housel · HackerTrans

3 months agodiscuss

I worked for him as well, from 1988 through 1990. He mentored me as I helped sysadmin various BSD machines the university was beta-testing (CCI Tahoe and Gould NP-1), and supervised my work fixing bugs in the Berkeley Pascal compiler. It was fun watching him put his early-model Motorola cell phone into service mode and tweak register values... while he was driving. And of course I enjoyed finding him in his office at all sorts of weird hours and listening to him rant about various technical topics.

housel

7 months agodiscuss

The ADM3a was just a UART chip, RAM chips, character ROMs, and a bunch of 74LS chips to glue it all together. No CPU, and no way to generate graphics.

housel

8 months agodiscuss

Given that it's an essential/definitional issue, I would have preferred that the author at least showed awareness of the differences between languages intended for marking up text and languages intended to represent data in a structured way.

Back when XML was first being developed, I was really anticipating having a standardized, easier-to-implement successor to SGML (which was hampered by its complexity and by the cost of the ISO standard) in the text markup space. It was that disappointing it ended up filling the vacuum in the space of serialized representations for for structured data, then getting rejected when it wasn't quite as suitable for that as alternatives such as JSON.

housel

8 months agodiscuss

Yes, we overlapped around then.

housel

8 months agodiscuss

I was a student part-time administrator/systems programmer at the Purdue Engineering Computer Network at the time. Our OS installs had enough local mods (and we had enough non-VAX, non-Sun architectures) that we were immune to some of the worm's modalities, but the sendmail debug mode exploit at least still caused a lot of consternation.

housel

9 months agodiscuss

"clang -Xclang -ast-dump=json" will take you partway there.

housel

4 years agodiscuss

I have a hard copy of this issue; it predated my subscription to Byte by a couple years, but I was able to purchase it as a back issue some time in the early 80s.

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