Charlie StrossApr 8

RE: https://techhub.social/@rayckeith/116370449957346533

Didn't Windows 95 do this too?!?

For fuck's sake, Apple, get your shit together and stop reinventing 30 year old 32 bit Windows bugs!

Show threadNorman WilsonApr 8

@cstross Such bugs are far older than that.

The place I studied as an undergrad had a PDP-10 for campus-wide time sharing. ca. 1979 official IT staff (not that they were called that) moved most of their effort to getting new VAXes going as replacements. As part of that, they cancelled the weekly downtime to run diagnostics on the PDP-10.

That revealed a long-standing bug in TOP-10: some internal counter (I forget what, can't have been simple uptime in clock ticks on a system with 36-bit words) overflowed after about a month of uptime, causing havoc.

I forget whether DEC supplied a fix, IT staff (or us students helping keep the -10 running) rolled our own, or we just scheduled monthly reboots.

Show threadJon6d ago
@oclsc @cstross TIMEVX:: forever! (I may boot up a VMS emulator and see if mined still compiles on it, someday).
Show threadNorman Wilson6d ago

@oddhack @cstross I was happy to leave VMS behind when I left California. I wish I could do the same with Linux and return to something that really feels like Unix, but that doesn't exist any more.

Need to find time to assemble, at long last, my PiDP-11 and run 7/e on it.

Show threadJon6d ago
@oclsc @cstross Free/OpenBSD do not count?
Show threadNorman Wilson6d ago
@oddhack @cstross Both have cat -v and worse.
Show threadJdeBP6d ago

@oddhack

For context:

The -v option to cat was introduced to AT&T #Unix in 1987 with System 5 Release 3, so @oclsc is looking for something that's older than even late 1980s #Unix.

I don't know what old versions of #Xenix one could get up and running nowadays.

@cstross
#cat #retrocomputing #ComputerHistory

Show threadJon6d ago
@JdeBP @oclsc @cstross for more context see Norman's paper here: https://vtda.org/pubs/AUUGN/AUUGN-V04.2.pdf
Show threadNorman Wilson
@oddhack @JdeBP @cstross Oh gawd, I'd almost forgotten about that.
Apr 9 at 5:16pmWeb
Show threadJon6d ago

@oclsc @JdeBP @cstross that title will be with me until the day I die.

But more to the point, you're making not just the same philosophical point, but some of the same examples today. Consistency FTW!

Show threadNorman Wilson6d ago

@oddhack @JdeBP @cstross It's been a few decades. I should read it again.

What really disturbs me about it is how much less energy I have these days. And, to a lesser extent, that it's just not possible for a single person to do that sort of work today, when just the OS kernel is two orders of magnitude bigger. Likewise the sort of stuff we did at the Labs.