seen an OS
older than Windows XP and most IT professionals have never seen or
used anything but Windows.
The view of the modern computer expert could be approximated by something like:
OSs are always written in C and compiled. Interpreters are only used
for scripting.
Computers work by loading compiled binaries files from a hierarchical
filesystem on disk into separately-managed RAM, where it's executed
according to the user's privilege level.
All computers are at least 32-bit and the only important architectures
ever were 386 and ARM. PowerPC is weird and marginal. Macs have always
been x86, the PC started with Windows XP. A few very old-timers
remember Windows 2000.
Memory always came in DIMMs.
All computers multitask, have GUIs and mice. Multiuser is normal.
Unix is weird and used by old men in big old companies.
Temporary storage is on USB Flash sticks. For booting, you use a CD.
Networking *means* TCP/IP over Ethernet.
VMs were invented by VMware about 6-7y ago.
--
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> Doesn't matter that it's crap if it
contains an interesting verb form
> not seen before, or mentions an historical fact only known previously
> from a single source.
Like the Roman or ancient Greek version of
misspelled words, improper
grammar, "hillbilly english", street slang, etc?
Very good examples, all of them.
Poetry is also a good source for archaisms in a language, so that we learn
how things were said at a less well attested stage. ?"Bad" poetry can be
just as good as "good" poetry for this.
One of my favourites is the evidence provided by spellings of Latin names
in Greek. ?In the first century BCE, the Roman name _Valerius_ is spelt in
Greek as _Oualerios_; if you know that "ou" spelt a long u in Greek, you
understand one of the reasons that we believe that Latin "v" was pronounced
like modern English "w". ?We know from the Romance languages that that
changed, but when? ?Greek spelling of the same name as _Balerios_ in the
first century CE gives us a very narrow time frame, two to three
generations, for the change.
LOLcats? ?Not so much. :-)