OK. VT-100s were nice. I always thought VT-52s were nicer, in a way, since they could be stacked and in a cramped lab that was awfully convenient.
When I get nostalgic about terminals, though, I think about the Heathkit terminals that we used. The director's theory was that if you wanted a terminal bad enough, you'd brush up on your soldering skills and build one. The other one that brings back memories was called, if memory serves, the Asciiscope (made by ITT). Orange phosphor, 40 column display, built-in acoustic coupler, and operated at a blazing 1200 baud. YeeHah!
--
``I remember being taught rudimentary programming as part of a maths class in the early 80's...''
Sounds like the same person who tried to teach FORTRAN programming as part of first year calculus (not quite ten years earlier):
``Now a DO loop does this and an IF statement does this...
Now write programs to numerically integrate problems 1 through 12 on page 25...
These are due on Friday.''
It was amazing to see all his students standing in line for a crack at the three keypunchs that were available to students. Needless to say, not much was learned about programming until a later class.
Digital had some awesome compilers writers. I had some orbital simulation software that, when compiled for use on a PC using the MS-FORTRAN compiler, required at least 512K to run. Compiling the same program for a PDP-11 using DEC's FORTRAN-77 compiler it was runnable on an I/D-space system (11/70), which had far less memory available to my programs. --
``I still look at that as a conspiracy, a harbinger of things to come, as CIS kiddies started coming out of the woodwork and noone cared so much about green-bar paper (the mark of quality analysis!). C++ killed the VAX!''
The last time I was at an office supply store, you could still get green-bar paper. Finding a DECwriter III in good working order might be a little tougher. There are days when I wouldn't mind having one to dump listings out on. And to think that someone was ready to give me one for free years ago...
``We punched our source files onto punch cards that were fed into our IBM 7094 and learned to wait hours to see if it compiled instead of getting "immediate" feedback like we'd had before.''
Arrgh! That's the environment under which I had my first experience with FORTRAN (II, if memory serves). If you were extremely fortunate, you could get three runs in a day. If you had a buddy in the computer center, you might get a fourth run. Getting a clean compile was like winning the lottery. Usually, you'd get something like a mixed-mode arithmetic error that either wouldn't compile or cause a strange run-time error. ``Productivity'' wasn't a word normally associated with FORTRAN programming in the punch card days.
``many people assume that BASIC compilers started with VB 5.''
On a similar note... that reminds me of the time I was in a record store and some teenaged kid held up a copy of ``Dark Side of the Moon'' to show his friend who told him ``Oh, yah. That's their first album.'' They were wondering why some OF was laughing at them. (This doesn't seem all that far off-topic since your username is ``auntfloyd''.)
Anybody who thinks that computing started with the IBM PC (and we've probably all run into at least one) probably thinks that Microsoft's BASIC was the first. I learned programming using a ``real'' BASIC (one with the matrix functions so it was easy to fit polynomials to all that data I was collecting in physics lab!) on an HP3000 and MPE (our school was a beta site so we got a deal). What a step down it was to have to use GW-BASIC and its offspring on PCs. And, yes, I know about TrueBASIC but by then I'd left BASIC far behind. BASIC was for learning the beginnings of programming; then you move on. By the time BASIC compilers came out for PCs, I didn't care anymore.
--
I sure hate to reply to my own reply but there's an interesting interview with Richard Stallman on OpenOffice.org that touches a bit on this. His comments on NAFTA, WTO, etc. are interesting (but not all that surprising in light of what I've read of Stallman's writings in the past).
``...nearly EVERYTHING on the Internet could get censored for one reason or another.''
Heck... nearly anything in a typical bookstore could be found to be offensive and censored if you looked hard enough for easily offended people. And, actually, you don't have to look all that hard.:-)
Gartner, IDG, et. al.: It doesn't matter how many are shipped with Linux pre-installed. To count market share that way omits all the copies of Red Hat, Suse, etc., that are purchased directly from the distribution manufacturers and then installed on gawd-only-knows how many computers. I know... I purchased one copy of a distribution and installed it on at least ten systems. I don't know on how many computers that copy of the distribution was installed by the people that borrowed the CDs from me. Let's not even get into the number of systems out there running Linux that was installed from a CD burned from a downloaded ISO image.
Get off the idea that market share is tied to pre-installations. Please. You just look stupid in the eyes of the people who will, someday, be running IT shops. Those people will remember your faulty methodology and look elsewhere when they want to do industry research. Your expensive reports will merely gather dust on the shelf.
--
I've resisted the urge to do something like that in the past. I may have to reconsider if I begin hearing stories about too many sites' web pages having links to inserted to MS-approved partners. I wouldn't worry too much about ignoring the users of that browser with 90-percent market share. I would rather configure a web server once than to have to go through tons of web pages inserting code to block Smart Tags.
Anybody know of a way to have Apache generate a ``666'' error so I can create a special ErrorDocument to spit out when it receives a request from IE? (heh heh heh)
So if the folks afflicted with carpel tunnel syndrome didn't get it from using their PCs at work, how did they get it? I suppose they got that numbness from the vibrations transmitted through the steering column on their way to and from work. Yah, that's it. Blame on poor roads and not the crappy furniture that corporations buy that (after how many years of people using PCs at work?) doesn't allow computer users to sit with a comfortable posture.
If these injuries are declining, one's gotta wonder if they've been disappearing since the use of trackballs became more widespread? I've been using one at home for several years and it seemed to help a great deal. (I still have to use a mouse at work on some systems and heavy use still is a problem.) The good thing about many RSIs, however, is that they do get better. My finger joints seemed to recover when I was on vacation and the most strenuous thing I did with my fingers was trip the shutter on my camera.
All in all, though, something about this report smells bad. As Deep Throat said: ``Follow the money.'' The article didn't mention just who funded the UofT study and I doubt the regents/board paid for it out of the goodness of their hearts. I know of too many people who have wrist, finger, and back problems that cannot be blamed on anything else but their heavy use of computers at work. Far too many people to attribute it to ``hysteria''. (What an insult that one was.) Companies that employ large numbers of computer users would certainly have an interest in seeing RSIs labeled as mass hysteria. American corporations were quite successful in killing off legislation that would have made workplaces more ergonomic. How many policies were cancelled in the past few months that would have benefitted either people or the environment because it was too expensive for corporations? (My eyes fill with tears just thinking about the horrendous expenses corporations would have to bear -- sniff) Surely some major insurance companies could've banded together to fund this study; they'd just love to claim that RSIs don't exist so they could avoid paying the medical bills of corporate employees.
--
``The part that keeps getting left out is that he developed this site for the university. (It was
their student government, I believe).''
Makes you wonder how effective the student government can be if everything that's said must be approved by the administration. You can just imagine the student govt. meeting where someone says: ``We can't approve that resolution. The administration'll just squash it without discussion.'' Wouldn't you just love being part of a puppet government? That'd give you a real feeling of making a contribution to campus life, that's for sure.
``And arent (sic) universities supposed to support free speech?''
Geez. Where have you been for the last, oh, 10-15 years? Free speech hasn't existed on college campuses since the onset of the political correctness movement. I've a lot of people tell me about:
folks auditing classes just to take notes on what professors are saying then using those notes to file complaints to the administration demanding that they be removed. We just can't have any of these `free thinkers' infecting the delicate minds of the Nation's youth.
campus organizations formed whose sole purpose seems to be to disrupt speechs being made by people whose views don't align with certain viewpoints. If they don't like what someone has to say, they don't just refuse to listen; they bar everyone else from listening as well.
students being accused of `being insensitive' to some supposedly maligned group and being disciplined without so much as a hearing. Better safe than sorry, you know.
A lot of college campuses are, IMHO, a scary place nowadays. I'm extremely glad to be out of school.
OK, OK, this is slightly off-topic (but somewhat related), but your comment:
``The school has claimed copyright on his work, which means he has no rights to use it unless they are explicity given (unlikly).''
got me to wondering... Imagine how different the computing industry might be if Harvard University had claimed copyright on Bill Gate's BASIC interpreter. I understood that he developed it on Harvard's campus computers. Of course, that wasn't a ``free speech'' issue. But some Universities don't like commercial work being done using campus facilities. Gotta wonder what Harvard's policy was back then.
Just a thought...
As for UofU's copyright claim: This seems to be common at Universities isn't it? I seem to recall that the copyright on a most theses or dissertations is held by the University where the work was done since the University is the publisher. As for UofU being rather tyrannical about their policy... What did you expect at UofU? They have a reputation for being awfully strict. I can't imagine the web site creator didn't know of their policies.
Finally...
``For that matter, what's to prevent ANY isp you
host with from taking over your material?''
Only the fear that word'll get around that they do this to folks hosting web pages on their servers. The sucking sound of users pulling their web sites down from an ISP that regularly practised this would be deafening. What was the big ``free'' web page site (geocities?) that tried to pull this one? They backed down rather quickly as I recall.
If I already place a copyright on all of my web pages, I wonder what legal right the ISP has then if they try to claim copyright on those pages? Any legal scholars reading this thread?
My experience is that the wimpy little fans that are included in the vast majority of computer cases and power supplies are the biggest culprits in computer noise. In order to move the required amount of air through the system, fans are selected that run at too high a speed. And then, to make the noise problem worse, someone usually decides that a fine-mesh screen has to be placed over the fan in order to keep anything larger than a couple of millimeters from being poked into the fan (I swear I've heard some setups actually ``whistle'' when the fans are running). All this seems to make for a darned noisy cooling system. It would sure be nice if case manufacturers took this aspect of their product into account and published some figures on the noise level of each case so as to provide those with a need for a quiet computer some information to make a reasonably informed choice.
The quietest computer I ever had on my desk was an industrial rackmount case (not a very desktop-space-friendly footprint but the HD in my usual desktop system had died) that included three 5-inch fans running at a slower speed: two in the front (the blew across the hard disks mounted behind them) and one in the rear behind the PS. They ran at a slower speed and were whisper quiet. The case was more expensive than the cheapo ones that are normally found today. I highly recommended a case with the larger fans if you want a quieter system.
Another source of noise are the hard disks. Once you get more than one in the system the noise level seems to get objectionable. I've got some older SCSI disks in one computer that don't ``whir'' so much as ``whine''. (A rackmount case full of these disks sounds less like a computer and more like a vacuum cleaner -- well, almost.) Replacing those disks with newer drives can help out a lot. Move the old ``whiners'' to that web server running in the basement.
Hmmm, thirty days of community service for painting something on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the President's daughter got what, eight hours, of community service for underage drinking?
Amazon's dynamic pricing failed, IMHO, becuase it turned the book/cd/etc buying experience into something akin to buying a car. The price you pay depends on which saleman you talk to or how successful you were in negotiating a better price. All in all, an experience that makes you feels as though you were ripped off or that there was a better price but that your bargaining skills were inadequate and no one likes that experience. Don't the airlines use something like dynamic pricing? I don't know of anyone who feels like they got the best possible or even a fair price on their airline tickets.
Just wait until Compaq and IBM owners start comparing notes and find out that they bought the same computers but at wildly difference prices. I wouldn't count on a consumer buying another computer from a vendor that adopts this pricing scheme.
``The reason there's nothing good to watch Friday night is young men 18-49 are off doing stuff''
Only if they're not married or don't have kids. Our kids are normally in bed by 8:00 so TLG was nice to unwind to. BTW, glad the high end of your definition of `young' includes guys my age -- though not by much.:-)
--
The only thing worth watching on Friday night and now it's cancelled? Looks like I'll get more reading done now so I guess there's an upside after all.
``But somewhere out there is a Mark Twain who's had it up to here and is poised to pen a caustic attack on a religion which will become an important classic. As of yesterday, Mark's a bit more likely to live in Canada.''
Quotations from Ambrose Bierce's ``The Devil's Dictionary'' could be hazardous to your freedom as well.
Canada may not be a safe haven. Are we sure there aren't any obscure clauses in the NAFTA agreement that might apply here? And for the truly paranoid, there's this story on The Village Voice's web site.
Slashdot Mirror
OK. VT-100s were nice. I always thought VT-52s were nicer, in a way, since they could be stacked and in a cramped lab that was awfully convenient.
When I get nostalgic about terminals, though, I think about the Heathkit terminals that we used. The director's theory was that if you wanted a terminal bad enough, you'd brush up on your soldering skills and build one. The other one that brings back memories was called, if memory serves, the Asciiscope (made by ITT). Orange phosphor, 40 column display, built-in acoustic coupler, and operated at a blazing 1200 baud. YeeHah!
--
Sounds like the same person who tried to teach FORTRAN programming as part of first year calculus (not quite ten years earlier):
It was amazing to see all his students standing in line for a crack at the three keypunchs that were available to students. Needless to say, not much was learned about programming until a later class.
--
Digital had some awesome compilers writers. I had some orbital simulation software that, when compiled for use on a PC using the MS-FORTRAN compiler, required at least 512K to run. Compiling the same program for a PDP-11 using DEC's FORTRAN-77 compiler it was runnable on an I/D-space system (11/70), which had far less memory available to my programs.
--
The last time I was at an office supply store, you could still get green-bar paper. Finding a DECwriter III in good working order might be a little tougher. There are days when I wouldn't mind having one to dump listings out on. And to think that someone was ready to give me one for free years ago...
--
Slacker!
--
Arrgh! That's the environment under which I had my first experience with FORTRAN (II, if memory serves). If you were extremely fortunate, you could get three runs in a day. If you had a buddy in the computer center, you might get a fourth run. Getting a clean compile was like winning the lottery. Usually, you'd get something like a mixed-mode arithmetic error that either wouldn't compile or cause a strange run-time error. ``Productivity'' wasn't a word normally associated with FORTRAN programming in the punch card days.
--
On a similar note... that reminds me of the time I was in a record store and some teenaged kid held up a copy of ``Dark Side of the Moon'' to show his friend who told him ``Oh, yah. That's their first album.'' They were wondering why some OF was laughing at them. (This doesn't seem all that far off-topic since your username is ``auntfloyd''.)
Anybody who thinks that computing started with the IBM PC (and we've probably all run into at least one) probably thinks that Microsoft's BASIC was the first. I learned programming using a ``real'' BASIC (one with the matrix functions so it was easy to fit polynomials to all that data I was collecting in physics lab!) on an HP3000 and MPE (our school was a beta site so we got a deal). What a step down it was to have to use GW-BASIC and its offspring on PCs. And, yes, I know about TrueBASIC but by then I'd left BASIC far behind. BASIC was for learning the beginnings of programming; then you move on. By the time BASIC compilers came out for PCs, I didn't care anymore.
--
I sure hate to reply to my own reply but there's an interesting interview with Richard Stallman on OpenOffice.org that touches a bit on this. His comments on NAFTA, WTO, etc. are interesting (but not all that surprising in light of what I've read of Stallman's writings in the past).
--
Heck... nearly anything in a typical bookstore could be found to be offensive and censored if you looked hard enough for easily offended people. And, actually, you don't have to look all that hard. :-)
--
Maybe those conspiracy theorists weren't so far off base after all.
--
Gartner, IDG, et. al.: It doesn't matter how many are shipped with Linux pre-installed. To count market share that way omits all the copies of Red Hat, Suse, etc., that are purchased directly from the distribution manufacturers and then installed on gawd-only-knows how many computers. I know... I purchased one copy of a distribution and installed it on at least ten systems. I don't know on how many computers that copy of the distribution was installed by the people that borrowed the CDs from me. Let's not even get into the number of systems out there running Linux that was installed from a CD burned from a downloaded ISO image.
Get off the idea that market share is tied to pre-installations. Please. You just look stupid in the eyes of the people who will, someday, be running IT shops. Those people will remember your faulty methodology and look elsewhere when they want to do industry research. Your expensive reports will merely gather dust on the shelf.
--
ROTFLMAO! Am I the only one that expects to see things get inserted into web pages like:
Anyone betting that something like these will not be part of the defaults?
--
I've resisted the urge to do something like that in the past. I may have to reconsider if I begin hearing stories about too many sites' web pages having links to inserted to MS-approved partners. I wouldn't worry too much about ignoring the users of that browser with 90-percent market share. I would rather configure a web server once than to have to go through tons of web pages inserting code to block Smart Tags.
Anybody know of a way to have Apache generate a ``666'' error so I can create a special ErrorDocument to spit out when it receives a request from IE? (heh heh heh)
--
So if the folks afflicted with carpel tunnel syndrome didn't get it from using their PCs at work, how did they get it? I suppose they got that numbness from the vibrations transmitted through the steering column on their way to and from work. Yah, that's it. Blame on poor roads and not the crappy furniture that corporations buy that (after how many years of people using PCs at work?) doesn't allow computer users to sit with a comfortable posture.
If these injuries are declining, one's gotta wonder if they've been disappearing since the use of trackballs became more widespread? I've been using one at home for several years and it seemed to help a great deal. (I still have to use a mouse at work on some systems and heavy use still is a problem.) The good thing about many RSIs, however, is that they do get better. My finger joints seemed to recover when I was on vacation and the most strenuous thing I did with my fingers was trip the shutter on my camera.
All in all, though, something about this report smells bad. As Deep Throat said: ``Follow the money.'' The article didn't mention just who funded the UofT study and I doubt the regents/board paid for it out of the goodness of their hearts. I know of too many people who have wrist, finger, and back problems that cannot be blamed on anything else but their heavy use of computers at work. Far too many people to attribute it to ``hysteria''. (What an insult that one was.) Companies that employ large numbers of computer users would certainly have an interest in seeing RSIs labeled as mass hysteria. American corporations were quite successful in killing off legislation that would have made workplaces more ergonomic. How many policies were cancelled in the past few months that would have benefitted either people or the environment because it was too expensive for corporations? (My eyes fill with tears just thinking about the horrendous expenses corporations would have to bear -- sniff) Surely some major insurance companies could've banded together to fund this study; they'd just love to claim that RSIs don't exist so they could avoid paying the medical bills of corporate employees.
--
Makes you wonder how effective the student government can be if everything that's said must be approved by the administration. You can just imagine the student govt. meeting where someone says: ``We can't approve that resolution. The administration'll just squash it without discussion.'' Wouldn't you just love being part of a puppet government? That'd give you a real feeling of making a contribution to campus life, that's for sure.
--
Geez. Where have you been for the last, oh, 10-15 years? Free speech hasn't existed on college campuses since the onset of the political correctness movement. I've a lot of people tell me about:
A lot of college campuses are, IMHO, a scary place nowadays. I'm extremely glad to be out of school.
--
OK, OK, this is slightly off-topic (but somewhat related), but your comment:
got me to wondering... Imagine how different the computing industry might be if Harvard University had claimed copyright on Bill Gate's BASIC interpreter. I understood that he developed it on Harvard's campus computers. Of course, that wasn't a ``free speech'' issue. But some Universities don't like commercial work being done using campus facilities. Gotta wonder what Harvard's policy was back then.
Just a thought...
As for UofU's copyright claim: This seems to be common at Universities isn't it? I seem to recall that the copyright on a most theses or dissertations is held by the University where the work was done since the University is the publisher. As for UofU being rather tyrannical about their policy... What did you expect at UofU? They have a reputation for being awfully strict. I can't imagine the web site creator didn't know of their policies.
Finally...
Only the fear that word'll get around that they do this to folks hosting web pages on their servers. The sucking sound of users pulling their web sites down from an ISP that regularly practised this would be deafening. What was the big ``free'' web page site (geocities?) that tried to pull this one? They backed down rather quickly as I recall.
If I already place a copyright on all of my web pages, I wonder what legal right the ISP has then if they try to claim copyright on those pages? Any legal scholars reading this thread?
Cheers...
--
My experience is that the wimpy little fans that are included in the vast majority of computer cases and power supplies are the biggest culprits in computer noise. In order to move the required amount of air through the system, fans are selected that run at too high a speed. And then, to make the noise problem worse, someone usually decides that a fine-mesh screen has to be placed over the fan in order to keep anything larger than a couple of millimeters from being poked into the fan (I swear I've heard some setups actually ``whistle'' when the fans are running). All this seems to make for a darned noisy cooling system. It would sure be nice if case manufacturers took this aspect of their product into account and published some figures on the noise level of each case so as to provide those with a need for a quiet computer some information to make a reasonably informed choice.
The quietest computer I ever had on my desk was an industrial rackmount case (not a very desktop-space-friendly footprint but the HD in my usual desktop system had died) that included three 5-inch fans running at a slower speed: two in the front (the blew across the hard disks mounted behind them) and one in the rear behind the PS. They ran at a slower speed and were whisper quiet. The case was more expensive than the cheapo ones that are normally found today. I highly recommended a case with the larger fans if you want a quieter system.
Another source of noise are the hard disks. Once you get more than one in the system the noise level seems to get objectionable. I've got some older SCSI disks in one computer that don't ``whir'' so much as ``whine''. (A rackmount case full of these disks sounds less like a computer and more like a vacuum cleaner -- well, almost.) Replacing those disks with newer drives can help out a lot. Move the old ``whiners'' to that web server running in the basement.
If you find a good solution, let everyone know.
--
Hmmm, thirty days of community service for painting something on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the President's daughter got what, eight hours, of community service for underage drinking?
Weird.
--
Amazon's dynamic pricing failed, IMHO, becuase it turned the book/cd/etc buying experience into something akin to buying a car. The price you pay depends on which saleman you talk to or how successful you were in negotiating a better price. All in all, an experience that makes you feels as though you were ripped off or that there was a better price but that your bargaining skills were inadequate and no one likes that experience. Don't the airlines use something like dynamic pricing? I don't know of anyone who feels like they got the best possible or even a fair price on their airline tickets.
Just wait until Compaq and IBM owners start comparing notes and find out that they bought the same computers but at wildly difference prices. I wouldn't count on a consumer buying another computer from a vendor that adopts this pricing scheme.
--
Only if they're not married or don't have kids. Our kids are normally in bed by 8:00 so TLG was nice to unwind to. BTW, glad the high end of your definition of `young' includes guys my age -- though not by much. :-)
--
I'd prefer reruns of `The Muppet Show'.
--
The only thing worth watching on Friday night and now it's cancelled? Looks like I'll get more reading done now so I guess there's an upside after all.
(Sorry but `The Family Guy' was/is not funny.)
--
I thought this sort of thing could only happen in Saudia Arabia... or Utah.
--
Quotations from Ambrose Bierce's ``The Devil's Dictionary'' could be hazardous to your freedom as well.
Canada may not be a safe haven. Are we sure there aren't any obscure clauses in the NAFTA agreement that might apply here? And for the truly paranoid, there's this story on The Village Voice's web site.
--