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Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Things That Every Hacker Once Knew? (ibiblio.org)
Open source guru Eric Raymond turns 60 this year, prompting this question from an anonymous reader:
Eric Raymond's newest writing project is "Things Every Hacker Once Knew," inspired by the day he learned that not every programmer today's knows the bit structure of ASCII. "I didn't write it as a nostalgia trip -- I don't miss underpowered computers, primitive tools, and tiny low-resolution displays... In any kind of craft or profession, I think knowing the way things used to be done, and the issues those who came before you struggled with, is quite properly a source of pride and wisdom. It gives you a useful kind of perspective on today's challenges."
He writes later that it's to "assist retrospective understanding by younger hackers so they can make sense of the fossils and survivals still embedded in current technology." It's focusing on ASCII and "related technologies" like hardware terminals, modems and RS-232. ("This is lore that was at one time near-universal and is no longer.") Sections include "UUCP and BBSes, the forgotten pre-Internets" and "The strange afterlife of the Hayes smartmodem" (which points out some AT commands survived to this day in smartphones). He requests any would-be contributors to remember that "I'm trying to describe common knowledge at the time." This got my thinking -- what are some that every programmer once knew that have since been forgotten by newer generations of programmers?
Eric Raymond is still hard at work today on the NTPsec project -- a secure, hardened, and improved implementation of Network Time Protocol -- and he promises donations to his Patreon page will help fund it. But what things do you remember that were commonplace knowledge "back in the day" that have now become largely forgotten? Leave your best answers in the comments. What are some things that every hacker once knew?
He writes later that it's to "assist retrospective understanding by younger hackers so they can make sense of the fossils and survivals still embedded in current technology." It's focusing on ASCII and "related technologies" like hardware terminals, modems and RS-232. ("This is lore that was at one time near-universal and is no longer.") Sections include "UUCP and BBSes, the forgotten pre-Internets" and "The strange afterlife of the Hayes smartmodem" (which points out some AT commands survived to this day in smartphones). He requests any would-be contributors to remember that "I'm trying to describe common knowledge at the time." This got my thinking -- what are some that every programmer once knew that have since been forgotten by newer generations of programmers?
Eric Raymond is still hard at work today on the NTPsec project -- a secure, hardened, and improved implementation of Network Time Protocol -- and he promises donations to his Patreon page will help fund it. But what things do you remember that were commonplace knowledge "back in the day" that have now become largely forgotten? Leave your best answers in the comments. What are some things that every hacker once knew?
Epson printer ESC codes - you embedded them in text documents and sent them to your parallel port dot-matrix printer, and they produced bold and italics and double width, and all sorts of effects.
ANSI escape screen codes - for setting foreground and background colours and other screen effects (clear screen, home) when you got bored with light grey on black.
I am anarch of all I survey.
I worked in a building numbered 2600 with a bunch of developers for a few years. One day I pointed at the massive street numbers on the side of the building and said something like, "How appropriate." None of them had any idea what I was talking about.
Most kids these days have no idea what phreaking is, what a black box is, or a blue box, etc... Don't get me started on the contents of the anarchist's cookbook.
Most of them don't know what a MUD, MUSH or MUX was or how to program one, let alone about common door games (Trade Wars was the best).
Heck, I remember key cards which worked by perforations. Really easy to duplicate with a piece of cardboard. Remember core memory? Many "technical" folks nowadays probably can't do Boolean logic and wouldn't recognize most of the symbols. let alone binary operations or PEEK'ing and POKE'ing.
Thanks guys, now I'm starting to feel old. :)
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Hexadecimal: what it is, why it is and how & why it evolved from octal.
This word 'evolved'. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Multiples of 4 bits (ie. hexadecimal) is more natural in a binary world.
Multiples of 3 is stupid, it was only ever going to be temporary.
No sig today...
The protocol, not the frog (which it was named after).
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
For some of us, it's today... I have two processes where the data arrives as EBCDIC plus binary data, and the files are constructed to emulate a 200-byte tape record. I got to learn all about how COBOL represented numbers in various fields to get these running in 1991 and 2000, and still have to remember them when the people source the data need help remembering how it works.
They keep saying they want to sunset the applications that generate the EBCDIC data, but, in 15 years of saying that, they have yet to create a viable alternative.