5 Apr
2008
5 Apr
'08
2:41 p.m.
I'm sure that the UHH is old news to folk hereabouts.
When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a
distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now,
it's available for free:
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html
(Yes, I know. Don't hold the URL against it.)
It's a good & enjoyable read. I'm nearly at the end of it now.
It's interesting to look back at this 1991 (-ish) book from the
perspective of 2008. How many of the criticisms levelled against Unix
were stuff that users of then-older OSs thought was deranged.
Today, the same sort of rivalry exists between Unix and Windows
people; the stuff before them is nearly forgotten now. I mean, I've
been in this business for some 20y (and another 5-10y before that as a
hobbyist) and I've never seen TOPS or MULTICS or ITS or anything like
them.
What I'm wondering is, how many of the criticisms levelled against
Unix (and thus, by association, Linux) in this book from 17y ago are
still current or valid today. I've been using Linux for 11-12y now,
but I still regard myself as something of a beginner, whereas I've
known Windows since it was 2 and can make it jump backwards through
flaming hoops.
A lot's changed. Hardware is much more homogeneous - a modern personal
computer is either an IBM-compatible x86 box or something much like
it; even later PowerPC Macs, Acorn-compatible RISC OS machines, Amiga
clones and stuff like that are very PC-like in many ways. They use the
same slots, buses, interfaces, RAM, disks and so on.
The old problems that plagued Unix 1980s & 1990s Unix - incompatible
keyboard layouts & terminal control codes, untrustworthy filesystems,
lousy performance, all sorts of things - have gone away now,
obliterated by advances in hardware and software design, increasing
consolidation and standardization of the computer industry, and the
simple progression of Moore's Law. Once, "Eight Megs And Constantly
Swapping" was pejorative; now, an app that uses only 8MB is positively
svelte.
If you don't already know it, give it a read.
I am not really a Linux expert - maybe a power user or competent
sysadmin, at best. I do have lots of comparative OS knowledge, but
most of it is of systems that came along long after Unix. I'd be
really interested to know the thoughts of modern Unix gurus on how
much of the criticism in the UHH is still valid today.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
5 Apr
5 Apr
3:04 p.m.
On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
I'm sure that the UHH is old news to folk
hereabouts.
When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a
distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now,
it's available for free:
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html
(Yes, I know. Don't hold the URL against it.)
It's a good & enjoyable read. I'm nearly at the end of it now.
It's interesting to look back at this 1991 (-ish) book from the
perspective of 2008. How many of the criticisms levelled against Unix
were stuff that users of then-older OSs thought was deranged.
Today, the same sort of rivalry exists between Unix and Windows
people; the stuff before them is nearly forgotten now. I mean, I've
been in this business for some 20y (and another 5-10y before that as a
hobbyist) and I've never seen TOPS or MULTICS or ITS or anything like
them.
What I'm wondering is, how many of the criticisms levelled against
Unix (and thus, by association, Linux) in this book from 17y ago are
still current or valid today. I've been using Linux for 11-12y now,
but I still regard myself as something of a beginner, whereas I've
known Windows since it was 2 and can make it jump backwards through
flaming hoops.
A lot's changed. Hardware is much more homogeneous - a modern personal
computer is either an IBM-compatible x86 box or something much like
it; even later PowerPC Macs, Acorn-compatible RISC OS machines, Amiga
clones and stuff like that are very PC-like in many ways. They use the
same slots, buses, interfaces, RAM, disks and so on.
The old problems that plagued Unix 1980s & 1990s Unix - incompatible
keyboard layouts & terminal control codes, untrustworthy filesystems,
lousy performance, all sorts of things - have gone away now,
obliterated by advances in hardware and software design, increasing
consolidation and standardization of the computer industry, and the
simple progression of Moore's Law. Once, "Eight Megs And Constantly
Swapping" was pejorative; now, an app that uses only 8MB is positively
svelte.
If you don't already know it, give it a read.
I am not really a Linux expert - maybe a power user or competent
sysadmin, at best. I do have lots of comparative OS knowledge, but
most of it is of systems that came along long after Unix. I'd be
really interested to know the thoughts of modern Unix gurus on how
much of the criticism in the UHH is still valid today.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
Some of them are still accurate. Others are a little outdated. Some,
and these are the ones that kinda annoy me, are the kind of complaints
that people come up with when they are unwilling to think outside of
their favored OS's techniques. I mean, the complaints about command
names? "rm" is not particularly intuitive, but good things require a
little learning. I admit that TOPS-XX and VMS did pretty good with the
ability to shorten command names, but "DELETE" is only one of several
possible commands a new user might try--"REMOVE", "JUNK", etc.
Complaints about how Unix is "silent" when there is no output--"grep"
returning nothing instead of saying "No matches" when there aren't any
matches--these are basically invalid. They're the kind of thing people
who don't use or understand pipes will say.
I don't feel like going through the document again and finding more things...
However, Unix is old. We should be looking elsewhere. Plan 9 is one of
the few non-Unix/non-Windows operating systems still in development
today; it breaks out of some of the old Unix ideas. I would much
rather see 10 new operating systems in active development than have
Unix/Linux/Windows take over the world.
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
6 Apr
6 Apr
10:36 a.m.
Some of them are still accurate. Others are a little
outdated. Some,
and these are the ones that kinda annoy me, are the kind of complaints
that people come up with when they are unwilling to think outside of
their favored OS's techniques. I mean, the complaints about command
names? "rm" is not particularly intuitive, but good things require a
little learning. I admit that TOPS-XX and VMS did pretty good with the
ability to shorten command names, but "DELETE" is only one of several
possible commands a new user might try--"REMOVE", "JUNK", etc.
I've yet to find any user interface that doesn't need learning. It took
me a long time to work out how to change directories under VMS -- coming
from a Unix/OS9 background, SET DEFAULT was hardly
expected.
And on the Mac, I first thoguht that if dragging a file to the trash
deleted it, then dragging a disk to the trash should reformat it.
There's also the danger of confusing 'easy to learn' with 'easy to
use'.
Some things are easy to learn becuase they're so limited in what you can
do there just isn't that much to learn. Personnally, I'd prefer a more
powerful system that will actually help me to get the job done, even if I
ahve to spend a fair amount of time learning to use it properly. Good
tools (no mattter what sort of tool) need practice to use properly.
-tony
7 Apr
7 Apr
11:04 a.m.
John Floren wrote:
Complaints about how Unix is "silent" when
there is no output--"grep"
returning nothing instead of saying "No matches" when there aren't any
matches--these are basically invalid. They're the kind of thing people
who don't use or understand pipes will say.
That's bull. There are ways to make grep output something like "No
matches" without breaking a pipeline that uses it. I suggest that
perhaps those who say "They're the kind of thing people who don't use or
understand pipes will say." are the ones who truly don't understand pipes.
Peace... Sridhar
11:15 a.m.
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
John Floren wrote:
No news is good news. Sure, you could make grep blather all over
stderr or something, but why? If you don't get any errors, the program
completed correctly. If you screwed up the syntax or specified a
nonexistent file, you get an error.
However, since GNU tools are so utterly goddamn broken, this may or
may not be the case on any given tool. Try Plan 9 some time and you'll
have a lovely experience... for example, see
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/cat for the proper way to
implement cat.
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Complaints about how Unix is "silent"
when there is no output--"grep"
returning nothing instead of saying "No matches" when there aren't any
matches--these are basically invalid. They're the kind of thing people
who don't use or understand pipes will say.
That's bull. There are ways to make grep output something like "No
matches" without breaking a pipeline that uses it. I suggest that perhaps
those who say "They're the kind of thing people who don't use or understand
pipes will say." are the ones who truly don't understand pipes.
Peace... Sridhar
11:33 a.m.
John Floren wrote:
I've played with Plan 9, and it's a definite improvement over UNIX,
especially in areas of consistency, but both seem to be more
programmer-oriented than user-oriented.
Peace... Sridhar
That's
bull. There are ways to make grep output something like "No
matches" without breaking a pipeline that uses it. I suggest that
perhaps those who say "They're the kind of thing people who don't
use or understand pipes will say." are the ones who truly don't
understand pipes.
No news is good news. Sure, you could make grep blather all over
stderr or something, but why? If you don't get any errors, the
program completed correctly. If you screwed up the syntax or
specified a nonexistent file, you get an error. However, since GNU
tools are so utterly goddamn broken, this may or may not be the case
on any given tool. Try Plan 9 some time and you'll have a lovely
experience... for example, see
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/cat for the proper way to
implement cat.
11:37 a.m.
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
John Floren wrote:
something, but why? If you don't get any errors, the
Well, programmers are the only ones that matter, right? ;)
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
That's bull. There are ways to make grep
output something like "No
matches" without breaking a pipeline that uses it. I suggest that
perhaps those who say "They're the kind of thing people who don't
use or understand pipes will say." are the ones who truly don't
understand pipes.
No news is good news. Sure, you could make grep blather all over stderr or program completed correctly. If you screwed up
the syntax or
specified a nonexistent file, you get an error. However, since GNU
tools are so utterly goddamn broken, this may or may not be the case
on any given tool. Try Plan 9 some time and you'll have a lovely
experience... for example, see
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/cat for
the proper way to
implement cat.
I've played with Plan 9, and it's a definite improvement over UNIX,
especially in areas of consistency, but both seem to be more
programmer-oriented than user-oriented.
Peace... Sridhar
15 Apr
15 Apr
9:07 a.m.
John Floren wrote:
No news is good news. Sure, you could make grep
blather all over
stderr or something, but why? If you don't get any errors, the program
completed correctly. If you screwed up the syntax or specified a
nonexistent file, you get an error.
However, since GNU tools are so utterly goddamn broken, this may or
may not be the case on any given tool. Try Plan 9 some time and you'll
have a lovely experience... for example, see
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/cat for the proper way to
implement cat.
I have been sick for the last few weeks, so I have been off this list for
a while. My view is unix on the 11 still is the best because the tools worked
as a system rather than being a copy of copy ... of the original.
I have PDP-8 clone and figuring how to get kermit from a Dos laptop
to the machine over the serial link is more important to me than 'the best version of
cat'.
Lets talk about non-broken tools so that we can run the old machines properly
like a terminal emulator that works like a real terminal?
Linux to my knowlage has none. My only gripe about the UNIX mind set is that
they did not have a small screen editor.
9:25 a.m.
On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:07 PM, woodelf wrote:
Lets talk about non-broken tools so that we can run
the old
machines properly
like a terminal emulator that works like a real terminal?
Linux to my knowlage has none.
Sheer madness. I use kermit in an xterm window all the
time...works great..
I always use a real terminal when one is available, though.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
9:58 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:53 PM, woodelf wrote:
DEC VT320 or VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and easy to
find.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
I always use
a real terminal when one is available, though.
What is a good real termial ( that you can afford )?
10:06 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 9:58 AM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:53 PM, woodelf wrote:
DEC VT320 or VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and easy to find.
-Dave
No love for the VT220? That's what I have, and although it's pretty
slow, I still like it... the VMS keyboard is an obstruction sometimes,
though.
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
I always use a real terminal when one is
available, though.
What is a good real termial ( that you can afford )?
16 Apr
16 Apr
5:58 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Apr 15, 2008, at 1:06 PM, John Floren wrote:
DEC VT320 or VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and easy
to find.
No love for the VT220? That's what I have, and although it's pretty
slow, I still like it... the VMS keyboard is an obstruction sometimes,
though.
Sure, I think VT220s are great terminals. I'd classify them more
as "collectible antiques", though, than "use it at my day job"
equipment like the '320 and '420. The VT220 also pulls a LOT more
power than the VT320, which is a consideration for me these days.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
I always use
a real terminal when one is available, though.
What is a good real termial ( that you can afford )?
10:18 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Apr 15, 2008, at 1:06 PM, woodelf wrote:
Just how far out into the wilderness ARE you? Surely someone must
be willing to ship to .ca land.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
DEC VT320 or
VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and easy
to find.
Except here!
2:46 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
Dave McGuire wrote:
Just how far out into the wilderness ARE you?
Surely someone must be
willing to ship to .ca land.
Well the odd thing is I am at Cold Lake, Alberta The Air Force base is only
a few miles away and guess what brand most the equiment was.
Had I been here in the 70's, buying real DEC equipment would have
been no problem other than the $$$$'s.
-Dave
10:32 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
Dave McGuire wrote:
On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:53 PM, woodelf wrote:
DEC VT320 or VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and easy to find.
Don't they have a nasty habit of blowing the flyback transformer, though? Or
is that just the VT220?
I had a VT220 for years as a console to my NCR Tower machine though; lovely
little terminal. Switched to jump scrolling, of course - smooth scrolling
makes me want to barf. What *were* DEC thinking? :-)
cheers
Jules
I
always use a real terminal when one is available, though.
What is a good real termial ( that you can afford )? 
10:45 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Dave McGuire wrote:
On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:53 PM, woodelf wrote:
I'll second that. I use a VT420 whenever I need to plug in a serial
terminal.
Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us
Old Technology http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/
What is a good real termial ( that you can afford )?
DEC VT320 or VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and easy to find. 
3:09 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
At 1:45 PM -0400 4/15/08, Mike Loewen wrote:
On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Dave McGuire wrote:
Agreed. I've used a huge array of terminals over the years from many
different manufactures, connected to may different types of
computers. Hands down the VT420 is my favorite. I was lucky enough
to be given a pile of them when a friend was having some troubles in
the late 90's. My only problem with VT420's is that I no longer have
enough desk space for as many as I'd like to be able to use.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:53 PM, woodelf wrote:
I'll second that. I use a VT420 whenever I need to plug in a
serial terminal.
What is a good real termial ( that you can afford )?
DEC VT320 or VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and easy to find.
3:16 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:53 PM, woodelf wrote:
DEC VT320 or VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and easy to
find.
And eat flyback trasnformers like they're going out of fashion.
FWIW, I've not managed to obtain any VT2xx or later DEC terminal with the
exception of the VT240. THey're not that common in .uk
-tony
I
always use a real terminal when one is available, though.
What is a good real termial ( that you can afford )?
8:45 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Apr 15, 2008, at 6:16 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
DEC VT320 or VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and easy to
find.
And eat flyback trasnformers like they're going out of fashion.
I've seen exactly three fail...I've had dozens upon dozens of
those terminals go through my hands. Mind you, I think that's an
excessive failure rate for "adult" (as opposed to "PC") computer
equipment, but still. I guess I've just had better luck.
I always use
a real terminal when one is available, though.
What is a good real termial ( that you can afford )? FWIW, I've not managed to obtain any VT2xx or
later DEC terminal
with the
exception of the VT240. THey're not that common in .uk
Really? That surprises me. They're all over the place here. A
fellow with whom I've sadly lost touch had a warehouse containing
well over a thousand VT320s maybe eight years ago. I think it was in
Virginia. I wonder what happened to those.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
16 Apr
16 Apr
1:36 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
G'Day,
On 16/04/2008, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
I am in the UK and seem to have aquired a few VT320's and a VT420
without any difficulty. The VT420 is in use. I think the VT320's may
have problems but I haven't had a chance to fully test them. If anyone
wants at VT320 in southern England (Cheltenham, Witney, Milton Keynes,
Bristol, Swindon, London) areas, I would be more than happy to gain
some space back.
Simon
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to
philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is
the utility of the final product."
Lectures on the Electrical Properties of Materials, L.Solymar, D.Walsh
On Apr 15, 2008, at 6:16 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
[VT series terminals]
FWIW, I've
not managed to obtain any VT2xx or later DEC terminal with the
exception of the VT240. THey're not that common in .uk
Really? That surprises me. They're all over the place here. A fellow
with whom I've sadly lost touch had a warehouse containing well over a
thousand VT320s maybe eight years ago. I think it was in Virginia. I
wonder what happened to those.
1:43 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
DEC VT320 or VT420. They are reliable, small,
cheap, and easy to
find.
And eat flyback trasnformers like they're going out of fashion. excessive failure rate for "adult" (as
opposed to "PC") computer
equipment, but still. I guess I've just had better luck.
You could find them 8 yeas ago, can you find them _now_?
-tony
FWIW, I've not managed to obtain any VT2xx or
later DEC terminal
with the
exception of the VT240. THey're not that common in .uk
Really? That surprises me. They're all over the place here. A
fellow with whom I've sadly lost touch had a warehouse containing
well over a thousand VT320s maybe eight years ago. I think it was in
Virginia. I wonder what happened to those.
2:05 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Apr 16, 2008, at 4:43 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
I've seen exactly three fail...I've had dozens upon dozens of
those terminals go through my hands. Mind you, I think that's an
When I was at Bristol, we had DEC terminal everywhere. Mostly VT220s,
which were extremely reliable, I think I had to fix _2_ in all my time
there. I had a real VT100 on my bench, and there were a few
VT3xx's. All
of the latter (perhaps 10 units) suffered from flyback problems.
Ugh. Bad production run, perhaps?
You could find them 8 yeas ago, can you find them _now_?
Well, 8 years ago, I happened to know someone who happened to have
a warehouse full of them. They're available *now* on eBay all day long.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
DEC VT320
or VT420. They are reliable, small, cheap, and
easy to
find.
And eat flyback trasnformers like they're going out of fashion. FWIW, I've not managed to obtain any VT2xx or
later DEC terminal
with the
exception of the VT240. THey're not that common in .uk
Really? That surprises me. They're all over the place here. A
fellow with whom I've sadly lost touch had a warehouse containing
well over a thousand VT320s maybe eight years ago. I think it was in
Virginia. I wonder what happened to those. 
5:50 a.m.
New subject: few old stuff to sell or take. microsolutions backpack hd, IBM s
Here's the stuff:
for IBM PC & XT card
One: comp serial/parallel p/n on white sticker:
B1090205304 uses 16450N serial IC. Condition unknown.
MIcrosolutions Backpack 3.5" beige, currently a sick WD 1.6GB in it
with parallel cable and driver disk, no power supply. Does work.
5 bucks for it.
Hitachi 5 head model VT-8A. Half of a early portable VHS video
recorder/player for camera. No power supply but you can supply 12VDC
of sufficient current to play tape or composite to RF output. It has
a compartment to take sealed lead acid battery brick (don't have
this). Have stereo audio output with composite output. Also useful
as RF converter because of composite input with stereo audio.
Working, I've fixed a loose connection long ago but haven't used it
much since. Gear drive tape mechanism, no belts to snap or slip.
Casing condition is average but intact and functional. Take it for
10.
Cheers, Wizard
2:36 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 09:43:20PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
When I was at Bristol, we had DEC terminal everywhere.
Mostly VT220s,
which were extremely reliable, I think I had to fix _2_ in all my time
there. I had a real VT100 on my bench, and there were a few VT3xx's. All
of the latter (perhaps 10 units) suffered from flyback problems.
When I worked with DEC equipment every day (1984-1994), we had a few
terminals die. The bulk of our stash was VT100-family terminals and
CiTOH clones, with a few VT220s. We never moved to anything newer
since they did everything we needed, and by the time the VT320s were
available for less than retail, we were on such hard times, that there
was no way to justify the cost of a newer terminal.
My recollection is that we had very few video problems with VT1xx
terminals. I think the only common problem we ran into was dead
keyboards or dead keyboard circuits in the terminals themselves. We
had enough spares lying around that we never investigated the faults.
We just swapped out the hardware and put the broken stuff on the
bench for the hardware guys (who never got around to poking inside).
The two faults I remember with VT220 terminals were dead 9636/9737
EIA chips, and loss of horizontal hold. It was tough getting the
old EIA chips out to mount sockets (must have had heavy copper
inner layers on the mainboard PCB), but once that was done, those
were easy to fix. We only lost about one a year, anyway. The
video, I was never able to fix myself with what I knew then. Perhaps
I could fix it now.
I don't think we ever had a total loss of video on any model of
terminal, mostly just the faults I described. Hardly scientific,
but it was a sample size of several dozen terminals, in operation
for at least 10 years.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 16-Apr-2008 at 21:20 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -69.7 F (-56.5 C) Windchill -111.2 F (-79.6 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 15.2 kts Grid 72 Barometer 679.1 mb (10662 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
3:05 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
Ethan wrote:
It was tough getting the
old EIA chips out to mount sockets (must have had heavy copper
inner layers on the mainboard PCB),
I haven't repaired any VT100 or VT220 termainals, but in general I've
found that removing dead parts from boards like that is easiest if you
remove the part with diagonal cutters first, then desolder the pins
individually.
Eric
4:01 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 03:05:46PM -0700, Eric Smith wrote:
Ethan wrote:
That is an excellent technique, and I don't recall having real problems
lifting the pin from the Vcc or GND holes (signal pins are easy) - I
recall having problems getting the power through-holes clean enough to
install a socket.
I think I had to resort to heating one side of the board and sucking the
solder from the other side - much easier with the board in a vise.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 16-Apr-2008 at 22:50 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -69.2 F (-56.2 C) Windchill -107.9 F (-77.7 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 13.0 kts Grid 72 Barometer 679.5 mb (10647 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
It was tough getting the
old EIA chips out to mount sockets (must have had heavy copper
inner layers on the mainboard PCB),
I haven't repaired any VT100 or VT220 termainals, but in general I've
found that removing dead parts from boards like that is easiest if you
remove the part with diagonal cutters first, then desolder the pins
individually.
17 Apr
17 Apr
2:33 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
That is an excellent technique, and I don't recall
having real problems
lifting the pin from the Vcc or GND holes (signal pins are easy) - I
recall having problems getting the power through-holes clean enough to
install a socket.
I think I had to resort to heating one side of the board and sucking the
solder from the other side - much easier with the board in a vise.
Isn't that how you're supposed to do it? It's certainly how I clean out
PCB holes if I need to add extra chips to a wave-soldered board (the most
recent example being upgrading my 512K HP Integral memory PCB to 1M).
-tony
4:58 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:33:14PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
For non-difficult vias, I typically apply heat and suction from the
same side - less juggling. I am accustomed to good results with this
technique (and can commonly recover intact parts from intact boards,
if that's the goal, like the time I extracted an IM6120 from a DecMate III
board - I wanted _both_ to survive so I could mount a socket and replace
the CPU later).
I find I only have to do the double-sided technique with tiny vias or
vias that are tied to inner fill layers (Vcc and GND, typically).
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 17-Apr-2008 at 23:50 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -76.5 F (-60.3 C) Windchill -110.5 F (-79.1 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 8.5 kts Grid 106 Barometer 680.2 mb (10621 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
I think I had
to resort to heating one side of the board and sucking the
solder from the other side - much easier with the board in a vise.
Isn't that how you're supposed to do it? It's certainly how I clean out
PCB holes if I need to add extra chips to a wave-soldered board.
18 Apr
18 Apr
1:55 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:33:14PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
For non-difficult vias, I typically apply heat and suction from the
same side - less juggling. I am accustomed to good results with this
technique (and can commonly recover intact parts from intact boards,
if that's the goal, like the time I extracted an IM6120 from a DecMate III
board - I wanted _both_ to survive so I could mount a socket and replace
the CPU later).
Agreed my comment was somewhat tongue-in-cheek last night. I routinely
desolder parts from a PCB (using a solder sucker and iron on the same
side) without damaging either.
But if I'm cleaning out holes to add extra parts (e.g. memory upgrades,
adding some option that wasn't presnet in my machine, whatever), then I
normally heat from the 'solder' side and scuk on the 'component' side. I
find it's easier, and more importantly involves less heating of the
board, so less risk of damage.
-tony
I think I
had to resort to heating one side of the board and sucking the
solder from the other side - much easier with the board in a vise.
Isn't that how you're supposed to do it? It's certainly how I clean out
PCB holes if I need to add extra chips to a wave-soldered board. 
17 Apr
17 Apr
7:31 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
The two faults I remember with VT220 terminals were
dead 9636/9737
EIA chips, and loss of horizontal hold. It was tough getting the
old EIA chips out to mount sockets (must have had heavy copper
inner layers on the mainboard PCB), but once that was done, those
were easy to fix. We only lost about one a year, anyway. The
video, I was never able to fix myself with what I knew then. Perhaps
I could fix it now.
I don't think we ever had a total loss of video on any model of
terminal, mostly just the faults I described. Hardly scientific,
but it was a sample size of several dozen terminals, in operation
for at least 10 years.
-ethan
Hey,
Whatever the brand or model, I absolutely must have a terminal with a
"green screen". I don't know if other members have this problem but, it
really strains my eyes to read an amber or white CRT.
A few years ago bought some "Versys" terminals for about $5 each. I
believe they are a LinkSys clone. They have proved to be excellent. The
screens are bright, the fonts are sharp and very readable. The only
repairs I've made is to replace some 1488s and 1489s. I think that's
because of a ground loop problem in my old house. The computer was in
one room, the terminal(s) in another.
Whatever terminal you use, it should have VT100 emulation. It seems like
most classic OS's and applications will have support for the VT100.
--
Steve Robertson
steerex [at] ccvn [dot] com
18 Apr
18 Apr
6:12 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:31:54AM -0400, Steve Robertson wrote:
Whatever terminal you use, it should have VT100
emulation. It seems like
most classic OS's and applications will have support for the VT100.
I mostly agree. The one large exception is if you fiddle with PDP-8s. The
'vtedit' macro for TECO expects a VT52, and does *not* work with VT220s in
VT52 mode.
Nearly everything else I've played with expect either an ASR-33 (i.e., no
cursor positioning), or a VT100.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 18-Apr-2008 at 13:10 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -83.9 F (-64.4 C) Windchill -118.4 F (-83.6 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 7.9 kts Grid 87 Barometer 678.2 mb (10696 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
17 Apr
17 Apr
2:30 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
The two faults I remember with VT220 terminals were
dead 9636/9737
EIA chips, and loss of horizontal hold. It was tough getting the
old EIA chips out to mount sockets (must have had heavy copper
inner layers on the mainboard PCB), but once that was done, those
were easy to fix. We only lost about one a year, anyway. The
video, I was never able to fix myself with what I knew then. Perhaps
I could fix it now.
I've had to repair a few VT220s with no horizontal hold. It seems to be
due to bad contact at the horizontal hold preset. Pull the case, note the
positon of this preset, and turn it from end to end a few times, finally
putting it back to the original postion. Power up and most likely the
picture will be locked. If it is, put the case back on.
-tony
4:56 p.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:30:22PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
I've had to repair a few VT220s with no horizontal
hold. It seems to be
due to bad contact at the horizontal hold preset. Pull the case, note the
positon of this preset, and turn it from end to end a few times, finally
putting it back to the original postion. Power up and most likely the
picture will be locked. If it is, put the case back on.
I'll certainly give that a try the next time I have a VT220 flake out on me.
Thanks for the tip.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 17-Apr-2008 at 23:50 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -76.5 F (-60.3 C) Windchill -110.5 F (-79.1 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 8.5 kts Grid 106 Barometer 680.2 mb (10621 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
18 Apr
18 Apr
12:38 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 22:30 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
<aol>me too</aol>
I gave them a scoosh of pot cleaner and worked them backwards and
forwards before returning to approximately the original position. They
always worked for years after that. Same goes for the DECMate monitors
(VR201?). They're nearly the same shape and have nearly the same
monitor chassis. Strange that... ;-)
Gordon
The two faults
I remember with VT220 terminals were dead 9636/9737
EIA chips, and loss of horizontal hold. It was tough getting the
old EIA chips out to mount sockets (must have had heavy copper
inner layers on the mainboard PCB), but once that was done, those
were easy to fix. We only lost about one a year, anyway. The
video, I was never able to fix myself with what I knew then. Perhaps
I could fix it now.
I've had to repair a few VT220s with no horizontal hold. It seems to be
due to bad contact at the horizontal hold preset. Pull the case, note the
positon of this preset, and turn it from end to end a few times, finally
putting it back to the original postion. Power up and most likely the
picture will be locked. If it is, put the case back on.
15 Apr
15 Apr
10:05 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
woodelf wrote:
Dave McGuire wrote:
I mostly use VT420s, but I'm in the process of switching to IBM 3151s,
because the keyboards are a lot nicer.
Peace... Sridhar
I always use a real terminal when one is available, though.
-Dave
What is a good real termial
( that you can afford )? 
16 Apr
16 Apr
6:02 a.m.
New subject: A good real terminal
Well, let's see...there are quite a few VT320s on eBay right now,
starting from $30. There are also VT420s in the same price range,
with one at $20 buy-it-now. There's a listing on there for VT420
bases for $24/ea, and the seller has ten available.
If someone as broke as I am can call that "affordable", anyone can.
-Dave
On Apr 15, 2008, at 1:27 PM, scheefj at netscape.net wrote:
This demonstrates the dangers of using relative terms
like
'available' and 'afford'.
woodelf wrote:
> Dave McGuire wrote:
>>
>> I always use a real terminal when one is available, though.
>
>> -Dave
> What is a good real termial ( that you can afford )?
>
>
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
15 Apr
15 Apr
11:50 a.m.
On Tuesday 15 April 2008, Dave McGuire wrote:
On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:07 PM, woodelf wrote:
Am I the only one who can't stand not being able to have a log of output
that I can scroll back through, and not being able to cut and paste
text from the terminal window?
Those are the two main reasons I normally rather use a laptop or
$macine_with_windowing_environment than a real serial terminal. (This
doesn't mean I don't have and don't use serial terminals, just that a
real serial terminal is rarely my first choice for something that I
want to be functional, instead of just "neat" and "pretty". :)
Pat
--
Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
Lets talk about non-broken tools so that we can
run the old
machines properly
like a terminal emulator that works like a real terminal?
Linux to my knowlage has none.
Sheer madness. I use kermit in an xterm window all the
time...works great..
I always use a real terminal when one is available, though. 
2:26 p.m.
In article <200804151450.09891.pat at computer-refuge.org>,
Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> writes:
Am I the only one who can't stand not being able
to have a log of output
that I can scroll back through, and not being able to cut and paste
text from the terminal window?
This is why I use SecureCRT for Windows. It can telnet, ssh or talk
to the serial port.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
3:06 p.m.
Patrick Finnegan wrote:
On Tuesday 15 April 2008, Dave McGuire wrote:
If I'm on a console, it's usually enough of an emergency that
cut-n-paste is not really going to be the right tool.
Peace... Sridhar
On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:07 PM, woodelf wrote:
Am I the only one who can't stand not being able to have a log of output
that I can scroll back through, and not being able to cut and paste
text from the terminal window?
Those are the two main reasons I normally rather use a laptop or
$macine_with_windowing_environment than a real serial terminal. (This
doesn't mean I don't have and don't use serial terminals, just that a
real serial terminal is rarely my first choice for something that I
want to be functional, instead of just "neat" and "pretty". :)
Lets talk about non-broken tools so that we can
run the old
machines properly
like a terminal emulator that works like a real terminal?
Linux to my knowlage has none.
Sheer madness. I use kermit in an xterm window
all the
time...works great..
I always use a real terminal when one is available, though. 
10:30 a.m.
[Let's] talk about non-broken tools so that we can
run the old
machines properly like a terminal emulator that works like a real
terminal?
I built a terminal emulator for X that is pretty close to a VT-100.
There are closer VT-100 emulators out there - or so I'm told; I've
never bothered to go look, since my own works well enough for what I
use it for.
I believe there are people here who have come substantially closer than
I to the real thing; indeed, there is likely someone, perhaps even here
on this list, running real terminal firmware under emulation.
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
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X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
2:50 p.m.
der Mouse wrote:
I believe there are people here who have come
substantially closer than
I to the real thing; indeed, there is likely someone, perhaps even here
on this list, running real terminal firmware under emulation.
My problem when using
LINUX, is all the emulators don't give a 80x24 text screen
as you tend to be X-windows for web-browsers and other asorted stuff.
8:46 p.m.
On Apr 15, 2008, at 5:50 PM, woodelf wrote:
Ben, what are you talking about? Exactly what X-based terminal
program *doesn't* (or can't) give you an 80x24 screen??
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
I believe
there are people here who have come substantially closer
than
I to the real thing; indeed, there is likely someone, perhaps even
here
on this list, running real terminal firmware under emulation.
My problem when
using LINUX, is all the emulators don't give a
80x24 text screen
as you tend to be X-windows for web-browsers and other asorted stuff.
11:56 p.m.
On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 20:50 -0600, woodelf wrote:
Dave McGuire wrote:
Turn the font size up then. It's very, very simple.
I often marvel at the mentality of people who are prepared to scour the
earth for an obscure part to repair one of three remaining obscure
computers, but throw their hands up in horror when asked to go
Edit->Profile->Font Size.
Gordon
Ben, what are you talking about? Exactly what
X-based terminal
program *doesn't* (or can't) give you an 80x24 screen??
I require a third opion: You can read the screen.
I am not a fan of tiny fonts, reading glasses is a must for me.
18 Apr
18 Apr
8:29 a.m.
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 11:56 PM, Gordon JC Pearce <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote:
On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 20:50 -0600, woodelf wrote:
Is this a Konsole user which I see before me? -- Macbeth
Personally, I just hold Ctrl and right-click in the xterm :) I usually
leave the fonts on the default, unless I want to play Nethack.
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Dave McGuire wrote:
Turn the font size up then. It's very, very simple.
I often marvel at the mentality of people who are prepared to scour the
earth for an obscure part to repair one of three remaining obscure
computers, but throw their hands up in horror when asked to go
Edit->Profile->Font Size.
Ben, what are you talking about? Exactly what
X-based terminal
program *doesn't* (or can't) give you an 80x24 screen??
I require a third opion: You can read the screen.
I am not a fan of tiny fonts, reading glasses is a must for me.
11:19 a.m.
On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 08:29 -0700, John Floren wrote:
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 11:56 PM, Gordon JC Pearce
<gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote:
Actually gnome-terminal, but I believe Konsole works the same way. It's
a pretty standard thing in modern terminal emulators, at least on Unixy
systems.
On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 20:50 -0600, woodelf wrote:
Is this a Konsole user which I see before me? -- Macbeth Dave McGuire wrote:
Turn the font size up then. It's very, very simple.
I often marvel at the mentality of people who are prepared to scour the
earth for an obscure part to repair one of three remaining obscure
computers, but throw their hands up in horror when asked to go
Edit->Profile->Font Size.
Ben, what are you talking about? Exactly what
X-based terminal
program *doesn't* (or can't) give you an 80x24 screen??
I require a third opion: You can read the screen.
I am not a fan of tiny fonts, reading glasses is a must for me. Personally, I just hold Ctrl and right-click in the
xterm :) I usually
leave the fonts on the default, unless I want to play Nethack.
That works too...
Gordon
11:44 a.m.
> > > I require a third opion: You can
read the screen.
> > > I am not a fan of tiny fonts, reading glasses is a must for me.
Mac users can always use glterminal for kicks :-)
http://ldopa.net/2006/01/14/glterminal/
On linux & friends, if you have certain bits of xscreensaver installed, try
/usr/lib/xscreensaver/phosphor -program bash -scale 2 -delay 1
(I think there is a way to do this with the apple2 screensaver as well...)
Joe.
5 Apr
5 Apr
3:10 p.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
I'm sure that the UHH is old news to folk
hereabouts.
When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a
distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now,
it's available for free:
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html
(Yes, I know. Don't hold the URL against it.)
Good stuff. I picked up a physical copy awhile back. Everyone should
read it to get a sense of perspective. At least to learn that UNIX was
not and is not the end-all, be-all of operating systems. :)
I am not really a Linux expert - maybe a power user or
competent
sysadmin, at best. I do have lots of comparative OS knowledge, but
most of it is of systems that came along long after Unix. I'd be
really interested to know the thoughts of modern Unix gurus on how
much of the criticism in the UHH is still valid today.
I like to quote Jamie Zawinski on UNIX: "Of all the operating systems
that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot." I think
that's still fairly accurate. I hate Windows and UNIX equally :).
I think a lot of the criticism is still relevant, it's just become less
of an issue (and in some sense, people have become so accustomed to the
UNIX brain-damage that they don't even know there /is/ an issue in many
cases).
Terminal handling in UNIX, for example, is still handled poorly (not a
part of the core OS, left to user libraries, etc... so there's no
standardization except for ad hoc ones) but it's not even an issue today
because no one (except us) uses dumb terminals anymore and so it's OK to
treat everything like an emulation of a VT102 in your XTerm windows.
User friendliness, error handling, and consistency at the command line
is still a problem -- and this is one of those cases where people don't
even /realize /how limiting that is -- use a Lisp Listener on a 'bolix
for 10 minutes and you'll realize how much better a CLI could be
(command completion, inline help, /helpful error messages/)... same goes
for documentation -- the LispM had graphical, hypertext sensitive
documentation available at a mouse click or a press of the "Help" key
whereas in UNIX it's still man or info pages displayed in a terminal
window, for the most part. This may be less of an issue for the
user-friendly Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc.) which are less CLI oriented.
Shell scripts, pipes, etc... combined with the idea of "small programs
that do one thing" are still pretty ugly (not in concept, but in terms
of implementation sometimes - unidirectional data flow of byte streams
only, bad/nonexistent error handling, cryptic syntax), but now that we
have Perl and other languages to act as the glue between progams, this
is somewhat less of an issue. Whereas on the lispm, "shell scripts"
were Lisp code like any other on the system and so were extremely
powerful, debuggable, maintainable, etc... (can you tell I'm a LispM fan? :)
C's problems have been eclipsed 10-fold by the problems of C++ :).
Networking is better supported, but NFS is still pretty terrible :).
X-Windows is still a mixed bag, but I think we can safely say that it's
here to stay. At least hardware's more than caught up to it at this point.
Those are some of my thoughts. (And take them with a grain of salt, I
have the mind of an old codger, on his front porch with a shotgun
shooing hooligans off his lawn). I could go on for days. I won't :).
Josh
7 Apr
7 Apr
3:22 p.m.
In article <47F7F8D7.8000907 at msu.edu>,
Josh Dersch <derschjo at msu.edu> writes:
User friendliness, error handling, and consistency at
the command line
is still a problem [...]
For some reason I was thinking of how novice-friendly the PLATO system
was when I read this paragraph. I remember large batches of people of
all ages working their way through computer aided instruction lessons
in the PLATO terminal room at Udel in the late 70s/early 80s, and this
was when far fewer people were familiar with even the most rudimentary
methods of interacting with a computer. The touch screen helped for
the grade schoolers, most definately.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
8:31 p.m.
Seems to be 404. Anyone care to send me a copy? I know I've read some
version of it, but long ago, and an old version....
At least to learn that UNIX was not and is not the
end-all, be-all of
operating systems. :)
No worries there; I went through my larval stage under VMS. :)
I think a lot of the criticism is still relevant,
it's just become
less of an issue (and in some sense, people have become so accustomed
to the UNIX brain-damage that they don't even know there /is/ an
issue in many cases).
And, to be fair, some of the problems with Unix have been at least
partially alleviated by progress (for example, there are Linuces that
have something at least a little like capabilities instead of the
traditional Unix all-or-nothing privilege model).
[...] and so it's OK to treat everything like an
emulation of a VT102
in your XTerm windows.
Except, of course, that it's a bad emulation in some important
respects. To pick two examples, VT-102s can't be resized and have a
specific keyboard layout which is rarely more than vaguely approached
under X.
Furthermore, xterm is far from the only terminal emulator out there.
Not even the only X one.
(can you tell I'm a LispM fan? :)
Me too. I'd be looking seriously for a Symbolics if (a) I had the
resources (physical space, primarily) for it and (b) I thought it
reasonably likely it would be within my budget if I found one.
Not that I think they're perfect. But they're _different_. I don't
like monocultures, and I think Unix has become too predominant a
monoculture - even Windows has grown a Posix layer by now.
X-Windows is still a mixed bag, but I think we can
safely say that
it's here to stay.
Well..."it's a window system named X, not a system named XWindows".
Yes, it's probably here to stay - but it's not that great; its keyboard
handling sucks, and it almost encourages writing code based on broken
assumptions like "there's a 32bpp TrueColor visual available". It's
hard, or at least tedious, to get it right; far too many coders mistake
"it works for me" for "it's right". (Not that _that_ mistake is
confined to X code, to be sure.)
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
8 Apr
8 Apr
12:09 a.m.
On Sat, 2008-04-05 at 15:10 -0700, Josh Dersch wrote:
for documentation -- the LispM had graphical,
hypertext sensitive
documentation available at a mouse click or a press of the "Help" key
whereas in UNIX it's still man or info pages displayed in a terminal
window, for the most part. This may be less of an issue for the
user-friendly Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc.) which are less CLI oriented.
Am I the only person in the world that likes man pages then? The GNU
utilities have "info" with a pointy-clicky hypertext interface, but like
nearly all such interfaces it's completely bloody useless and very hard
to use. Part of the problem is that nearly all of the Unix command-line
utilities can be fully explained in one short page (with a couple of
notable exceptions like grep and awk), but misguided programmers writing
the info pages feel they have to make everything a separate page, just
so they can have the front page with a big pile of links to pages, most
of which have only a couple of lines on them. Searching is impossible,
and navigation is impossible.
Just give me a nice plain flat page and let me do the searching myself.
That's what the '/' key is for.
Gordon
12:26 a.m.
Am I the only person in the world that likes man pages
then? [...]
Just give me a nice plain flat page and let me do the
searching
myself. That's what the '/' key is for.
You are not alone. I have very similar tastes in documentation. (I
agree with you about info; I find it more useful to use less on the
texinfo source, or even the underlying info file itself, than to try to
get anything useful out of info.)
/~\ The ASCII der Mouse
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X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
7:25 a.m.
On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 12:26 AM, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote:
I have never found any information of any use in info. Manual pages
are wholly sufficient and the interface is pretty good. My Preferred
OS just uses nroff to dump man pages to your terminal (since by
default terminal windows are non-autoscrolling); if I need to search
for something in a big man page, I just send it to an editor (very
simple) and search there.
VMS HELP is pretty nice but I actually prefer a man page.
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Am I the only
person in the world that likes man pages then? [...]
Just give me a nice plain flat page and let me do
the searching
myself. That's what the '/' key is for.
You are not alone. I have very similar tastes in documentation. (I
agree with you about info; I find it more useful to use less on the
texinfo source, or even the underlying info file itself, than to try to
get anything useful out of info.)
5:36 p.m.
> Am I the only person in the world that likes man
pages then? [...]
>
> Just give me a nice plain flat page and let me do the searching
> myself. That's what the '/' key is for.
On Tuesday 08 April 2008, der Mouse wrote:
You are not alone. I have very similar tastes in
documentation. (I
agree with you about info; I find it more useful to use less on the
texinfo source, or even the underlying info file itself, than to try
to get anything useful out of info.)
I've never had much luck for using info, either, or like it. I think
that the main problem with info is its relation to emacs. :)
OTOH, I'm much happier with GNU tar and it's general compatibility with
reading tar files that I throw with it, and a few smart things it does
(like stripping off leading /'s), as compared to any other tar variant
that ships with a UNIX.
On Tuesday 08 April 2008, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Quick, who can recite from memory all of the switches
and their
meanings for GNU tar? I can't.
So? I can remember all of the switches that I normally use. If I need
something else, it's quite easy to type "man tar".
Who can understand the tar man pages?
Huh? I don't see how it's complex or hard to understand.
Who knows it to be accurate for the particular
incarnation of
tar that they're using?
If tar doesn't accept the options that the man page specifies when you
try to use them, then it's not compatible. If it does, than it is. :)
I've never actually run into any system that I can remember where
there's a man page for tar, but it isn't up-to-date enough to be
perfectly usable.
Pat
--
Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
5:45 p.m.
On Tuesday 08 April 2008 03:09, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
On Sat, 2008-04-05 at 15:10 -0700, Josh Dersch wrote:
Absolutely. That "info" nonsense is bloody awful!
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
for documentation -- the LispM had graphical,
hypertext sensitive
documentation available at a mouse click or a press of the "Help" key
whereas in UNIX it's still man or info pages displayed in a terminal
window, for the most part. This may be less of an issue for the
user-friendly Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc.) which are less CLI oriented.
Am I the only person in the world that likes man pages then? The GNU
utilities have "info" with a pointy-clicky hypertext interface, but like
nearly all such interfaces it's completely bloody useless and very hard
to use. Part of the problem is that nearly all of the Unix command-line
utilities can be fully explained in one short page (with a couple of
notable exceptions like grep and awk), but misguided programmers writing
the info pages feel they have to make everything a separate page, just
so they can have the front page with a big pile of links to pages, most
of which have only a couple of lines on them. Searching is impossible,
and navigation is impossible.
Just give me a nice plain flat page and let me do the searching myself.
That's what the '/' key is for.
9 Apr
9 Apr
7:01 a.m.
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
Seconded (thirded, too ;-)
I've always got along really well with man pages. info just seems very clumsy
in comparison - as though some idiot decided that what people really needed
was a web-a-like interface to the documentation, but then did a really
brain-dead job when it came to actually implementing it.
cheers
Jules
Just give me a
nice plain flat page and let me do the searching myself.
That's what the '/' key is for.
Absolutely. That "info" nonsense is bloody awful!
8:37 a.m.
In article <47FCCC2B.20507 at gmail.com>,
Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> writes:
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
Seconded (thirded, too ;-)
I've always got along really well with man pages. info just seems very clumsy
in comparison - as though some idiot decided that what people really needed
was a web-a-like interface to the documentation, but then did a really
brain-dead job when it came to actually implementing it.
The worst part is when they intentionally cripple the man page and
force you into the awful info system. Most of the time, I can either
take or leave the GNU/FSF attitude about things, but shoving this info
crap down my throat really makes me want to kick them in the
collective nuts.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
Just give
me a nice plain flat page and let me do the searching myself.
That's what the '/' key is for.
Absolutely. That "info" nonsense is bloody awful!
9:19 a.m.
Richard wrote:
The worst part is when they intentionally cripple the
man page and
force you into the awful info system.
Aha, the old "The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info
documents instead". Bastards. :-)
My preference order goes something like: man page, book, online docs, other
online resources (Google search, usenet etc.), utility's built-in help, 'info'
documentation.
How old is 'info' anyway - does it pre-date widespread (whatever that may
mean!) web use? I don't think I had cause to come across it until mid/late 90s
(man pages were pretty well maintained until about then), by which time the
web was well established. I'm not sure if info is a poor imitation of a bunch
of HTML pages, or merely a poor implementation of a more general hypertext
system (which had of course been around for many years previous)
cheers
Jules (skirting the bounds of off-topicness a little... sorry)
9:42 a.m.
On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 9:19 AM, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
Richard wrote:
GNU info reminds me of the ITS help system, which isn't too surprising
considering the Head Idiot's background. Have I made it clear yet that
I really dislike Stallman? I like ITS and LispM, Stallman's favorites
which are now, as Dennis Ritchie says, fertilizing the OS field from
below; I just don't like Stallman.
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
The worst part is when they intentionally cripple
the man page and
force you into the awful info system.
Aha, the old "The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create
info documents instead". Bastards. :-)
My preference order goes something like: man page, book, online docs, other
online resources (Google search, usenet etc.), utility's built-in help,
'info' documentation.
How old is 'info' anyway - does it pre-date widespread (whatever that may
mean!) web use? I don't think I had cause to come across it until mid/late
90s (man pages were pretty well maintained until about then), by which time
the web was well established. I'm not sure if info is a poor imitation of a
bunch of HTML pages, or merely a poor implementation of a more general
hypertext system (which had of course been around for many years previous)
cheers
Jules (skirting the bounds of off-topicness a little... sorry)
10:40 a.m.
Richard wrote:
The worst part is when they intentionally cripple the man page and
force you into the awful info system.
I don't want to debate this (it's not my space), but I think, like much
of the unix-haters-handbook, there is more to this than has been
discussed here.
The info system is a lot like many page setting systems which came before
it (and there is a long history, littered with things like scribe, bolio,
runoff and many others)
One nice thing about it is that you can "compile" source documents into
many different formats. This tends to be really useful for some applications.
It can also be done (somewhat) with man pages but it's not easy and
there are fewer options for inserting various types of 'metadata' for
referencing other information. There's also methods for structuring the
information in ways that go beyond the format of a single man page.
I've personally used info/tex-info to generate system documentation and
then went on to make html pages, pdf's, printed pages and single text
files (which can be searched with any text editor or grep). I found it easy
and nice to use (but I still miss scribe).
On topic here, the MIT lisp machine manual was written in bolio, which
is somewhat close to tex-info and one industrious guy was able to take
the source files I unearthed and (30 year later) compile them into
really nice html, automagically. I'm sure he could turn them into even
nicer pdf file with a small amount of work. That says something about
the 'language' and how it encodes the information.
http://common-lisp.net/project/bknr/static/lmman
I'm not sure you could do that with man pages. Maybe you could.
So I'd offer that info pages are more than just cumbersome poorly
hypertext'd documents. They are part of a larger system which has goals
beyond just simple man pages.
-brad
11:21 a.m.
In article <1481.1207762811 at mini>,
Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com> writes:
So I'd offer that info pages are more than just
cumbersome poorly
hypertext'd documents. They are part of a larger system which has goals
beyond just simple man pages.
In theory I don't disagree with what info pages *could* be. In
practice though, they end up being vastly inferior to the man pages
that they replaced. A man page is best at succinctly communicating
important information about a utility: summary of usage, command-line
options supported, environment variables consumed, etc. I wouldn't
want to write a book using the an macro set for troff, but every time
I just need a quick piece of information about a command-line utility
and try to get it out of info, its a huge PITA.
Of course some things need a bona-fide full-featured cross-linked
manual -- just look at how many man pages perl sprawls across these
days.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
11 Apr
11 Apr
12:59 p.m.
On 09/04/2008, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
In article <1481.1207762811 at mini>,
Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com> writes:
I have no objection to 'man' pages, although many of them badly need a
concise clear overview when they actually leap into a list of
switches. The thing is, it's 2008. I object to having to quit out and
type 'man 3 command' when I should just be able to tab over to the
referred subpage and hit Enter. I'm not asking for it all to be turned
into fully-crosslinked indexed hypertext, I'm just asking for some
tiny bit of heed to be paid to 30y of progress in HCI and UI design!
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
So I'd offer that info pages are more than
just cumbersome poorly
hypertext'd documents. They are part of a larger system which has goals
beyond just simple man pages.
In theory I don't disagree with what info pages *could* be. In
practice though, they end up being vastly inferior to the man pages
that they replaced. A man page is best at succinctly communicating
important information about a utility: summary of usage, command-line
options supported, environment variables consumed, etc. I wouldn't
want to write a book using the an macro set for troff, but every time
I just need a quick piece of information about a command-line utility
and try to get it out of info, its a huge PITA.
Of course some things need a bona-fide full-featured cross-linked
manual -- just look at how many man pages perl sprawls across these
days.
9 Apr
9 Apr
2:15 p.m.
On Wednesday 09 April 2008 11:37, Richard wrote:
In article <47FCCC2B.20507 at gmail.com>,
Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> writes:
I wonder how hard it would be to extract the stuff from wherever "info" is
keeping it and stuff it into a man page?
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
Seconded (thirded, too ;-)
I've always got along really well with man pages. info just seems very
clumsy in comparison - as though some idiot decided that what people
really needed was a web-a-like interface to the documentation, but then
did a really brain-dead job when it came to actually implementing it.
The worst part is when they intentionally cripple the man page and
force you into the awful info system. Most of the time, I can either
take or leave the GNU/FSF attitude about things, but shoving this info
crap down my throat really makes me want to kick them in the
collective nuts. Just give
me a nice plain flat page and let me do the searching
myself. That's what the '/' key is for.
Absolutely. That "info" nonsense is bloody awful! 
5 Apr
5 Apr
4:10 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:
When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a
distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now,
it's available for free:
Darn. And to think I bought the dead tree version in the mid 90s (I still
have the barf bag that came with it).
It's a good & enjoyable read. I'm nearly
at the end of it now.
It's interesting to look back at this 1991 (-ish) book from the
perspective of 2008. How many of the criticisms levelled against Unix
were stuff that users of then-older OSs thought was deranged.
Today, the same sort of rivalry exists between Unix and Windows
people; the stuff before them is nearly forgotten now. I mean, I've
been in this business for some 20y (and another 5-10y before that as a
hobbyist) and I've never seen TOPS or MULTICS or ITS or anything like
them.
I've certainly heard of them myself, and some of the concepts they came up
with have made me want to learn more about each one, but I've yet to
actually use any of them.
What I'm wondering is, how many of the criticisms
levelled against
Unix (and thus, by association, Linux) in this book from 17y ago are
still current or valid today. I've been using Linux for 11-12y now,
but I still regard myself as something of a beginner, whereas I've
known Windows since it was 2 and can make it jump backwards through
flaming hoops.
Chapter 1---not so much any more. This was a time (94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R
C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of
Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now?
(Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris).
Chapter 2---mostly user expectations here. And yes, it's still somewhat
valid---VMS was a lot more consistent in the command line than Unix ever
was.
Chpater 3---Eh. They go on about how horrible man pages are, but they're
infinitely better than the whole info crap you get nowadays with GNU (god, I
love man pages that say crap like "The full documentation for cut is
maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and cut programs are properly
installed at your site, the command info coreutils cut should give you
access to the complete manual"). Nowadays you can probably paste any
command or error message into Google and find out the problem (but then
again, you might find plenty of other people with said problem but no
definitive answer).
Chapter 4---mail. Or more specifically sendmail. Still relevent, and
sadly, the situations presented there are infinitely easier to deal with
than the crap I have to deal with today.
Chapter 5---Usenet. Strictly speaking, not specifically Unix, and
frankly, nowadays, not really relevent all that much (which means, it's
probably usuable these days). Replace USENET with
Slashdot|Reddit|Digg|etc.
Chapter 6---terminals. Not so much anymore. Pretty much vt100/xterm and
you're good to go (alhough I still have issues with BS vs. DEL on Linux).
Chapter 7---Pretty much spot on, although the alternatives to X Windows
are worse (that is, if you want remote capabilities). And sadly, I do miss
NeWS (used it in college; was sad when SGI dropped it).
Chapter 8---who uses csh anymore? I think we all use bash nowadays, but
this still holds up pretty well (man, I can't make heads or tails of the
startup scripts on Linux, but then again, I never did learn to really read
shell scripts).
Chapter 9---Not so much anymore, as more and more people use languages
other than C and make (and there are a few alternative to make nowadays).
Chapter 10---Dead on. (I don't like C++ 8-P
Chapter 11---If anything it's gotten better and worse in my opinion. If
you set up Unix correctly, it can run smoothly for years without problems.
The major problem comes when you have other users on the system, or trying
to get a modern Linux distribution set up correctly (when did "which" become
optional? Or "traceroute"? Don't even get me started on so-called
"package
managers").
Chapter 12---security. Sadly, this book was written before the Internet
became as popular as it did and Microsoft showed us just how bad security
could get. Or PHP showed us just how bad security could get (really! You
can embed PHP in gif files and PHP will gladly execute it! How ...
Microsoftian of it ... ).
Chapter 13---file systems. They're gotten much better over the years, and
even Linux is slowly learning about removable media [1].
Chapter 14---I don't know anyone using NFS anymore (I think the last time
I saw NFS in a commercial setting was the late 90s, and even at home, I
don't use NFS all that much). But replace NFS with Samba, and it's spot on
(more or less).
-spc (Been using Unix since 1989 ... )
[1] My own personal theory about Unix: If it wasn't in Unix V7, then
it's never been supported all that well under Unix. That explains
the crappy support for removable devices, graphical systems and
threads.
4:35 p.m.
On Saturday 05 April 2008 19:10, Sean Conner wrote:
Chapter 1---not so much any more. This was a time
(94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of
K&R C floating around.
What's wrong with K&R C? <ducking> :-)
(Snip)
Chpater 3---Eh. They go on about how horrible man
pages are, but they're
infinitely better than the whole info crap you get nowadays with GNU (god,
I love man pages that say crap like "The full documentation for cut is
maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and cut programs are properly
installed at your site, the command info coreutils cut should give you
access to the complete manual").
Yeah...
Talk about a truly *horrible* user interface! At least some of that stuff is
available in HTML, which if I'm not happy with it I can hack away at...
Nowadays you can probably paste any command or error
message into Google and
find out the problem (but then again, you might find plenty of other people
with said problem but no definitive answer).
That's happened to me already, on a number of occasions.
Chapter 4---mail. Or more specifically sendmail.
Still relevent, and
sadly, the situations presented there are infinitely easier to deal with
than the crap I have to deal with today.
I started to look at all the bits involved in mail a while back, then got KDE
going (my initial install and first year or two of running linux did not
include a GUI :-), and once I found that I could get kmail to deal with all
of that it sort of short-circuited the whole mess. Now I'm starting to think
about looking at it again because of things like a message I want to send to
another user on the LAN here having to go through Verizon's servers. :-(
There's a pretty lively discussion currently going on in the local LUG about
somebody else dealing with all of those issues that I'm following with
interest.
Chapter 5---Usenet. Strictly speaking, not
specifically Unix, and
frankly, nowadays, not really relevent all that much (which means, it's
probably usuable these days). Replace USENET with
Slashdot|Reddit|Digg|etc.
Heh. Once in every really long while I fire up my news reader, and maybe
I'll poke around in some newsgroups and maybe I'll just look a bit for
certain specific material, but that's about it. I do remember what it was
like before the web, though. And there are still lots and lots of clueless
posters, no doubt about that...
(Snip)
Chapter 8---who uses csh anymore? I think we all
use bash nowadays, but
this still holds up pretty well (man, I can't make heads or tails of the
startup scripts on Linux, but then again, I never did learn to really read
shell scripts).
I'm certainly no expert on that stuff, but have managed to poke around them
to the extent where I can often follow what's going on. :-) There's a
product out there I think I probably found at freshmeat called "Advanced Bash
Scripting Guide" that's pretty good.
(Snip)
Chapter 10---Dead on. (I don't like C++ 8-P
I don't either.
Chapter 11---If anything it's gotten better and
worse in my opinion. If
you set up Unix correctly, it can run smoothly for years without problems.
The major problem comes when you have other users on the system, or trying
to get a modern Linux distribution set up correctly (when did "which"
become optional? Or "traceroute"? Don't even get me started on so-called
"package managers").
That's a lot of why I run Slackware here pretty much exclusively.
(snip)
Chapter 14---I don't know anyone using NFS
anymore (I think the last time
I saw NFS in a commercial setting was the late 90s, and even at home, I
don't use NFS all that much). But replace NFS with Samba, and it's spot on
(more or less).
I use it here. Though I can't quite get all aspects of it to work the way I
think it should be. For some reason the server is refusing to export the
first of three drives, while it does okay with the other two. And as far as
I can tell all of the config stuff is pretty much identical.
-spc (Been using Unix since 1989 ... )
Linux here since 1999, and some exposure to unix before that with a friend
who ran it at home, and gave me a login I could get to by way of a modem.
I'm glad he did. :-)
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
5:42 p.m.
Chapter 1---not so much any more. This was a time
(94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R
C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of
Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now?
(Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris).
... AIX, HP/UX, ...
And, of course then there's the argument over whether OS X counts too. So
I think there's still a fair amount of heterogeneity even now.
Chapter 8---who uses csh anymore?
*raises hand*
Well, tcsh really.
Chapter 14---I don't know anyone using NFS
anymore (I think the last time
I saw NFS in a commercial setting was the late 90s, and even at home, I
don't use NFS all that much).
I use it mostly for diskless systems, but even in that application I don't
use it much.
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Mistakes are often the stepping stones to catastrophic failure. ------------
7:43 p.m.
On 06/04/2008, Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:
... Mac OS X...
Now /officially/ Unix & I believe has sold more individual system
licenses than any other Unix ever, possibly now than all other Unixes
ever put together... Certainly in the tens of millions... So, y'know,
/quite/ significant... :?)
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
Chapter
1---not so much any more. This was a time (94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R
C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of
Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now?
(Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris).
... AIX, HP/UX, ... 
6 Apr
6 Apr
2:45 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 03:43:57AM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
On 06/04/2008, Cameron Kaiser <spectre at
floodgap.com> wrote:
... Mac OS X...
Now /officially/ Unix & I believe has sold more individual system
licenses than any other Unix ever, possibly now than all other Unixes
ever put together... Certainly in the tens of millions... So, y'know,
/quite/ significant... :?)
But from what I've seen, it twisted the definition of UNIX even worse
that AIX did.
Regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
Chapter
1---not so much any more. This was a time (94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R
C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of
Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now?
(Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris).
... AIX, HP/UX, ... 
5 Apr
5 Apr
6:20 p.m.
New subject: old computer books (was Re: The Unix Haters' Handbook)
Sean Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once
stated:
Looks like it's still worth at least a few bucks, more if it's in
decent condition. "Available free online" doesn't always whack
the market for the dead-trees artifact.
On another bookish note I have in front of me the February 16, 1970
issue of The IBM Magazine which contains an article featuring
Dr. Kenneth E. Iverson. There's a photograph of his 1962 book,
"A Programming Language", with a caption:
Dr. Iverson presented his new notation in
A Programming Language, which has sold
1,363 copies since it was published in 1962.
This suggests to me that I have perhaps personally seen 1% of the
surviving copies.
-Frank McConnell
When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a
distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now,
it's available for free:
Darn. And to think I bought the dead tree version in the mid 90s (I still
have the barf bag that came with it). 
7:48 p.m.
On Sat, 5 Apr 2008, Sean Conner wrote:
Darn. And to think I bought the dead tree version
in the mid 90s (I still
have the barf bag that came with it).
If you've still got it, I'll give you a dollar plus media mail shipping
for it. And you can keep the collectable barf bag!
Instead of teaching, I'm a librarian now, and I think that the library
should have a copy of it. Since the administration won't give us any
significant money to expand the collection, I'm buying and donating some
books.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
6 Apr
6 Apr
8:13 a.m.
On Sat, 5 Apr 2008, Sean Conner wrote:
Chapter 14---I don't know anyone using NFS
anymore (I think the last time
I saw NFS in a commercial setting was the late 90s, and even at home, I
don't use NFS all that much). But replace NFS with Samba, and it's spot on
(more or less).
I'd say it's use has if anything grown. Modern data centers often have
dedicated GigE NFS LANs. Good for consolidated storage and portability
useful in HA and virtualised platforms, but cheaper than SAN. And NAS
vendors such as NetApp have gone to great pains to get folks such as
Oracle to certify their technology in such configurations.
Andrew
7 Apr
7 Apr
11:11 a.m.
Andrew Back wrote:
I use NFS all over the place. I wouldn't be caught dead using SMBFS in
a production setting.
Peace... Sridhar
Chapter
14---I don't know anyone using NFS anymore (I think the last
time
I saw NFS in a commercial setting was the late 90s, and even at home, I
don't use NFS all that much). But replace NFS with Samba, and it's
spot on
(more or less).
I'd say it's use has if anything grown. Modern data centers often have
dedicated GigE NFS LANs. Good for consolidated storage and portability
useful in HA and virtualised platforms, but cheaper than SAN. And NAS
vendors such as NetApp have gone to great pains to get folks such as
Oracle to certify their technology in such configurations.
11:17 a.m.
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 11:11 AM, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
Andrew Back wrote:
dedicated GigE NFS LANs. Good for consolidated storage and portability
useful in HA and virtualised platforms, but cheaper than SAN. And NAS
vendors such as NetApp have gone to great pains to get folks such as Oracle
to certify their technology in such configurations.
I use NFS all over the place. I wouldn't be caught dead using SMBFS in a
production setting.
Peace... Sridhar
Us Real Men just import a remote fileserver's tree over 9p ;)
% 9fs kremvax
% ls /n/kremvax/usr/john
/n/kremvax/usr/john/foo
/n/kremvax/usr/john/bar
...
%
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
> Chapter 14---I don't know anyone using NFS anymore (I think the last
time
> I saw NFS in a commercial setting was the
late 90s, and even at home, I
> don't use NFS all that much). But replace NFS with Samba, and it's spot
on
(more or
less).
I'd say it's use has if anything grown. Modern data centers often have
6 Apr
6 Apr
2:43 p.m.
On Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 07:10:47PM -0400, Sean Conner wrote:
It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once
stated:
HP-UX and AIX are still alive and kicking, so commercial UNIX isn't
dead, it just smells funny.
When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a
distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now,
it's available for free:
Darn. And to think I bought the dead tree version in the mid 90s (I still
have the barf bag that came with it).
It's a good & enjoyable read. I'm
nearly at the end of it now.
It's interesting to look back at this 1991 (-ish) book from the
perspective of 2008. How many of the criticisms levelled against Unix
were stuff that users of then-older OSs thought was deranged.
Today, the same sort of rivalry exists between Unix and Windows
people; the stuff before them is nearly forgotten now. I mean, I've
been in this business for some 20y (and another 5-10y before that as a
hobbyist) and I've never seen TOPS or MULTICS or ITS or anything like
them.
I've certainly heard of them myself, and some of the concepts they came up
with have made me want to learn more about each one, but I've yet to
actually use any of them.
What I'm wondering is, how many of the
criticisms levelled against
Unix (and thus, by association, Linux) in this book from 17y ago are
still current or valid today. I've been using Linux for 11-12y now,
but I still regard myself as something of a beginner, whereas I've
known Windows since it was 2 and can make it jump backwards through
flaming hoops.
Chapter 1---not so much any more. This was a time (94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R
C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of
Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now?
(Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris). Chapter 6---terminals. Not so much anymore. Pretty
much vt100/xterm and
you're good to go (alhough I still have issues with BS vs. DEL on Linux).
Chapter 7---Pretty much spot on, although the alternatives to X Windows
are worse (that is, if you want remote capabilities). And sadly, I do miss
NeWS (used it in college; was sad when SGI dropped it).
Chapter 8---who uses csh anymore? I think we all use bash nowadays, but
this still holds up pretty well (man, I can't make heads or tails of the
startup scripts on Linux, but then again, I never did learn to really read
shell scripts).
Ah, those are reasonably easy to read, but some people do really twisted
things with shell scripts.
Chapter 11---If anything it's gotten better and
worse in my opinion. If
you set up Unix correctly, it can run smoothly for years without problems.
The major problem comes when you have other users on the system, or trying
to get a modern Linux distribution set up correctly (when did "which" become
optional? Or "traceroute"? Don't even get me started on so-called
"package
managers").
Package managers, done _right_ are a godsend. Done wrong, they are a
nightmare.
Chapter 13---file systems. They're gotten much
better over the years, and
even Linux is slowly learning about removable media [1].
Chapter 14---I don't know anyone using NFS anymore (I think the last time
I saw NFS in a commercial setting was the late 90s, and even at home, I
don't use NFS all that much). But replace NFS with Samba, and it's spot on
(more or less).
Lets just say that NFS is _very_ much alive and in use, all over the
place. From home networks (here, $HOME sits on NFS) to small and large
companies.
Regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
5:50 p.m.
Chapter
1---not so much any more. This was a time (94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R
C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of
Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now?
(Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris).
HP-UX and AIX are still alive and kicking, so commercial UNIX isn't
dead, it just smells funny.
6:23 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:
I giggled very loudly when I read this. Well put.
A take on Rob Pike's "Not only is Unix dead, it's starting to smell really
bad"?
John
--
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Chapter 1---not so much any more. This was a time
(94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R
C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of
Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now?
(Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris).
HP-UX and AIX are still alive and kicking, so commercial UNIX isn't
dead, it just smells funny.
7 Apr
7 Apr
3:11 a.m.
On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 06:23:51PM -0700, John Floren wrote:
On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Cameron Kaiser
<spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:
I giggled very loudly when I read this. Well put.
A take on Rob Pike's "Not only is Unix dead, it's starting to smell really
bad"?
Not intentionally ;-)
But in that case, Rob is wrong, Unix as a OS family is very much alive.
To cite someone else:
If UNIX is dead, the necromancer who is animating the corpse is doing a
damn fine job. -- Par Leijonhufvud (parlei at algonet.se) in a.s.r.
;-)
Regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
Chapter 1---not so much any more. This was a time
(94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R
C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of
Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now?
(Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris).
HP-UX and AIX are still alive and kicking, so commercial UNIX isn't
dead, it just smells funny. 
3:16 a.m.
2008/4/7, John Floren <slawmaster at gmail.com>:
On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 5:50 PM, Cameron Kaiser
<spectre at floodgap.com> wrote:
A take on Rob Pike's "Not only is Unix dead, it's starting to smell really
bad"?
I believe Frank Zappa once said, "Jazz ain't dead, it just smells funny.."
--
< http://whorehou.se/ >
HP-UX and
AIX are still alive and kicking, so commercial UNIX isn't
dead, it just smells funny.
I giggled very loudly when I read this. Well put.
11:08 a.m.
Sean Conner wrote:
Chapter 1---not so much any more. This was a time
(94) when the ANSI-C
standard had only been out a few years so there was still quite a bit of K&R
C floating around. This was also a time when there were still plenty of
Unix versions floating around, instead of the what? Five we have left now?
(Linux, Open|Free|NetBSD, Solaris).
AIX, MacOS, HP/UX, Tru64.
Peace... Sridhar
12:12 p.m.
Resending, mailed this on Saturday and it never made it. Which
guarantees that two copies will show up in everyone's mailbox. Whee.
Liam Proven wrote:
I'm sure that the UHH is old news to folk
hereabouts.
When I was a baby geek, I remember reading about this seminal text, a
distillation from a long-active mailing list called UNIX-HATERS. Now,
it's available for free:
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/unix-haters.html
(Yes, I know. Don't hold the URL against it.)
Good stuff. I picked up a physical copy awhile back. Everyone should
read it to get a sense of perspective. At least to learn that UNIX was
not and is not the end-all, be-all of operating systems. :)
I am not really a Linux expert - maybe a power user or
competent
sysadmin, at best. I do have lots of comparative OS knowledge, but
most of it is of systems that came along long after Unix. I'd be
really interested to know the thoughts of modern Unix gurus on how
much of the criticism in the UHH is still valid today.
I like to quote Jamie Zawinski on UNIX: "Of all the operating systems
that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot." I think
that's still fairly accurate. I hate Windows and UNIX equally :).
I think a lot of the criticism is still relevant, it's just become less
of an issue (and in some sense, people have become so accustomed to the
UNIX brain-damage that they don't even know there /is/ an issue in many
cases).
Terminal handling in UNIX, for example, is still handled poorly (not a
part of the core OS, left to user libraries, etc... so there's no
standardization except for ad hoc ones) but it's not even an issue today
because no one (except us) uses dumb terminals anymore and so it's OK to
treat everything like an emulation of a VT102 in your XTerm windows.
User friendliness, error handling, and consistency at the command line
is still a problem -- and this is one of those cases where people don't
even /realize /how limiting that is -- use a Lisp Listener on a 'bolix
for 10 minutes and you'll realize how much better a CLI could be
(command completion, inline help, /helpful error messages/)... same goes
for documentation -- the LispM had graphical, hypertext sensitive
documentation available at a mouse click or a press of the "Help" key
whereas in UNIX it's still man or info pages displayed in a terminal
window, for the most part. This may be less of an issue for the
user-friendly Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc.) which are less CLI oriented.
Shell scripts, pipes, etc... combined with the idea of "small programs
that do one thing" are still pretty ugly (not in concept, but in terms
of implementation sometimes - unidirectional data flow of byte streams
only, bad/nonexistent error handling, cryptic syntax), but now that we
have Perl and other languages to act as the glue between progams, this
is somewhat less of an issue. Whereas on the lispm, "shell scripts"
were Lisp code like any other on the system and so were extremely
powerful, debuggable, maintainable, etc... (can you tell I'm a LispM fan? :)
C's problems have been eclipsed 10-fold by the problems of C++ :).
Networking is better supported, but NFS is still pretty terrible :).
X-Windows is still a mixed bag, but I think we can safely say that it's
here to stay. At least hardware's more than caught up to it at this point.
Those are some of my thoughts. (And take them with a grain of salt, I
have the mind of an old codger, on his front porch with a shotgun
shooing hooligans off his lawn). I could go on for days. I won't :).
Josh
7:56 p.m.
On 07/04/2008, Josh Dersch <derschjo at msu.edu> wrote:
I like to quote Jamie Zawinski on UNIX: "Of all
the operating systems
that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot."
Sounds like a paraphrase of Winston Churchill:
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government
except all the others that have been tried."
User friendliness, error handling, and consistency at
the command line
is still a problem -- and this is one of those cases where people don't
even /realize /how limiting that is -- use a Lisp Listener on a 'bolix
for 10 minutes and you'll realize how much better a CLI could be
(command completion, inline help, /helpful error messages/)... same goes
for documentation -- the LispM had graphical, hypertext sensitive
documentation available at a mouse click or a press of the "Help" key
whereas in UNIX it's still man or info pages displayed in a terminal
window, for the most part. This may be less of an issue for the
user-friendly Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc.) which are less CLI oriented.
I know SQR(fsck all) about Lisp Machines, but in these days of
high-powered PCs, would it be viable to create some form of
implementation of the LispM OS on x86? Even if it required some kind
of emulation layer underneath for content-addressable memory or
whatever?
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
8:31 p.m.
I think it'd certainly be possible. Symbolics did a "port" of Genera to
the Alpha (ran under Tru64 unix) called OpenGenera; Brad Parker's done
an amd64-linux port of that port (which I don't know the legal status
of). See http://labs.aezenix.com/lispm/index.php?title=VLM_On_Linux.
(I've tried it, it's /bleeding fast/ on modern PC hardware. It's also
buggy at the moment :)).
There are other "lisp directly on the hardware" OSes for modern hardware
but I haven't looked into them very deeply yet.
Josh
Liam Proven wrote:
On 07/04/2008, Josh Dersch <derschjo at msu.edu>
wrote:
I like to quote Jamie Zawinski on UNIX: "Of
all the operating systems
that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot."
Sounds like a paraphrase of Winston Churchill:
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government
except all the others that have been tried."
User friendliness, error handling, and
consistency at the command line
is still a problem -- and this is one of those cases where people don't
even /realize /how limiting that is -- use a Lisp Listener on a 'bolix
for 10 minutes and you'll realize how much better a CLI could be
(command completion, inline help, /helpful error messages/)... same goes
for documentation -- the LispM had graphical, hypertext sensitive
documentation available at a mouse click or a press of the "Help" key
whereas in UNIX it's still man or info pages displayed in a terminal
window, for the most part. This may be less of an issue for the
user-friendly Linux distros (Ubuntu, etc.) which are less CLI oriented.
I know SQR(fsck all) about Lisp Machines, but in these days of
high-powered PCs, would it be viable to create some form of
implementation of the LispM OS on x86? Even if it required some kind
of emulation layer underneath for content-addressable memory or
whatever?
8 Apr
8 Apr
12:22 a.m.
On Tue, 8 Apr 2008 03:56:14 +0100
"Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
I know SQR(fsck all) about Lisp Machines, but in these
days of
high-powered PCs, would it be viable to create some form of
implementation of the LispM OS on x86? Even if it required some kind
of emulation layer underneath for content-addressable memory or
whatever?
http://labs.aezenix.com/lispm/index.php?title=VLM_On_Linux
VLM On Linux
This file gives some additional hints on running the Symbolics Virtual
Lisp Machine (VLM) port to Linux/x86_64 by Brad Parker.
[...]
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
3:23 a.m.
On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 09:22:02AM +0200, Jochen Kunz wrote:
On Tue, 8 Apr 2008 03:56:14 +0100
"Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
There is also a Lisp on bare-metal-x86, project Movitz:
http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/
It would probably be a good idea to port it against the Xen PVM
interface - this would solve the pesky issue of hardware drivers quite
elegantly ;-)
Regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
I know SQR(fsck all) about Lisp Machines, but in
these days of
high-powered PCs, would it be viable to create some form of
implementation of the LispM OS on x86? Even if it required some kind
of emulation layer underneath for content-addressable memory or
whatever?
http://labs.aezenix.com/lispm/index.php?title=VLM_On_Linux
VLM On Linux
This file gives some additional hints on running the Symbolics Virtual
Lisp Machine (VLM) port to Linux/x86_64 by Brad Parker.
[...]
7:49 a.m.
On 08/04/2008, Alexander Schreiber <als at thangorodrim.de> wrote:
On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 09:22:02AM +0200, Jochen Kunz
wrote:
Fascinating. Thanks for that.
I was going to say that running it under Xen or something would rather
miss the point, inasmuch as that brings all the baggage of having Unix
underneath - but then, coincidentally, today I read this:
<http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/Novell-Developing-Standalone-Xen-Based-Hypervisor-Product/>
The URL is quite informative in itself, really, but the article opens thus:
_Novell Developing Stand-Alone Xen-Based Hypervisor Product_
*Novell's hypervisor product will be available later in 2008 and is
based on the Xen hypervisor found in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.*
Novell is quietly working on a stand-alone hypervisor product that
will be based on the Xen hypervisor found in SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server 10.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
On Tue, 8 Apr 2008 03:56:14 +0100
"Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
There is also a Lisp on bare-metal-x86, project Movitz:
http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/
It would probably be a good idea to port it against the Xen PVM
interface - this would solve the pesky issue of hardware drivers quite
elegantly ;-) I know SQR(fsck all) about Lisp Machines, but in
these days of
high-powered PCs, would it be viable to create some form of
implementation of the LispM OS on x86? Even if it required some kind
of emulation layer underneath for content-addressable memory or
whatever?
http://labs.aezenix.com/lispm/index.php?title=VLM_On_Linux
VLM On Linux
This file gives some additional hints on running the Symbolics Virtual
Lisp Machine (VLM) port to Linux/x86_64 by Brad Parker.
[...]
12:19 p.m.
On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 03:49:19PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
On 08/04/2008, Alexander Schreiber <als at
thangorodrim.de> wrote:
Ah yes, Novell can play the "Lies, damn lies and marketing" game as well
as anybody else. What the product _will_ be (if you read the
announcement carefully), is a stand-alone product consisting of:
- the Xen hypervisor
- a stripped down Linux distribution to run as Domain 0 (the privileged
Xen domain for management and hardware drivers)
In other words, something any compentent Linux sysadmin with some
knowledge of Xen can crank out on a boring friday, using
$DISTRO_OF_CHOICE as base.
So it will still contain Unix underneath, but you won't be able to use
that Unix for anything.
Regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 09:22:02AM +0200, Jochen
Kunz wrote:
Fascinating. Thanks for that.
I was going to say that running it under Xen or something would rather
miss the point, inasmuch as that brings all the baggage of having Unix
underneath - but then, coincidentally, today I read this:
<http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Infrastructure/Novell-Developing-Standalone-Xen-Based-Hypervisor-Product/>
The URL is quite informative in itself, really, but the article opens thus:
_Novell Developing Stand-Alone Xen-Based Hypervisor Product_
*Novell's hypervisor product will be available later in 2008 and is
based on the Xen hypervisor found in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.*
Novell is quietly working on a stand-alone hypervisor product that
will be based on the Xen hypervisor found in SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server 10. On Tue, 8 Apr 2008 03:56:14 +0100
"Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
There is also a Lisp on bare-metal-x86, project Movitz:
http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/
It would probably be a good idea to port it against the Xen PVM
interface - this would solve the pesky issue of hardware drivers quite
elegantly ;-) I know SQR(fsck all) about Lisp Machines, but in
these days of
high-powered PCs, would it be viable to create some form of
implementation of the LispM OS on x86? Even if it required some kind
of emulation layer underneath for content-addressable memory or
whatever?
http://labs.aezenix.com/lispm/index.php?title=VLM_On_Linux
VLM On Linux
This file gives some additional hints on running the Symbolics Virtual
Lisp Machine (VLM) port to Linux/x86_64 by Brad Parker.
[...]
7:41 a.m.
On 08/04/2008, Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote:
On Tue, 8 Apr 2008 03:56:14 +0100
"Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
Fascinating - thanks for that! I didn't know this had been done.
Shame it's not FOSS, though.
Also a shame that I don't own a 64-bit machine yet. ;?)
[Makes mental note to self: bump Lisp up list of languages to try to learn]
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
I know SQR(fsck all) about Lisp Machines, but in
these days of
high-powered PCs, would it be viable to create some form of
implementation of the LispM OS on x86? Even if it required some kind
of emulation layer underneath for content-addressable memory or
whatever?
http://labs.aezenix.com/lispm/index.php?title=VLM_On_Linux
VLM On Linux
This file gives some additional hints on running the Symbolics Virtual
Lisp Machine (VLM) port to Linux/x86_64 by Brad Parker.
[...]
6092
days inactive
6105
days old
90 comments
31 participants
participants (31)
-
als＠thangorodrim.de -
andy＠smokebelch.org -
ard＠p850ug1.demon.co.uk -
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
brad＠heeltoe.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
derschjo＠msu.edu -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
ethan.dicks＠usap.gov -
fmc＠reanimators.org -
fryers＠gmail.com -
fu3.org＠gmail.com -
gordonjcp＠gjcp.net -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
jkunz＠unixag-kl.fh-kl.de -
joachim.thiemann＠gmail.com -
jpero＠sympatico.ca -
jules.richardson99＠gmail.com -
legalize＠xmission.com -
lproven＠gmail.com -
mcguire＠neurotica.com -
mloewen＠cpumagic.scol.pa.us -
mouse＠Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA -
pat＠computer-refuge.org -
ploopster＠gmail.com -
rtellason＠verizon.net -
scheefj＠netscape.net -
slawmaster＠gmail.com -
spc＠conman.org -
spectre＠floodgap.com -
steerex＠ccvn.com