I was about to merely deflate the above joke by pointing out that
when the command line was invented, video terminals didn't exist, and you knew where to type by the position of the carriage or print head on the Teletype, Flexowriter, Selectric, etc. And the cursor (it there was one) was a clear plastic thing with a mark to show where the next character would strike -- the name derived from the similar sliding pointer on a slide rule.
Then I used my big dic to look up "cursor", and wanted to share what I found: "A part of a mathematical instrument, which slides backwards and forwards. 1594."
So the word "cursor", with something reasonably close to its current meaning, is over four centuries old!
Make Multics look like a pretty young thing.
On MIT's famed ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System),
the command processor -- the analogue of the shell -- was
the debugger, just enhanced with a few extra commands for logging in and such. Perhaps some slumming exITSer can explain further.
Currently, Sun's Solaris debugger command language is a ksh superset. I suppose you could use it as your login shell.
Face it, bash is not equivalent to the first shell used in Unix.
Indeed.
-r---wxrw- 1 root sys 954 Jan 18 1973 v1/bin/sh -rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 5888 May 14 1975 v6/bin/sh -rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 17310 May 5 1979 v7/bin/sh -rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 563624 Aug 1 1999/bin/bash
Another comparison: bash alone, not counting the shared library routines it needs, is bigger than all of the Sixth Edition kernel,/bin,/usr/bin, and/usr/games put together.
utility=log(size) is a charitable description of bash.
Re:A Warning to Christians--BSD Daemons and Satani
on
FreeBSD 4.2 Is Out
·
· Score: 3
Daemon bondage can be brought about... (sins of the flesh).
Rack-mount my hardware, finger(1) me, fsck(8) my raw partitions, mount(8) my file systems, abort(3) my child processes, chmod -R ugo=rw ~,.../etc,/etc.
The Bible makes it clear that there are daemons, or evil spirits, in the world that interfere in people's lives.
Yeah, had some trouble with rarpd(8) terminating; ended up putting the X terminals' IP addresses in NVRAM instead.
"There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire...
Like I'm leaving my network open to script kiddies.
... or that useth divination, or an observer of times,...
1:22AM up 28 days, 7:38, 1 user, load averages: 2.03, 0.71, 0.32 (Storm. Power cut outlasted the UPS. And just whose fault was that? "Act of God", they said.)
... a consulter with familiar spirits...
Aw, c'mon. It's not just BSD sysadmins who are driven to drink.
... or a wizard...
Well. Don't blame me when your universe crashes.
Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like
Yay, new Slashdot poll! I got 82%; how about you?
1. Compulsion to abuse animals or people;
Fuck you.
2. Sexual perversion and immorality (homosexuality, molestation,etc.);
See #1.
Also, counselors at CBN 700 Club can pray with you by telephone.
$4.99/minute. Have your credit card ready; will appear as "Bondage Daemons" on your statement. Must be 18 to call. For entertainment purposes only.
And the latest release of UNIX for the PDP11 is 2.11 BSD, still maintained. Just mentioning it so we can repeat these threads when OpenBSD reaches 2.11.
Did something very similar with sucker/lollipop sticks -- the rolled paper kind, not the hollow plastic ones -- cut into half inch pieces, with a pin through the centre, blown through a ballpoint pen barrel.
Also (though not at school) had some fibreglass tubes about 4ft long with inner diameter about 3/8 inch. Push-pins (the ones with the large cylinderish handles, like the cross-section of a rail) fired through would stick nicely in walls and similarly soft things.
Hungary produced (at least) PDP-8 and PDP-11 clones under the label "TPA". From the PDP-8 FAQ:
There was a decree that computer development in Hungary was to cease, with all computers to be purchased from the USSR. In response, the people at KFKI ceased developing computers and began developing "Stored Program Analyzers", the acronym for which is TPA in Hungarian.
Silly communists!
The venture capitalist's insistance on avoiding the term computer was based on the stereotype that computers were big and expensive, needing a computer center and a large staff; by using the term Programmable Data Processor, or PDP, DEC avoided this stereotype.
I like the following method, which has the additional advantage that we don't have to first understand how the brain works, 'only' how an individual neuron works. Build nanotechological artificial neurons, that can interface to other artificial neurons and to natural neurons as well. Build 'installers', each of which seeks out a single natural neuron, copies its entire state to the artificial neuron, kills the cell, and installs the artificial neuron in its place. Take a capsule full with each meal; in a year or so you'll have finished 'uploading' yourself into your new immortal robot brain, never have noticed any transition, and have no messy blob of meat left behind to argue that you're not really you.
SWPM, seeking mature, stable country. Must respect individuals rights such as freedom of expression, assembly, religion, freedom from self-incrimination, warrantless search and seizures, intimidation through unwaranted prosecution. No crime-against-no-person laws, please.
...
but some clueless moderator called it "offtopic".
And I'm copying it here in case no one puts it back.
The only mouse I've seen properly designed for three-button use is a Sun mouse... Anybody know if you can use one of these on a PC?
Look in a second-hand shop for an older Logitech mouse. The buttons are a little wider and shorter, but otherwise they look quite similar to older Sun mice. Serial and PS/2 versions exist, at least.
...
some easily-cracked-or-dented, hard-to-replace mouse pad.
Xerox, on the other hand, used optical mice whose pads are quite easy to replace, since they're just a black-and-white dot pattern. In case anyone has one of these around and doesn't know you don't need the original pad, this will do:
%!PS /x0 900 def/y0 x0 def/x1 14400 def/y1 18900 def /b 24 def % use 24 for 300dpi, 25 for 360dpi to avoid aliasing /s b b add def /sq { newpath dup b add 2 index b add dup 3 index moveto 1 index lineto 2 index exch lineto lineto closepath eofill } bind def y0 s y1 { x0 s x1 { 1 index sq } for } for showpage
Are there any, currently, that don't, besides purely optical ones?
I have a couple of old Hawley mice that use metal brushes instead. Anyone happen to know the interface for these? (They have a DE9 with an AUI-style slide lock.)
And what the hell was that round puck thing on RS6000 systems in '88-89? It didn't have a wheel and wasn't optical. It had two knobs that jittered underneath it... was that a friction sensor or something?
In the sense that a mouse ball is a friction sensor, yes.... DEC shipped similar mice during the late VAX / early MIPS period. The two things on the bottom are disks that are almost but not quite horizontal, touching the surface at one point, so that a disk would turn with horizontal motion and slip with vertical motion, and vice versa. Very nice because the contact surface stays outside the body of the mouse rather than carrying crap inside as balls do.
Apparently Honeywell used to sell a PC mouse with a similar mechanism.
Just for the hell of it, I rewrote true on my box at work in i386 assembly: pushl $0; movl $1,%eax; lcall 7,0. I'm proud to say this is the only i386 assembly code I've ever written. And I hereby place it in the public domain:-)
For some real excitement, though, see/usr/bin/clear on Solaris, or better still Unixware. It's "tput clear" preceded by twenty lines of copyright notices, including:
# Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation # All Rights Reserved # This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft # Corporation and should be treated as Confidential.
<pedantic>AT&T never had a System 5. They had a System V, though.</pedantic> It descended from System III, a suit-infected offshoot of V6 and V7; nobody used System V except due to corporate politics. (Nobody used System IV at all.) It didn't originally have TCP/IP or even paged virtual memory (just swapping entire processes).
I did like RFS though.
The people who claim BSD is real Unix just weren't there I guess.
Like the bunch at Bell Labs who based Eighth Edition off 4.1BSD?
Well, of course not. No current UNIX(TM) contains original Unix code. It was PDP-7 assembly code, after all. No current Unix can contain code from anything earlier than Seventh Edition without it having been significantly rewritten, since the C language changed substantially between V6 and V7. Original code is not the point; the point is the continuous line of descent from {V6,V7,32V} through {2,4}BSD to 4.4BSD to the current free BSDs.
and is not certified as UNIX by the Open group
Who cares what the suits say? By their criteria, no real (i.e. Bell Labs Research) Unix would qualify as such.
Current free BSDs' kernel sources contain some AT&T copyright notices, by the way. If you really, really care how much code hasn't changed much since (say) Seventh Edition, you can now get the latter from SCO for free.
check out the excellent website Ask Tog.... Which is faster, the mouse or keyboard (hint: you'll need a stopwatch to believe this one).
You won't need a stopwatch, only a willingness to uncritically swallow an "executive summary". Stopwatches appear to be the rarer of the two.
Tognazzini wrote:
The test I did I did several years ago, frankly, I entered into for the express purpose of letting cursor keys win, just to prove they could in some cases be faster than the mouse.
Note, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".
I typed in a paragraph of text, then replaced every instance of an "e" with a vertical bar (|). The test subject's task was to replace every | with an "e.".... The average time for the cursor keys was 99.43 seconds, for the mouse, 50.22 seconds.
Never mind the absurdity of reporting the times to four significant digits. He said, again, "cursor keys", not "keyboard". He had the users move the text cursor with the arrow keys alone, from one "|" to the next.
Here's another way to do it, using the keyboard. Got your stopwatch?
?^$?;//s/|/e/g
Six seconds, independent of the length of the paragraph or number of changes. (That's ed(1); "ed is the standard text editor".)
Even if you constrain the user to move the cursor to each "|", one by one, the keyboard is faster: for instance, in vi(1), "{/|^[re" and then repeat "n." But why would you make the user do that? That's not just ignoring the utility of the keyboard, but of the computer itself. So the mouse is faster than the arrow keys at performing task X forty-two times? If you use the computer as a fucking computer instead of crippling it to the level of a typewriter, then you don't do it forty-two times; you do it once. Tognazzini's test suffers from Mac tunnel vision.
It might be argued that automated repetition defeats the true purpose of the test -- that it isn't about replacing "|" with "e" forty-two times, that that isn't a real-world editing task but just a stand-in for forty-two different tasks.
Better for the keyboard! A keyboard does have keys other than arrow keys -- it has keys that bear the very same characters that appear in text. There is an obvious correspondence between a character on the keyboard and a character in the document, one about as "intuitive" as you can get. This lets the user press the keys to locate the corresponding character in the document, either individually, or sequentially to magically form composites we call "words" that have meaning within the user's task.
Using the keyboard, the user can have the computer find the correct location, rather than being forced to do it himself, visually, with the possibility of error. What if Tognazzini's test had not involved finding the vertical bars, which are visually distinctive in text, but, say, replacing "blue" with "green" throughout a ten-page document? How many instances would have been missed? Do you want to cut the blue wire, or the green one? Are you sure?
(Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say "|" was visually distinctive? Here you are, user: take your mouse and change every "|" in this Helvetica paragraph. Don't touch any "I" or "l" or "1", though.)
The mouse ignores the semantic content of the characters and symbols, words and keywords, blocks and sentences.... It even ignores the symbols themselves; it wanders haphazardly over a picture of the document (a static picture, if you're lucky; ever try using a mouse to select something that doesn't hold still because the window is being written to?)
Revised Executive Summary:the mouse is faster than the keyboard that has nothing but four arrow keys, when errors don't matter. Oh, wait. That has qualifying clauses, which makes it too hard for an executive to understand. When they are therefore ignored, we'll be back where we started. However, real keyboards don't actually have just four keys, and errors do matter, so we can rephrase. Revised^2 Executive Summary:the mouse isn't faster than the keyboard. Better, but that negation might still go over management's heads. Oh well, that's why we techies get paid the big bucks. Six is less than 50.22, so: Revised^3 Executive Summary:the keyboard is faster than the mouse.
I'd like to lock Raskin and Pike together in a room until they'd agree on a user interface design.
Pike's UIs have a wonderful minimalist elegance combined with expressive power, irredeemably marred by dependence on a mouse pointer. Raskin has good ideas about that (it's much faster to press a few keys than to move a hand to the pointing device, find the pointer on the screen, move the pointer to the target, click, move the pointer.... wake me up when you're through) and a number of other UI issues (notwithstanding a slight obsession with incremental searching).
How would a mouseless ACME work?
Re:But which Intel Architecture???
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 1
Not "designed from the ground up" for the 432 or 960XA, then? Now that might be fun to play with....
Assuming it covers the same things as the previous 'Ancient UNIX' license, no, it doesn't include System V. It covers up to everything up to 32V, including Seventh Edition etc. This is enough to cover the encumbered parts of 2BSD and 4BSD as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I was about to merely deflate the above joke by pointing out that when the command line was invented, video terminals didn't exist, and you knew where to type by the position of the carriage or print head on the Teletype, Flexowriter, Selectric, etc. And the cursor (it there was one) was a clear plastic thing with a mark to show where the next character would strike -- the name derived from the similar sliding pointer on a slide rule.
Then I used my big dic to look up "cursor", and wanted to share what I found: "A part of a mathematical instrument, which slides backwards and forwards. 1594." So the word "cursor", with something reasonably close to its current meaning, is over four centuries old! Make Multics look like a pretty young thing.
Neat.
On MIT's famed ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System), the command processor -- the analogue of the shell -- was the debugger, just enhanced with a few extra commands for logging in and such. Perhaps some slumming exITSer can explain further.
Currently, Sun's Solaris debugger command language is a ksh superset. I suppose you could use it as your login shell.
Indeed.
-r---wxrw- 1 root sys 954 Jan 18 1973 v1/bin/sh /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 5888 May 14 1975 v6/bin/sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 17310 May 5 1979 v7/bin/sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 563624 Aug 1 1999
Another comparison: bash alone, not counting the shared library routines it needs, is bigger than all of the Sixth Edition kernel, /bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/games put together.
utility=log(size) is a charitable description of bash.
Daemon bondage can be brought about ... (sins of the flesh).
Rack-mount my hardware, finger(1) me, fsck(8) my raw partitions, mount(8) my file systems, abort(3) my child processes, chmod -R ugo=rw ~,... /etc, /etc.
The Bible makes it clear that there are daemons, or evil spirits, in the world that interfere in people's lives.
Yeah, had some trouble with rarpd(8) terminating; ended up putting the X terminals' IP addresses in NVRAM instead.
"There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire ...
Like I'm leaving my network open to script kiddies.
1:22AM up 28 days, 7:38, 1 user, load averages: 2.03, 0.71, 0.32
(Storm. Power cut outlasted the UPS. And just whose fault was that? "Act of God", they said.)
Aw, c'mon. It's not just BSD sysadmins who are driven to drink.
Well. Don't blame me when your universe crashes.
Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like
Yay, new Slashdot poll! I got 82%; how about you?
1. Compulsion to abuse animals or people;
Fuck you.
2. Sexual perversion and immorality (homosexuality, molestation,etc.);
See #1.
Also, counselors at CBN 700 Club can pray with you by telephone.
$4.99/minute. Have your credit card ready; will appear as "Bondage Daemons" on your statement. Must be 18 to call. For entertainment purposes only.
And the latest release of UNIX for the PDP11 is 2.11 BSD, still maintained. Just mentioning it so we can repeat these threads when OpenBSD reaches 2.11.
Did something very similar with sucker/lollipop sticks -- the rolled paper kind, not the hollow plastic ones -- cut into half inch pieces, with a pin through the centre, blown through a ballpoint pen barrel.
Also (though not at school) had some fibreglass tubes about 4ft long with inner diameter about 3/8 inch. Push-pins (the ones with the large cylinderish handles, like the cross-section of a rail) fired through would stick nicely in walls and similarly soft things.
Hungary produced (at least) PDP-8 and PDP-11 clones under the label "TPA". From the PDP-8 FAQ:
Silly communists!
Silly capitalists!
Trick question. Unix mv doesn't have a -v option; that's another embrace-and-extend gnuisance.
"By 1977, the Arpanet employed several informal standards for the text messages (mail) sent among its host computers...."
Here. You're welcome.
I like the following method, which has the additional advantage that we don't have to first understand how the brain works, 'only' how an individual neuron works. Build nanotechological artificial neurons, that can interface to other artificial neurons and to natural neurons as well. Build 'installers', each of which seeks out a single natural neuron, copies its entire state to the artificial neuron, kills the cell, and installs the artificial neuron in its place. Take a capsule full with each meal; in a year or so you'll have finished 'uploading' yourself into your new immortal robot brain, never have noticed any transition, and have no messy blob of meat left behind to argue that you're not really you.
eswan (User #16407) wrote:
... but some clueless moderator called it "offtopic". And I'm copying it here in case no one puts it back.
Are there any beautiful new computers?
I think my 11/45 is beautiful, though, and it's in a rack; I'm not sure it could even support its own weight otherwise.
So, what computers are beautiful?
Well, my Lisp machine has a three-button mouse....
(So, did a MacIvory come with its own keyboard and mouse?)
Look in a second-hand shop for an older Logitech mouse. The buttons are a little wider and shorter, but otherwise they look quite similar to older Sun mice. Serial and PS/2 versions exist, at least.
Xerox, on the other hand, used optical mice whose pads are quite easy to replace, since they're just a black-and-white dot pattern. In case anyone has one of these around and doesn't know you don't need the original pad, this will do:
%!PSy0 s y1 { x0 s x1 { 1 index sq } for } for
showpage
Are there any, currently, that don't, besides purely optical ones?
I have a couple of old Hawley mice that use metal brushes instead. Anyone happen to know the interface for these? (They have a DE9 with an AUI-style slide lock.)
In the sense that a mouse ball is a friction sensor, yes.... DEC shipped similar mice during the late VAX / early MIPS period. The two things on the bottom are disks that are almost but not quite horizontal, touching the surface at one point, so that a disk would turn with horizontal motion and slip with vertical motion, and vice versa. Very nice because the contact surface stays outside the body of the mouse rather than carrying crap inside as balls do.
Apparently Honeywell used to sell a PC mouse with a similar mechanism.
Just for the hell of it, I rewrote true on my box at work in i386 assembly: pushl $0; movl $1,%eax; lcall 7,0. I'm proud to say this is the only i386 assembly code I've ever written. And I hereby place it in the public domain :-)
For some real excitement, though, see /usr/bin/clear on Solaris, or better still Unixware. It's "tput clear" preceded by twenty lines of copyright notices, including:
# Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation# All Rights Reserved
# This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft
# Corporation and should be treated as Confidential.
I did like RFS though.
Like the bunch at Bell Labs who based Eighth Edition off 4.1BSD?
(IKIHBT. IAHAND. HTH.)
_Well, of course not. No current UNIX(TM) contains original Unix code. It was PDP-7 assembly code, after all. No current Unix can contain code from anything earlier than Seventh Edition without it having been significantly rewritten, since the C language changed substantially between V6 and V7. Original code is not the point; the point is the continuous line of descent from {V6,V7,32V} through {2,4}BSD to 4.4BSD to the current free BSDs.
Who cares what the suits say? By their criteria, no real (i.e. Bell Labs Research) Unix would qualify as such.
Current free BSDs' kernel sources contain some AT&T copyright notices, by the way. If you really, really care how much code hasn't changed much since (say) Seventh Edition, you can now get the latter from SCO for free.
Yes, IKIHBT, and yes, IAHAND, thank you. HTH.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
You won't need a stopwatch, only a willingness to uncritically swallow an "executive summary". Stopwatches appear to be the rarer of the two.
Tognazzini wrote:
Note, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".
Never mind the absurdity of reporting the times to four significant digits. He said, again, "cursor keys", not "keyboard". He had the users move the text cursor with the arrow keys alone, from one "|" to the next.
Here's another way to do it, using the keyboard. Got your stopwatch?
Six seconds, independent of the length of the paragraph or number of changes. (That's ed(1); "ed is the standard text editor".)
Even if you constrain the user to move the cursor to each "|", one by one, the keyboard is faster: for instance, in vi(1), "{/|^[re" and then repeat "n." But why would you make the user do that? That's not just ignoring the utility of the keyboard, but of the computer itself. So the mouse is faster than the arrow keys at performing task X forty-two times? If you use the computer as a fucking computer instead of crippling it to the level of a typewriter, then you don't do it forty-two times; you do it once. Tognazzini's test suffers from Mac tunnel vision.
It might be argued that automated repetition defeats the true purpose of the test -- that it isn't about replacing "|" with "e" forty-two times, that that isn't a real-world editing task but just a stand-in for forty-two different tasks.
Better for the keyboard! A keyboard does have keys other than arrow keys -- it has keys that bear the very same characters that appear in text. There is an obvious correspondence between a character on the keyboard and a character in the document, one about as "intuitive" as you can get. This lets the user press the keys to locate the corresponding character in the document, either individually, or sequentially to magically form composites we call "words" that have meaning within the user's task.
Using the keyboard, the user can have the computer find the correct location, rather than being forced to do it himself, visually, with the possibility of error. What if Tognazzini's test had not involved finding the vertical bars, which are visually distinctive in text, but, say, replacing "blue" with "green" throughout a ten-page document? How many instances would have been missed? Do you want to cut the blue wire, or the green one? Are you sure?
(Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say "|" was visually distinctive? Here you are, user: take your mouse and change every "|" in this Helvetica paragraph. Don't touch any "I" or "l" or "1", though.)
The mouse ignores the semantic content of the characters and symbols, words and keywords, blocks and sentences.... It even ignores the symbols themselves; it wanders haphazardly over a picture of the document (a static picture, if you're lucky; ever try using a mouse to select something that doesn't hold still because the window is being written to?)
Revised Executive Summary: the mouse is faster than the keyboard that has nothing but four arrow keys, when errors don't matter. Oh, wait. That has qualifying clauses, which makes it too hard for an executive to understand. When they are therefore ignored, we'll be back where we started. However, real keyboards don't actually have just four keys, and errors do matter, so we can rephrase. Revised^2 Executive Summary: the mouse isn't faster than the keyboard. Better, but that negation might still go over management's heads. Oh well, that's why we techies get paid the big bucks. Six is less than 50.22, so: Revised^3 Executive Summary: the keyboard is faster than the mouse.
I'd like to lock Raskin and Pike together in a room until they'd agree on a user interface design.
Pike's UIs have a wonderful minimalist elegance combined with expressive power, irredeemably marred by dependence on a mouse pointer. Raskin has good ideas about that (it's much faster to press a few keys than to move a hand to the pointing device, find the pointer on the screen, move the pointer to the target, click, move the pointer.... wake me up when you're through) and a number of other UI issues (notwithstanding a slight obsession with incremental searching).
How would a mouseless ACME work?
Not "designed from the ground up" for the 432 or 960XA, then? Now that might be fun to play with....
Assuming it covers the same things as the previous 'Ancient UNIX' license, no, it doesn't include System V. It covers up to everything up to 32V, including Seventh Edition etc. This is enough to cover the encumbered parts of 2BSD and 4BSD as well.