For some reason, more historical links this week than usual.
- Thinking Forth. It sounds to be – though I haven’t read it yet – one of those books that transcends the target language. (via)
- Fuzix, a “new” OS. (They should just try something else small, like RetroBSD.) (via)
- The Best Small Computer in the World – 1968. (pdf, via)
- Vim after 11 years. (via)
- Terms of Service. I have other comics from the artist. (via)
- Recalculating Odds of RAID5 URE Failure.
- A brief history of spam and email crypto, from a former GMail worker.
- Kerberos Papers and Documentation (via)
- Amazon Echo, which continues the long trend of companies reinventing existing open source projects and making them creepier.
- Or making lovable things annoying. Seriously, phone alerts and “where are you?” alerts from a teddy bear? I hate it when people pepper me with that. (via)
- Noisy dead satellites. (via)
- Old UNIX releases/source
- Building a 10BASE5 “Thick Ethernet” network. I just barely remember seeing this hardware in the wild, so to speak. It was awful. (via)
- The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing (via) Lose some time on this one.
- Forth in the USSR. (PDF, via)
Unrelated link of the week: Cartozia Tales. It’s a print comic in a limited series. Many stories, many artists. I’ve been getting the issues and it’s a lot of fun. Here’s an interview with the person coordinating the whole thing.
The echo does seem creepy as all hell….but I can admit there are times that the vocal timer and shopping list stuff would be cool. If it was just that, I think I’d actually like it more.
I used forth like VM in several projects, never had that book; I have “FORTH: a text and a reference”. I did find an earlier release of the PDF and refered to when porting a version of EForth.
DG Nova, remember that – the Cobol system allowed multi-user access to its programs. We had a text editor in Cobol so we could make source changes during work time so as to minimise the down time when switching to single user for compiling.
There was a microprocessor version used in the DG MPT/100 a desktop computer – complete with Fortran compiler. It had no memory protection and when combined with Fortran’s pass by reference allowed constants to be overwritten far too easily. It’s a nasty bug when “n = 1” does not work as expected!