@rl_dane
I say, aren’t we well past weekly patches, what with AI-driven CI/CD pipelines and such?😆

@raven667 @dougmerritt

@AmenZwa
I don't know about *you*, chum, but *my* software knows how to patch *itself*. While it's running.

@rl_dane @raven667

At 20 W of power consumption.

@dougmerritt @AmenZwa @rl_dane @raven667

@vnikolov @dougmerritt
We can’t have the AI data centres consume all the electrical power; the real-time embedded community has to rise up and take back some of that power. We may well be consuming sub-mW individually, but we are hundreds of billions strong and we’re everywhere.

Come to think of it, if the embedded engineers were to follow the practices of the web world, each “embedded” device would now be the size of a refrigerator, and would consume 100 W or thereabouts.

@rl_dane @raven667

@AmenZwa
You can still get PDP-8s with a hefty 4 KB core memory on the used market.

@vnikolov @rl_dane @raven667

@dougmerritt
😆👍Maverick move—again!

By the way, I heard, years ago, an apocryphal story: it is said that the CSRC staff gave Ken’s old PDP-7 a fitting burial at sea (in the pond in front of the Holmdel HQ building), instead of sending it to the scrap yard. But I didn’t see that in Brian’s UNIX memoir, so it’s probably just that, a legend.

I tell ya mate, I was this close to getting that PiDP-11 replica kits, were it not for my wife’s meaningful look….

@vnikolov @rl_dane @raven667

@AmenZwa
Tell your wife she's beautiful, rub her tired feet, and order away!

I hope that PDP-7 story is apocryphal, it would be a great museum piece.

Circa 1980 a friend of mine had some random PDP-8 he used as a footrest, occasionally kicking it to break off some more of those whatchamacallit nifty DEC toggle switches.

I had no particular love (nor experience) of the PDP-8, but I was still shocked. 😱

However others I've told that story said that it was no more than the PDP-8 deserved, that it had brought it on itself. 😝

@vnikolov @rl_dane @raven667

Right!

You all have surely seen this definition:

hardware:
that part of a computer system which can be kicked.

***

Barely tangential, the following doesn't seem apocryphal to me:
at Los Alamos during the Manhattan project they had the most expensive doorstop in the world.

They measured neutron absorption of several different materials.
That included a large piece of gold, which became a doorstop, as it wasn't needed for other scientific or engineering purposes afterwards.

@dougmerritt @AmenZwa @rl_dane @raven667

@vnikolov @dougmerritt @AmenZwa @raven667

> hardware:
> that part of a computer system which can be kicked.

That definition would have helped me a lot as a kid. I asked my dad what the difference between hardware and software was, and he said, "hardware is hard, software is soft." 😂

👍🙂

From the same fortune file:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And plunged it deep into the VAX.
Don't you envy people who
Do the things you want to do?

And to end on a positive note:

A Unix saleslady, Lenore,
Likes to work, but she likes to play more.
So she found a good way
To combine work and play
And she sells C-shells by the shore.

#Limerick

@rl_dane @dougmerritt @AmenZwa @raven667

@vnikolov @dougmerritt @AmenZwa @raven667

Haha, that last one is fantastic.

I did technically start my unix journey in csh, but I didn't really know what I was doing then.
When I started really learning shell scripting, it was with ksh, which translated easily into bash. I've now taken to writing POSIX shell more quite recently, as it can target both Linux and the BSDs without requiring an extra install on either.

But I do wonder what csh would have been like. I never did mess around with it, except as a very, very beginning unix user of SunOS in the early 90s. ;)

I used to use csh a lot, many years ago.
Like many others, I suppose, I was particularly happy with its history manipulation features.
They are all in bash now, of course, perhaps in other shells as well.
For example,
$ !?foo?:gs/bar/baz/
(I often prefer to enter a change to a previous command, rather than re-edit the command line, but that is a separate topic.)

As the documentation itself noted, the syntax of csh has "unexpected quirks"¹; for a while I put up with them.
In any case, in those days it offered significantly more than the Bourne shell _in some respects_, if I recall correctly, like expansion of variants in braces.
These features, too, have long been added to bash.

(I never used tcsh.)

_________
¹ This is a quote.
Checking it just now yielded:
csh programming considered harmful
<https://web.mit.edu/ghudson/info/csh.whynot>.
So, yes...

@rl_dane @dougmerritt @AmenZwa @raven667

@vnikolov
The C Shell was indeed lightyears ahead of Bourne Shell. Korn Shell did try, but it just couldn't quite get there. But Bourne Again Shell is where it's at. It was amusing and frightening, at once, to have learned that bash had a massive security hole, for years.

@rl_dane @dougmerritt @raven667

@AmenZwa @vnikolov @dougmerritt @raven667

You should check out mksh some time. It has some very interesting improvements.

@rl_dane
Will do. Much obliged.🙏

@vnikolov @dougmerritt @raven667

@AmenZwa @vnikolov @dougmerritt @raven667

The creator is on fedi: @mirabilos

Expect very spicy takes on Unix and shell scripting (and anything else ;)... he's one of us 🤣

@rl_dane @AmenZwa @vnikolov @dougmerritt @raven667 @mirabilos
mksh is way to mainstream :)

Since IceCreamSandwich Android has used mksh as its shell.
source

@kabel42 @AmenZwa @vnikolov @dougmerritt @raven667 @mirabilos

Huh! I had no idea! :D

@rl_dane
> mksh

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Amen:
> The C Shell was indeed lightyears ahead of Bourne Shell.

Especially interactively; even Stephen Bourne agrees, I've heard him.

Bill Joy was, as usual, very creative about both thinking up *and* adding new features. Some of the rest of us tried our hand at writing shells from scratch, but it was as an exercise that was hard enough in itself, let alone adding features. :)

For some years I used csh quite religiously. It took me a long time to see that it was less ideal for scripting. (Religion blinds one to other paths.)

Not that anything but csh and Bourne shell were available for years.

@kabel42 @AmenZwa @vnikolov @raven667 @mirabilos

@dougmerritt

I've heard similar first-hand stories about Bill, like yours, by those who were at Berkeley at the same time. I faintly recall Kurt recounting how Bill fixed and improved the buggy BBN TCP/IP stack, pretty much overnight. Am I mistaken?

I've also heard Kernighan described how Thompson wrote, or rewrote, complex pieces of software, like compilers and OS algorithms, essentially overnight.

Some guys have all the "Joy", I guess....

Were the folks at Berkeley CS, in those days, mostly cordial or corrosive?

@rl_dane @kabel42 @vnikolov @raven667 @mirabilos

@AmenZwa
Wait, you knew Kurt Schoens, really? He married my ex-girlfriend Polly.

I didn't see Bill "read the spec and implement what it said", but everyone agrees that it was fast, just not literally overnight.

Bill was superhuman, though, so I don't really see a problem with the common story.

Everyone was friendly, except a few exceptions. Eric Schmidt was standoffish and didn't seem to really socialize with anyone, although he was active. There were no remote filesystems in that era, of course, but he still hacked up some code to remote mount a disk in a different building. Over a 300 baud dialup.

At the time it somehow escaped me that he was the Bell Labs author of Lex(1), even though I used it.

@rl_dane @kabel42 @vnikolov @raven667 @mirabilos

@dougmerritt
Oh no, so sorry; I mean Kirk (McKusick). My old age....😀

I don't know Kurt Schoens.

Ah, Schmidty....

Using a VT100 over a 300 baud line made me feel good: it gave me the illusion that, when I programmed in a screen-editor, I was thinking and working at the speed of a computer.🤣

@rl_dane @kabel42 @vnikolov @raven667 @mirabilos

Myself, I reached the conclusion once that unpredictable response time hurts more than low connection speed.

I have been spared from using a bidirectional connection (to a computer) at 300 Baud.
I think the worst that has happened to me was a 1200 Baud synchronous connection for a 3270 emulator on a PC.

@AmenZwa @dougmerritt @rl_dane @kabel42 @raven667 @mirabilos

@vnikolov
I’ve only used the 3270 in the computer centre, and very briefly at that. But I guess it would have been a demanding diva, compared to the basic VT100.

@dougmerritt @rl_dane @kabel42 @raven667 @mirabilos

@AmenZwa
Y'all are casually taking this in stride, as if a remote mount at 300 baud was basically the same thing as a human terminal connection at 300 baud.

It was an impressive tour de force in an era when very few, if any, were doing such things even at vastly higher speeds.

@vnikolov @rl_dane @kabel42 @raven667 @mirabilos

@dougmerritt
I am still reading your post, over a 300 baud modem. I just got to the remote-mounting bit. Hang on.

You're absolutely right; remote mounting protocol that works over a 300 baud line, using the ideas and tools of the era, was indeed a Berkeley-worthy feat.

@vnikolov @rl_dane @kabel42 @raven667 @mirabilos

@AmenZwa @dougmerritt @vnikolov @kabel42 @raven667 @mirabilos

Oh man... I'm using @tut limited to certain baud rates using trickle, and it's completely unusable at less than anything but 9600 baud. It redraws every character onscreen several times per refresh. Infuriating. XD

Ed, of course, is a gem, even at 300 baud. XD

#TUI application developers, please test your programs at forced (low) baud rates!

cc: @sjmulder

@mirabilos @AmenZwa @dougmerritt @vnikolov @kabel42 @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

yeah, jupp has optimisations for low baudrates (especially if you disable “fast status line” or the status line entirely), but nōn-ed is not fun at 300 bps (use bps, not baud… 300 baud can easily be 1200 bps or more)

nvi was actually quite usable at 300 baud once the various statusline options were disabled.

You're right, bps, not baud.

@rl_dane
Could be, but wasn't. At the time the *common* usage was firmly and unquestionably "300 baud", not "300 bps".

The two terms were, at the time, pragmatically synonyms. People used "300 baud modems", and those were always "300 bps".

People were forced to change their habits to say "bps" some years later, but that was after faster modems became affordable and widespread.

@mirabilos @AmenZwa @vnikolov @kabel42 @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

@dougmerritt @mirabilos @AmenZwa @vnikolov @kabel42 @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

My understanding is that baud was "symbols per second," where each symbol wasn't necessarily a bit.

@rl_dane
That's true.

If you look closely, you'll see that I used scare quotes, terms like "common usage", and more, to clearly say I was talking about common parlance, not of strict correctness.

In the era of 300 baud modems being the common ones. And I said that that changed not long after. When common modems got faster.

"Baud" went from theoretically possibly maybe conceivably being "symbols per second" but that being the same in common practice as "bits per second" to "no kidding around, that modem you're using RIGHT NOW is more symbols per second than the bit rate".

@mirabilos @AmenZwa @vnikolov @kabel42 @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

Right.
Let me add that this isn't just about modems, though perhaps their case is the most familiar one.

Aside, watching the spectrum of a telegraphy channel over time is rather instructive, even on a plain vanilla oscilloscope.
At low transmission rates, of course, otherwise it's just a blur.
With a teletype providing a soundtrack.

Naturally, watching any spectrum is very instructive.
(It is not for nothing that good spectrum analyzers are expensive.)
These days, there ought to be plenty of video recordings, but it hadn't occurred to me to look for them.

I don't know whether the strict definition of _baud_ should be about symbols per second or state changes per second.
I suppose it might depend on the layer of abstraction of the Discourse.

_________
Exploring phase modulation, pulse code modulation, and then the interesting types of modulation etc. (whose names I forget) is left as an exercise for the proverbial reader thirsting for knowledge.
Warning: it is a rabbit cave, not merely a hole, with multiple branches connected to other large rabbit caves.
But you would be in the good company of giants.

#Baud
#Baudot
#ContinuousWave
#Modulation
#Telegraphy

@dougmerritt @rl_dane @mirabilos @AmenZwa @kabel42 @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

@vnikolov @dougmerritt @mirabilos @AmenZwa @kabel42 @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

I'll add that watching various types of digital and quasi-digital transmissions on the "waterfall" (x=freq, y=time, color=amplitude) display of a cheap $30 software-defined radio dongle is hella fun. XD

I really need to get off my bum and set mine up again. The last time I had it running, I was able to hear #WSPR beacons from Japan on the dinky little "rabbit ears" antenna that came with the dongle. :D

@rl_dane wrote:
«I was able to hear #WSPR beacons from Japan on the dinky little "rabbit ears" antenna that came with the dongle.»

Nice.
A comparable feat is listening in on the US Coast Guard (East Coast) from Bulgaria.
The distance is smaller than to Japan, but a public broadcaster would transmit at higher power (I presume WSPR is one).
Perhaps your achievement is greater, because of the antenna.

@dougmerritt @mirabilos @AmenZwa @kabel42 @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

@vnikolov @dougmerritt @mirabilos @AmenZwa @kabel42 @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

#WSPR beacons are usually private, and not terribly high-powered, but the WSPR protocol itself is immensely fault-tolerant. I can't remember the specifics, but the "packet" time is something like five minutes long. Also (according to Wikipedia), it's 1.5 baud. XD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSPR_(amateur_radio_software)

@kabel42 @vnikolov @dougmerritt @mirabilos @AmenZwa @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

Looked it up, the transmission time is two minutes long. :D

https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/WSPR

Yeah, the guys that come up with stuff like #WSPR and #FT8 are scary smart. XD

Also, IIRC, it's written in #FORTRAN?!? XD XD XD

@kabel42 @vnikolov @dougmerritt @mirabilos @AmenZwa @raven667 @tut @sjmulder

This is the guy that initially developed it, maybe he as some writings on it? ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor_Jr.

This is the software that encodes/decodes #WSPR and other groovy ham protocols:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSJT_(amateur_radio_software)