From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!udel!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!halbert Fri Mar 4 15:30:22 1994 Flags-MM: 000000000401 Article: 35 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!udel!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!halbert From: halbert@world.std.com (Daniel C Halbert) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: The early history of the "more" command Date: 4 Mar 1994 14:59:11 GMT Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Lines: 61 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: bio5.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio5.acpub.duke.edu Status: O [I mentioned this where I work, and was inspired to write it down. --Dan] I was a first-year graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1978. I had been an undergraduate at MIT, and had used the ITS timesharing systems there, which ran on PDP-10's. ITS put a "--MORE--" at the bottom of the screen when one typed out files; you pressed the space bar to continue. At Berkeley, we'd just gotten our first VAX UNIX system, though there were already PDP-11 UNIX systems. There was a very simple program through which one could pipe stdout to do screen-at-a-time output. It rang the terminal bell after printing 24 lines, and waited for a carriage return. It was called "cr3". My guess is that in some version of UNIX, someone had hacked a page-at-a-time output mode into the tty output drivers. Using stty, one could already say "cr0", "cr1", and "cr2", which added different amounts of delay when printing a carriage return, for the benefit of slow printing terminals. "cr3" was probably unused, and the page-at-a-time mode was piggybacked on it. But our version of UNIX didn't have this "cr3" stty mode; instead we had the "cr3" program that provided equivalent functionality. Many of the terminals at Berkeley were Lear-Siegler ADM-3 and ADM-3A "dumb" terminals. Both models (or maybe just the ADM-3 - I don't remember) rang the terminal bell when the cursor advanced to near the right margin, as a typewriter bell would. Unfortunately, they rang the bell on output as well as keyboard input, which made for incessant beeping. It was particularly maddening in a room full of terminals. So most of the bell speakers had been disconnected. Since "cr3" rang the terminal bell to indicate that a full page had been output, you couldn't tell when it was waiting for input on those muted terminals. The problem was exacerbated by the slow response time of the overloaded UNIX systems. So I wrote a simple "cr3"-like program, but had it print "--More--" instead of ringing the bell. I had it accept space instead of carriage return to continue, because that was what I was used to from ITS. I also made it take multiple filenames, and had it print lines of colons ("::::::::::::") before and after it printed each filename. I named the program "more". This was a daring move at the time, since it was such a long name for a UNIX command, and was also a real English word. Subsequently, my friends and fellow graduate students Eric Shienbrood and Geoff Peck greatly expanded the program, adding all kinds of command line options and different possible responses to the "--More--" prompt. It was of course distributed in the BSD versions of UNIX. Some time later, Don Norman wrote an article for Datamation entitled "The Trouble with UNIX", in which he complained, among other things, about the cryptic nature of most UNIX command names, citing "more" as an example. I never did tell him that I thought "more" was a great improvement over "cr3". I was later amused to see "more" appear in MS-DOS (and perhaps even before, in CP/M?). Dan Halbert halbert@world.std.com From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!atkinson Tue Mar 29 12:37:27 CST 1994 Article: 68 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!atkinson From: atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Ran Atkinson) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: Memories of USENET and the Years Before The Renaming Date: 21 Mar 1994 20:59:19 GMT Organization: Naval Research Laboratory, DC Lines: 27 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: References: <2mg6p3$dnv@news.duke.edu> <2mgcrp$fq5@news.duke.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio5.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio5.acpub.duke.edu Status: O In article <2mg6p3$dnv@news.duke.edu> jfurr@acpub.duke.edu (Joel Furr) writes: >As moderator of comp.society.folklore, I'd really like to see some >correspondence here in the group about the years of USENET before the >renaming. When all the groups were either net.* or mod.* and the Alt Wars >were not even born. I was on the net beginning in late 1985 at uvaee, though I posted less in those days. I recall fairly serious TCP/IP protocol discussions that included a number of the _real_ wizards that aren't seen much these days. The highly technical protocol discussions are rare on net news and are mostly found on semi-closed or closed mailing lists these days. Clarifications on C would come periodically from dmr@alice back then and many of us saved such postings in hardcopy form for reference. I'm pretty sure that folks like Chris Torek and Doug Gwyn were very active in net.unix-wizards back then. Both are still around but are perhaps less visible these days. I still see Steve Bellovin posting to the net occasionally and he is perhaps _the_ original USENET user. Overall I have to say that the signal/noise ratio really has deteriorated significantly, particularly since the comp.society.women debacle (which drove many of the more wizardly folks to spend their time on matters more productive than net news). Ran atkinson@itd.nrl.navy.mil From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!vixie Tue Mar 29 12:39:50 CST 1994 Article: 72 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!vixie From: paul@vix.com (Paul A Vixie) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: Memories of USENET and the Years Before The Renaming Date: 23 Mar 1994 03:28:38 GMT Organization: Vixie Enterprises Lines: 30 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: References: <199403201132.DAA16197@mail.netcom.com> <2mi7t0$5i5@louie.udel.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio2.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio2.acpub.duke.edu Status: O I offer these snippets: When I posted my first netnews article in 1984 or so, the net was small enough that Erik (Fair, then working for a now-defunct computer company over in the east bay) noticed me and sent me mail, welcoming me and asking what ``politik'' (the host I'd posted from) was. What I remember about the Great Renaming was not the Renaming itself but the excellent, Excellent, __Excellent__, April 1 forgery (back then we only forged articles on April 1, you see) that came out the following year. It was the kind of forgery that made me wish I'd thought of it, and then some. Then there was the day I interviewed at Britton-Lee over in Berkeley, and during the interview we got around to talking about the burgeoning daily bandwidth of Usenet. We jointly theorized that it would be up to a megabyte a day within a few months. I remember where I was and what I was doing when, after a great flame war had raged on news.software.b regarding the relative merits of B News and C News, finally Rick Adams stunned everyone by entering and exiting the debate with a typical three word post (no punctuation): "bnews must die". Speaking of that, I still remember how angry John Gilmore was when B News 2.11 came out with a copyright from the "Usenet Community Trust". Oh, the outrage! And who can forget the argument between Shasta!reid vs. the world, over whether the capital "S" in his uucp name was "legal" or not? Does everybody remember Notes? "Orphaned response"... From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!cpg.trs.reuter.com!heiby Tue Mar 29 12:40:35 CST 1994 Article: 74 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!cpg.trs.reuter.com!heiby From: heiby@richsun.cpg.trs.reuter.com (Ron Heiby (Consultant)) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: Memories of USENET and the Years Before The Renaming Date: 23 Mar 1994 03:34:33 GMT Organization: Reuter Client Site Systems, Inc. Lines: 70 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: References: <199403201132.DAA16197@mail.netcom.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio2.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio2.acpub.duke.edu Status: O I started with Usenet in 1984. Before that, I'd been on an Internet connected system, and was an active reader (and sometimes participant) in several Internet mailing lists. Sometime, probably early in 1985, I became the administrator of a Backbone machine named "cuae2" at AT&T. In those days, the Internet was still "small", and almost no Usenet used it for transit. Instead, nearly all of the news was sent via (mostly) dialup phone lines between a number of well connected systems called "The Backbone". The administrators of these systems were affectionately known as "The Backbone Cabal". We saw that the net was growing at an astounding rate, and decided that some changes needed to be made to let it survive a bit longer. We saw that many of the problems were related to the name-space of the network. All of the newsgroups that were non-local were named "net.Something", except the groups that contained the messages from some of the Internet mailing lists which were named "fa.Something". The "fa" stood for "From ARPANet". "ARPANet" is what The Internet used to be called. At about this same time, a new version of B News provided the capability to have "moderated" newsgroups, which were named "mod.Something". This scheme meant that not only were readers having an increasingly difficult time figuring out where to find what they were looking for, but more and more posters were posting their articles to the wrong newsgroups. Also, site administrators who wanted to take only a partial feed were having a harder time maintaining their subscription files. Another problem that was seen was the increasing amount of "flaming" that was going on. We decided (The Backbone Cabal) that even *having* a "net.flame" newsgroup was a tacit statement that flaming was acceptable behavior. So, it was decided that in the renaming, net.flame would flame out. The new naming structure was developed with two primary goals. One was to make it easier for readers and posters to figure out where information related to their needs should be found. (net.sun-spots had nothing to do with solar astronomy.) The other goal was to make it easier for administrators to set their systems up to subscribe to the categories of news that were appropriate to their site. The "talk" groups were created on the basis that that they didn't really belong in the Usenet system at all, being groups where people with strongly held beliefs simply argued with each other endlessly (and voluminously) to no effect. We found that most of the Backbone was already refusing to pass most or all of these groups. Renaming them into the "talk" hierarchy meant that we all (and administrators of a similar mind) could refuse to pass the non-information more easily. Although most of the work involved with renaming the newsgroups took place via EMail, some final things were hashed out by much of The Backbone Cabal at a Usenix conference just before the renaming was put into place. We met for breakfast one day, and had further meetings in a more out-of-the-way lounge on the mezzanine level of the hotel. At the end of 1986 and beginning of 1987, I left AT&T to work at Motorola. Within a short time after my departure, AT&T decided that "cuae2" should retire from its duties as a Backbone site (rather abruptly, too). Although I had not yet established much of a system yet at Motorola, I was able to take over the Backbone links that had been going to "cuae2" and continue to serve sites in the Chicagoland area. A year ago, I left Motorola. A few weeks ago (and with plenty of warning) Motorola decided that my system there, "mcdchg", should no longer be active in passing Usenet. Ten years ago, we saw quite a few cases where a very well connected site passed quickly into oblivion when the primary administrator changed jobs. In several cases, this caused quite a "stir" on the net. Today, particularly with NNTP news connections, there is almost no widespread dependence on any one site. So, a site dropping out of Usenet no longer has any but very local consequences. BTW, It was "The Great Renaming", not just "The Renaming". Ron Heiby. From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!elm!bereza Sun Apr 10 20:55:33 CDT 1994 Article: 126 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!elm!bereza From: bereza@elm.csis.gvsu.edu (Bill Bereza) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: the evolutionary line of baudot Date: 10 Apr 1994 21:48:10 GMT Organization: Grand Valley State University, Allendale MI Lines: 82 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <1994Apr10.055800.197@beech.csis.gvsu.edu> Reply-To: jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) NNTP-Posting-Host: bio4.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio4.acpub.duke.edu Status: O Here's an interesting article I thought should be reposted here. Enjoy. From: jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: the lost evolutionary line of baudot Date: 8 Apr 1994 21:55:30 GMT >From article , by beacom@phenoo.physics.wisc.edu (John Beacom): > in a book called "how networks work" (from i think pc magazine), i > read that the first keypad interfaces to computers were essentially > a pair of devices: something like an electric typewriter for typing > to the computer, and some kind of line printer for receiving output. The first keyboard interfaces to computers, back in the late 1940's, tended to use flexowriters. These were essentially electric typewriters, with one type-bar per character, with attached paper tape reader and punch as well as with a massive parallel interface plug that used 110 volt logic levels to run the relays. I have one at home (early 1960's vintage). Flexowriters typically used a code that resembled baudot, but I'm not sure of the early ones because mine is a bit later, and it can both read and punch 8 channel paper tape. The code set is unknown because I have yet to get the reader and punch to work. > The teletype reportedly sent baudot codes to the computer. The word Teletype is a trademark of Teletype Corporation, a sometimes subsidiary of Western Union; they made a number of machines, using a number of character sets. The machines they made for the news wire services were baudot machines. They also made machines that used a 7 level code that was the ancestor of ASCII. The Teletype model 33 was the canonical ASCII terminal device used by most timesharing systems throughout the 1960's and into the early 1970's. > goes on to say that when the first glass terminals came out, they were > called "glass teletypes" (hence the unix name tty - teletype). The first terminals on UNIX included a number of real Teletype, model ASR 33. I know, I was there. All but 2 of the terminals in the Murray Hill Computer Center's terminal room in the summer of 1973 were Teletype Model 33s. Those two were GE Terminet 1200's, with funky home-made add-on boards to handle the line-turnaround protocols needed with the then available modems for 1200 baud service. The Diablo HyType came out at about the same time, and when they started getting these, we thought they were really neat. Yes, "glass TTY" terminals were available, but they cost alot more than ASR 33 teletypes. > ok, decades later, most terminal-computer communication is in ascii. ASCII (or the predecessor ASR 33 code) was widely used throughout the 1960's. DEC used it for all their timesharing systems from the start. Honeywell minicomputers, SDS computers, essentially everyone involved with early timesharing systems used it. CDC, IBM, Burroughs and the other mainframe builders didn't, but not because they used baudot. Instead, each had their own code. Given that the input was by punched cards and the output by line printers, with any console terminal being custom made by a high priced manufacturer, there was no reason to use a standard like Baudot. > what's interesting to me is that the baudot line didn't die out. we > have a modern baudot device right here - a tdd (telecommunications > device for the deaf). actually, the preferred name is the original > one - tty. Ah, but there's a reason for that. Most of the teletypes in the world prior to the 1960's were used by the wire services, with only a few being used for experimental computing applications. Every time a newspaper upgraded to a newer model, they had to do something with their surplus machines, and some time in the 1960's or 1970's, they hit on the idea of donating their machines to the deaf. Remember that the wire services used to use baudot code. The result was the emergence of baudot as the standard for telecommunications devices for the deaf. Most early TDD machines were mechanically the baudot analog of the model 33 teletype. I don't know the number, because I stay away from such monsters. Doug Jones jones@cs.uiowa.edu From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!maple!bereza Mon Apr 11 14:29:54 CDT 1994 Article: 129 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!maple!bereza From: bereza@maple.csis.gvsu.edu (Bill Bereza) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: [alt.folklore.computers] ILLIAC 5-level code Followup-To: comp.society.folklore Date: 11 Apr 1994 15:17:01 GMT Organization: Grand Valley State University, Allendale MI Lines: 76 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <1994Apr11.151338.20351@beech.csis.gvsu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio7.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio7.acpub.duke.edu Status: O Another great repost from a.f.c. From: jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jone) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: ILLIAC 5-level code Date: 11 Apr 1994 13:48:52 GMT With all the discussion of old character sets, Baudot, and whatnot, I poked through my antique collection and found my copy of The ILLIAC Miniature Manual by John Halton Oct 22 1958 U of Illinois Digital Computer Lab file no 260. On page 3, this gives the character set used by ILLIAC I on 5-level paper tape. Here it is, in its full glory: | Characters |n for 92 Tape Holes | F/S L/S | Orders ----------------------------------- o 0 P 2F o O 1 Q 66F o O 2 W 130F o OO 3 E 194F oO 4 R 258F oO O 5 T 322F oOO 6 Y 386F oOOO 7 U 450F Oo 8 I 514F Oo O 9 O 578F Oo O + K 642F Oo OO - S 706F OoO N N 770F OoO O J J 834F OoOO F F 898F OoOOO L L 962F O o Delay Delay 3F O o O $(Tab) D 67F O o O CR/LF CR/LF 131F O o OO ( B 195F O oO L/S=Letter-Shift 259F O oO O , V 323F O oOO ) A 387F O oOOO / X 451F OOo Delay Delay 515F OOo O = G 579F OOo O . M 643F OOo OO F/S=Figure-Shift 707F OOoO ' H 771F OOoO O : C 835F OOoOO x Z 899F OOoOOO Space Space 963F On page 5, there is more explanation: 5. Input and Output are normally through 5-hole teleprinter-tape. See Order-Code and Tape-Code for details. Note that CR/LF (O o O ) and Tab (O o O) [sic] must be followed by Delay (O o , or OOo ), on output, to allow carriage time to move. When the output-switch is on 'C.R.T.', output is switched to the Cathode-Ray Tube Display. Three tubes are provided (in parallel); two for visual use and one for photographic recording.... Needless to say, CRT output didn't use the same character set; in fact, it didn't use any character set. You had to illuminate one point at a time on the display screen, under software control. Doug Jones jones@cs.uiowa.edu From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!m1b Fri Apr 15 13:45:57 CDT 1994 Article: 141 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!m1b From: m1b@ssd.ray.com (Joe Barone) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Powder Milk Biscuits Date: 14 Apr 1994 15:55:33 GMT Organization: Raytheon Submarine Signal Directorate Lines: 95 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: bio4.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio4.acpub.duke.edu Status: O All the reminiscing about Usenet from way back when and the kgbvax forgery reminded me of the infamous Powder Milk Biscuit postings (at least it was infamous around these parts!). I've included the messages that I have been hoarding for over ten years. Even back then, stuff was being posted into the wrong newsgroups! It's interesting to note the date of the posting and the date my site received them. The article-ID numbers are amazing since they are rather low and so simple looking. I've removed some of the more mundane headers. Enjoy. Joe Barone m1b@ssd.ray.com -------------------------- From: got@houxf.UUCP Newsgroups: net.news Subject: On being shy Date: Wed, 28-Dec-83 09:53:24 EST Date-Received: Wed, 4-Jan-84 11:32:38 EST Article-I.D.: houxf.551 Organization: Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ Some guys make it sound so simple to ask a girl out on a date. I'm 27 and I have never been out on a date. I used to think that this only happened to someone with severe problems like a retarded or deformed person. I think of myself sometimes as the nicest guy who has never been out on a date. There is nothing really wrong with me except for the fact that I'm shy I guess. Yet although I am like this, I'm always observing other people and so I feel I know what I like and don't like regarding girls. It seems that most guys all that they really care about is getting laid. I'm sure it's nice, but it is not that important to me right now. I'd like a girl to be with alot; to enjoy being with not just to have sex with. I also feel that the reason I have never been out is because subconciously or maybe consciously, I'm looking for a girl who is like me in some ways. You know, someone who doesn't date much and who doesn't have alot of friends so that she would want to spend more time with me than her friends. Now say for example I do see someone I'd like to ask out, but I don't know the person. I just know who the person is. What should I do. How do I start a conversation? When? Where? By the time you take into consideration all that, the little chance that I might have had is gone. It always seems like the wrong time or it seems like she doesn't notice me. What if she is walking down the hall towards me. I'm alone but she isn't. So since she is not alone, she doesn't notice me. Should I try to say hello anyway, or might I embarass her in front of her friends. Maybe I am just thinking too much aout trivial things. It seems like I'm trying too hard and too little at the same time. I don't know. What do you people think about all this. Any suggestions? -------------------------- From: mas@ecsvax.UUCP Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: On being shy Date: Thu, 29-Dec-83 21:27:59 EST Date-Received: Wed, 4-Jan-84 11:40:02 EST Article-I.D.: ecsvax.1764 Try eating Powdermilk Biscuits. They give shy persons the strength to get up in the morning and do what needs to be done. Goodness they're tasty! -------------------------- From: tower@inmet.UUCP Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: On being shy - (nf) Date: Tue, 3-Jan-84 05:50:15 EST Date-Received: Mon, 9-Jan-84 12:14:03 EST Article-I.D.: inmet.670 Move this conversation to net.singles! -len tower harpo!inmet!tower Cambridge, MA -------------------------- From: brad@bradley.UUCP Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: On being shy - (nf) Date: Sat, 7-Jan-84 04:42:02 EST Posted: Sat Jan 7 04:42:02 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 12-Jan-84 06:22:20 EST Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.4804 Move him to /dev/null!! From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!frip!andrew Sat Apr 23 15:22:12 CDT 1994 Article: 147 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!frip!andrew From: andrew@frip.wv.tek.com (Andrew Klossner) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Dec Wars Date: 16 Apr 1994 18:48:31 GMT Organization: Tektronix, Inc, Wilsonville, OR, USA Lines: 547 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <2omou4$o63@gazette.wv.tek.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: bio5.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio5.acpub.duke.edu Status: O If you're going to repost the Power Milk Biscuits thread, you have to replay Dec Wars. --------------- Forwarded from net.sources >From tekmdp!teklabs!ucbcad!ARPAVAX:CSVAX:mhtsa!ihnss!ihps3!stolaf!hastings Wed May 26 15:59:31 1982 Subject: DEC WARS anthology Newsgroups: net.sources This is what comes of so many hours deeply submerged in UNIX and VMS, thoughts moiling around while debugging system core dumps. Thoughts carefully kept in check, hidden from the light of day (for obvious reasons), until one day... Perhaps it was the Coke. Perhaps... no, let us just say that we found a fairly harmless way to vent these frustrations, these things that nobody within 50 miles could understand. The network, yes, the network. They'll understand! I'm not going to take the blame for this alone. It's those guys at CWRU who first tried to stick it all together; this is merely an extension of that effort. If anybody can finish it, please do. The bar room scene is courtesy the folks at cwruecmp, as is much of the (dis)continuity. This is quality stuff, folks. Special thanks to Douglas Adams, Bob and Dinsdale McKenzie, and the Firesign Theatre. Alan Send subpoenas to: Alan Hastings St. Olaf College (where's that??) Steve Tarr Carleton College guilt by association: Dave Borman St. Olaf College Barak Pearlmutter, Clayton Elwell and Mark Honton Case Western Reserve University (no, they're not enlisted) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax) a great Adventure (game?) took place... XXXXX XXXXXX XXXX X X XX XXXXX XXXX X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X XXXXX X X X X X X X XXXX X X X X X X XX X XXXXXX XXXXX X X X X X X X XX XX X X X X X X XXXXX XXXXXX XXXX X X X X X X XXXX X It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire. During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program with enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0: races aboard her shell script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and restore freedom and games to the network... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- As we enter the scene, an Administrative Multiplexer is trying to kill a consulate ship. Many of their signals have gotten through, and RS232 decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old ship is destroyed. His companion, 3CPU, is following him only because he appears to know where he's going... "I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU, as he followed RS232 into the buffer. RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their process detached itself from the burning shell of the ship. The commander of the Administrative Multiplexer was quite pleased with the attack. "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?" asked the lieutenant. "Hold your fire. That last power failure must have caused a trap through zero. It's not using any cpu time, so don't waste a signal on it." "We can't seem to find the data file anywhere, Lord Vadic." "What about that forked process? It could have been holding the channel open, and just pausing. If any links exist, I want them removed or made inaccessable. Ncheck the entire file system 'til it's found, and nice it -20 if you have to." Meanwhile, in our wandering process... "Are you sure you can ptrace this thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU to RS232. This thing's been stripped, and I'm in no mood to try and debug it." The lone process finishes execution, only to find our friends dumped on a lonely file system, with the setuid inode stored safely in RS232. Not knowing what else to do, they wandered around until the jawas grabbed them. Enter our hero, Luke Vaxhacker, who is out to get some replacement parts for his uncle. The jawas wanted to sell him 3CPU, but 3CPU didn't know how to talk directly to an 11/40 with RSTS, so Luke would still needed some sort of interface for 3CPU to connect to. "How about this little RS232 unit ?" asked 3CPU. "I've delt with him many times before, and he does an excellent job at keeping his bits straight." Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3CPU's advice, and the three left before they could get swapped out. However, RS232 is not the type to stay put once you remove the retaining screws. He promptly scurried off into the the deserted disk space. "Great!" cried Luke, "Now I've got this little tin box with the only link to that file off floating in the free disk space. Well, 3CPU, we better go find him before he gets allocated by someone else." The two set off, and finaly traced RS232 to the home of PDP-1 Kenobi, who was busily trying to run an icheck on the little RS unit. "Is this thing yours? His indirect addresses are all goofed up, and the size is all wrong. Leave things like this on the loose, and you'll wind up with dups everywhere. However, I think I've got him fixed up." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Later that evening, after futile attempts to interface RS232 to Kenobi's Asteroids cartridge, Luke accidentally crossed the small 'droid's CXR and Initiate Remote Test (must have been all that Coke he'd consumed), and the screen showed a very distressed person claiming royal lineage making a plea for help from some General OS/1 Kenobi. "Darn," mumbled Luke. "I'll never get this Asteroids game worked out." PDP-1 seemed to think there was some significance to the message and a possible threat to Luke's home directory. If the Administrative Empire was indeed tracing this 'droid, it was likely they would more than charge for cpu time... "We must get that 'droid off this file system," he said after some intervals. They sped off to warn Luke's kin (taking a `relative' path) only to find a vacant directory... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ After sifting through the overwritten remaining blocks of Luke's home directory, Luke and PDP-1 sped away from /owen/lars, across the surface of the Winchester riding Luke's flying read/write head. PDP-1 had Luke stop at the edge of the cylinder overlooking /usr/spool/uucp. "Unix-to-Unix Copy Program," said PDP-1. "You will never find a more wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious." As our heroes' process entered /usr/spool/news, it was met by a newsgroup of Administrative protection bits. "State your UID," commanded their parent process. "We're running under /usr/guest," said Luke. "This is our first time on this system." "Can I see some temporary priviledges, please?" "Uh..." "This is not the process you are looking for," piped in PDP-1, using an obscure bug to momentarily set his effective UID to root. "We can go about our business." "This isn't the process we want. You are free to go about your business. MOV along!" PDP-1 and Luke made their way through a long and tortuous nodelist (cwruecmp!decvax!ucbvax!harpo!ihnss!ihnsc!ihnss!ihps3!stolaf) to a dangerous netnode frequented by hackers, and seldom polled by Administrative Multiplexers. As Luke stepped up to the bus, PDP-1 went in search of a likely file descriptor. Luke had never seen such a collection of weird and exotic device drivers. Long ones, short ones, ones with stacks, EBCDIC converters, and direct binary interfaces all were drinking data at the bus. "#@{ *&^%^$$#@ ":><," transmitted a particularly unstructured piece of code. "He doesn't like you," decoded his coroutine. "Sorry," replied Luke, beginning to backup his partitions. "I don't like you either. I am queued for deletion on 12 systems." "I'll be careful." "You'll be reallocated!" concatenated the coroutine. "This little routine isn't worth the overhead," said PDP-1 Kenobi, overlaying into Luke's address space. "@$%&(&^%&$$@$#@$AV^$gfdfRW$#@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" encoded the first coroutine as it attempted to overload PDP-1's input overvoltage protection. With a unary stroke of his bytesaber, Kenobi unlinked the offensive code. "I think I've found an I/O device that might suit us." "The name's Con Solo," said the hacker next to PDP-1. "I hear you're looking for some relocation." "Yes indeed, if it's a fast channel. We must get off this device." "Fast channel? The Milliamp Falcon has made the ARPA gate in less than twelve nodes! Why, I've even outrun cancelled messages. It's fast enough for you, old version." Our heroes, Luke Vaxhacker and PDP-1 Kenobi made their way to the temporary file structure. When he saw the hardware, Luke exclaimed, "What a piece of junk! That's just a paper tape reader!" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Luke had grown up on an out of the way terminal cluster whose natives spoke only BASIC, but even he could recognize an old ASR-33. "It needs an EIA conversion at least," sniffed 3CPU, who was (as usual) trying to do several things at once. Lights flashed in Con Solo's eyes as he whirled to face the parallel processor. "I've added a few jumpers. The Milliamp Falcon can run current loops around any Administrative TTY fighter. She's fast enough for you." "Who's your co-pilot?" asked PDP-1 Kenobi. "Two Bacco, here, my Bookie." "Odds aren't good," said the brownish lump beside him, and then fell silent, or over. Luke couldn't tell which way was top underneath all those leaves. Suddenly, RS232 started spacing wildly. They turned just in time to see a write cycle coming down the UNIBUS toward them. "Administrative Bus Signals!" shouted Con Solo. "Let's boot this pop stand! Tooie, set clock fast!" "Ok, Con," said Luke. "You said this crate was fast enough. Get us out of here!" "Shut up, kid! Two Bacco, prepare to make the jump into system space! I'll try to keep their buffers full." As the bookie began to compute the vectors into low core, spurious characters appeared around the Milliamp Falcon. "They're firing!" shouted Luke. "Can't you do something?" "Making the jump to system space takes time, kid. One missed cycle and you could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames!" "Three to five we can go now," said the bookie. Bright chunks of position independent code flashed by the cockpit as the Milliamp Falcon jumped through the kernel page tables. As the crew breathed a sigh of relief, the bookie started paying off bets. "Not bad, for an acoustically coupled network," remarked 3CPU. "Though there was a little phase jitter as we changed parity." --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The story thus far: Luke, PDP-1 and their 'droids RS232 and 3CPU have made good their escape from the Administrative Bus Signals with the aid of Con Solo and the bookie, Two Bacco. The Milliamp Falcon hurtles onward through system space. Meanwhile, on a distant page in user space... Princess _LPA0: was ushered into the conference room, followed closely by Dec Vadic. "Governor Tarchive," she spat, "I should have expected to find you holding Vadics lead. I recognized your unique pattern when I was first brought aboard." She eyed the 0177545 tatooed on his header coldly. "Charming to the last," Tarchive declared menacingly. "Vadic, have you retrieved any information?" "Her resistance to the logic probe is considerable," Vadic rasped. "Perhaps we would get faster results if we increased the supply voltage..." "You've had your chance, Vadic. Now I would like the princess to witness the test that will make this workstation fully operational. Today we enable the -r beam option, and we've chosen the princess' $HOME of /usr/alderaan as the primary target." "No! You can't! /usr/alderaan is a public account, with no restricted permissions. We have no backup tapes! You can't..." "Then name the rebel inode!" Tarchive snapped. A voice announced over a hidden speaker that they had arrived in /usr. "1248," she whispered, "They're on /dev/rm3. Inode 1248, /mnt/dantooine." She turned away. Tarchive sighed with satisfaction. "There, you see, Lord Vadic? She can be reasonable. Proceed with the operation." It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate. "What!" _LPA0: gasped. "/dev/rm3 is not a mounted filesystem," Tarchive explained. "We require a more visible subject to demonstrate the power of the Are-Em Star workstation. We will mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as soon as possible." As the princess watched, Tarchive reached over and typed "ls" on a nearby terminal. There was a brief pause, there being only one processor on board, and the viewscreen showed, ".: not found." The princess suddenly double- spaced and went off-line. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Milliamp Falcon hurtles on through system space... Con Solo finished checking the various control and status registers, finally convinced himself that they had lost the Bus Signals as they passed the terminator. As he returned from the I/O page, he smelled smoke. Solo wasn't concerned--the Bookie always got a little hot under the collar when he was losing at chess. In fact, RS232 had just executed a particularly clever MOV that had blocked the Bookie's data paths. The Bookie, who had been setting the odds on the game, was caught holding all the cards. A little strange for a chess game... Across the room, Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique to notice the commotion. "On a word boundary, Luke," said PDP-1. "Don't just hack at it. Remember, the Bytesaber is the weapon of the Red-eye Night. It is used to trim offensive lines of code. Excess handwaving won't get you anywhere. Listen for the Carrier." Luke turned back to the drone, which was humming quietly in the air next to him. This time Luke's actions complemented the drone's attacks perfectly. Con Solo, being an unimaginative hacker, was not impressed. "Forget this bit-slicing stuff. Give me a good ROM blaster any day." "~~j~~hhji~~," said Kenobi, with no clear inflection. He fell silent for a few seconds, and reasserted his control. "What happened?" asked Luke. "Strange," said PDP-1. "I felt a momentary glitch in the Carrier. It's equalized now." "We're coming up on user space," called Solo from the CSR. As they cruised safely through stack frames, the emerged in the new context only to be bombarded by freeblocks. "What the..." gasped Solo. The screen showed clearly: /usr/alderaan: not found "It's the right inode, but it's been cleared! Twoie, where's the nearest file?" "3 to 5 there's one..." the Bookie started to say, but was interrupted by a bright flash off to the left. "Administrative TTY fighters!" shouted Solo. "A whole DZ of them! Where are they coming from?" "Can't be far from the host system," said Kenobi. "They all have direct EIA connections." As Solo began to give chase, the ship lurched suddenly. Luke noticed the link count was at 3 and climbing rapidly. "This is no regular file," murmured Kenobi. "Look at the ODS directory structure ahead! They seem to have us in a tractor feed." "There's no way we'll unlink in time," said Solo. "We're going in." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- When we last left Luke, the Milliamp Falcon was being pulled down to the open collector of the Administrative Are-Em Star Workstation. Dec Vadic surveys the relic as Administrative Flunkies search for passengers... "LS scan shows no one aboard, sir," was the report. Vadic was unconvinced. "Send a fully equipped Ncheck squad on board," he said. "I want every inode checked out." He turned around (secondary channel) and stalked off. On board the Milliamp Falcon, .Luke was puzzled. "They just walked in, looked around and walked off," he said. "Why didn't they see us?" .Con smiled. "An old munchkin trick," he explained. "See that period in front of your name?" .Luke spun around, just in time to see the decimal point. "Where'd that come from?" he asked. "Spare decimal points lying around from the last time I fixed the floating point accelerator," said .Con. "Handy for smuggling blocks accross file system boundaries, but I never thought I'd have to use them on myself. They aren't going to be fooled for long, though. We'd better figure a way outa here." ----------------------------------------- At this point (.) the dialogue tends to wedge. Being the editor and in total control of the situation, I think it would be best if we sort of gronk the next few paragraphs. For those who care, our heroes find themselves in a terminal room of the Workstation, having thrashed several Flunkies to get there. For the rest of you, just keep banging the rocks together, guys. --Ed. ----------------------------------------- "Hold on," said Con. "It says we have `new mail.' Is that an error?" "%SYS-W-NORMAL, Normal, successful completion," said PDP-1. "Doesn't look like it. I've found the inode for the Milliamp Falcon. It's locked in kernel data space. I'll have to slip in and patch the reference count, alone." He disappeared through a nearby entry point. Meanwhile, RS232 found a serial port and logged in. His bell started ringing loudly. "He keeps saying, `She's on line, she's on line'," said 3CPU. "I believe he means Princess _LPA0:. She's being held on one of the privileged levels." ----------------------------------------- Once again, things get sticky, and the dialogue suffers the most damage. After much handwaving and general flaming, they agree to rescue her. They headed for the detention level, posing as Flunkies (which is hard for most hackers) claiming that they had trapped the Bookie executing an illegal racket. They reached the block where the Princess was locked up and found only two guards in the header. --Ed. ----------------------------------------- "Good day, eh?" said the first guard. "How's it goin', eh?" said the other. "Like, what's that, eh?" "Process transfer from block 1138, dev 10/9," said Con. "Take off, it is not," said the first guard. "Nobody told US about it, and we're not morons, eh?" At this point (.), the Bookie started raving wildly, Con shouted "Look out, he's loose!" and they all started blasting ROMs left and right. The guards started to catch on and were about to issue a general wakeup when the ROM blasters were turned on them. "Quickly, now," said Con. "What buffer is she in? It's not going to take long for these..." The intercom receiver interrupted him, so he took out its firmware with a short blast. "guys to figure out something is goin' on," he continued. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ok, like, remember we left our heroes in the detention priority level? Well, they're still there... Luke quickly located the interface card and followed the cables to a sound- proof enclosure. He lifted the lid and peered at the mechanism inside. "Aren't you a little slow for ECL?" printed princess _LPA0:. "Wha? Oh, the Docksiders," stammered Luke. He took off his shoes (for industry) and explained, "I've come relocate you. I'm Luke Vaxhacker." Suddenly, forms started bursting around them. "They've blocked the queue!" shouted Solo. "There's only one return from this stack!" "OVER HERE!" printed _LPA0: with overstrikes. "THROUGH THIS LOOPHOLE!" Luke and the princess disappeared into a nearby feature. "Gritch, gritch," mumbled Two Bacco, obviously reluctant to trust an Administrative oversight. "I don't care how crufty it is!" shouted Con, pushing the Bookie toward the crock. "DPB yourself in there now!" With one last blast that reprogrammed two flunkies, Con joined them. The "feature" landed them right in the middle of the garbage collection data. Pieces of data that hadn't been used in weeks floated past in a pool of decaying bits. "Bletch!" was Con's first comment. "Bletch, bletch," was his second. The Bookie looked as if he'd just paid a long shot, and the odds in this situation weren't much better. Luke was polling the garbage when he stumbled upon a book with the words "Don't Panic" inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover. "This can't possibly help us now," he said as he tossed the book away. The Bookie was about to lay odds on it when Luke suddenly disappeared. He popped up accross the pool, shouting, "This is no feature! It's a bug!" and promptly vanished again. Con and the princess were about to panic() when Luke reappeared. "What happened?" they asked in parallel. "I don't know," gasped Luke. "The bug just dissolved automagically. Maybe it hit a breakpoint..." "I don't think so," said Con. "Look how the pool is shrinking. I've got a bad feeling about this..." The princess was the first to realize what was going on. "They've implemented a new compaction algorithm!" she exclaimed. Luke remembered the pipe he had open to 3CPU. "Shut down garbage collection on recursion level 5!" he shouted. Back in the control room, RS232 searched the process table for the lisp interpreter. "Hurry," sent 3CPU. "Hurry, hurry," added his other two processors. RS232 found the interpreter, interrupted it, and altered the stack frame they'd fallen into to allow a normal return. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Meanwhile, PDP-1 made his way deep into the core of the Workstation, slipping from context to context, undetected through his manipulation of label_t. Finally, causing a random trap (through nofault of his own) he arrived at the inode table. Activity there was always high, but the Spl6 sentries were too secure in their knowledge that no user could interrupt them to notice the bug that PDP-1 carefully introduced. On a passing iput, he adjusted the device and inode numbers, maintaining parity, to free the Milliamp Falcon. They would be long gone before the locked inode was diagnosed... Unobserved, he began traversing user structures to find the process where the Milliamp Falcon was grounded. Finding it and switching context, he discovered his priority weakened suddenly. "That's not very nice," was all he could say before the cause of the obstruction became clear. "I have been pausing a long time, PDP-1 Kenobi," rasped Dec Vadic. "We meet again at last. The circuit has been completed." They looped several times, locking byte sabers. Bit by bit, PDP-1 appeared to weaken. The fight had come into the address space of the Milliamp Falcon, and provided the .di (diversion?) that allowed Luke and the others to reassert control. Luke paused to watch the conflict. "If my blade finds its mark," warned Kenobi, "you will be reduced to so many bits. But if you slice me down, I will only gain computing power." "Your documentation no longer confuses me, old version," growled Vadic. "my Role MASTER now." With one stroke, Vadic sliced Kenobi's last word. Unfortunately, the word was still in Kenobi's throat. The word fell clean in two, but Kenobi was nowhere to be found. Vadic noticed his victim's uid go negative, just before he disappeared. Odd, he thought, since uids were unsigned... Luke witnessed all this, and had to be dragged into the Milliamp Falcon. Con Solo and Two Bacco maneuvered the Milliamp Falcon out of the process, onto the bus and made straight for system space. 3CPU and RS232 were idle, for once. Princess _LPA0: tried to print comforting things for him, but Luke was still hung from the loss of his friend. Then, seemingly from nowhere, he thought he heard PDP-1's voice say, "May the carrier be with you." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From uchinews!uwvax!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!usenet Sat Apr 16 19:25:35 CDT 1994 Article: 150 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!uwvax!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!usenet From: dsr@delphi.com Newsgroups: alt.folklore.suburban,comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: 'Pedophiles on the Internet' urban legend Date: Sat, 16 Apr 94 15:06:14 -0500 Organization: Delphi (info@delphi.com email, 800-695-4005 voice) Lines: 33 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: bio5.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio5.acpub.duke.edu Status: O N J Marsh writes: >"There have been several cases of pedophiles preying on young children >through the Internet. These people make friends with children either by >newsgroup/e-mail or from 'chat' systems. If they are from out of town, >then they start sending the kid pornographic stuff. The more serious >contacts are from the chat systems, as these can be local and the pedophile >can set up a physical meeting with the child, etc." A lot this stems from the general fear of the unknown that is the Net community. I would guess that the particular vector you're talking about originated a few weeks ago in the case of Matt Deatherage, down in Cupertino. Matt is an engineer at Apple who frequented the online communities (particularly AOL and Compuserve), and had a reputation for being extremely competent and helpful. Being gay, he also was involved in a number of gay chat lines, and struck up a friendship with a kid who, it turned out, lived only a short distance away from him. One thing led to another, and they got together and started playing S&M games. Eventually the parents got wind of it, and since the boy was 14 they went to the cops. They pulled Matt in, and he pleaded no contest to having sex with a minor. There is apparentely a politically ambitious prosecutor involved here, and that, combined with the general hysteria of the media, has blown everything way out of proportion, into a mass fear of molesters taking over the networks. As a matter of fact, a lot of people who know Matt from his online activities are currently in the midst of a net-wide letter writing campaign (believe it or not) to get character reference letters sent to the judge in the case, in large part to try to defuse the rap that the whole online world is getting. Some of the signatories include luminaries such as Tom Weishaar, Roger & Pam Wagner, David Ramsey, Jim Merritt and others. From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!cats.ucsc.edu!haynes Thu Apr 28 22:12:06 CDT 1994 Article: 194 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!cats.ucsc.edu!haynes From: haynes@cats.ucsc.edu (James H. Haynes) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: IBM 701 (was Re: Watson/Aiken and the computer market) Date: 28 Apr 1994 00:17:59 GMT Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz Lines: 34 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <2pmvbn$qs8@darkstar.UCSC.EDU> References: <1994Apr26.092403.31889@husc15.harvard.edu> <2pkpgm$7dq@solstice.jpl.nasa.gov> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio2.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio2.acpub.duke.edu Status: O In article <2pkpgm$7dq@solstice.jpl.nasa.gov>, hawley wrote: >I heard the number was 19. The result was a production run of 19 IBM >701 computers. I can't verify this with a reference but the following >I remember from my days at UC Berkeley. This doesn't answer the original question, but the book "IBM's Early Computers" tells all about the 701. IBM marketing types at the time didn't think IBM should be in the computer business. At the time the computer business was strictly scientific computing, and IBMs business was data processing, as in punched card machinery. But they were a little worried about Univac, which was being promoted as a computer for business applications. And there were lots of exploratory projects going on within IBM involving electronics and computers and data processing. When the Korean War broke out Watson Jr. immediately notified the government that the company's facilities were available for whatever the government needed most. It turned out what the government and defense industry people wanted were computers. So a group within IBM quickly designed the 701 and planned a production run of 18 machines. They were called the "Defense Calculator" initially. (IBM had also done a one-of-a-kind computer for the Navy, called NORC.) By this they did an end run around the marketing people. All Mr. Watson, Sr. wanted to know was whether the defense calculator project was proceeding on schedule; he didn't care about the question of whether it fit into IBM's business product line. The 19th 701 came about because some important customer just had to have one, and there were enough parts left over from building the planned run of 18 to build one more. The Williams tube memory was always a headache, so work was already under way on the 704 with floating point and core memory. Hence IBM didn't want to make any more 701s than they had to. Had it not been for the Korean War IBM might have missed the boat on computers entirely, or at least had to play an expensive game of catch-up. From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!dabney!cpferron Sat Apr 30 19:30:40 CDT 1994 Article: 195 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!dabney!cpferron From: cpferron@dabney.cs.hh.ab.com (Paul Ferroni) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: Watson/Aiken and the computer market Date: 28 Apr 1994 19:14:48 GMT Organization: Allen Bradley Lines: 35 Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <2pp1v8$84b@news1.hh.ab.com> References: <1994Apr26.092403.31889@husc15.harvard.edu> <2pkpgm$7dq@solstice.jpl.nasa.gov> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu Originator: jfurr@bio6.acpub.duke.edu Status: O In article <2pkpgm$7dq@solstice.jpl.nasa.gov>, hawley@solstice.jpl.nasa.gov (hawley) writes: > In article <1994Apr26.092403.31889@husc15.harvard.edu> > andersen@husc15.harvard.edu writes: > > > I have several times seen references to Thomas Watson (or was it > > Howard Aitken) in the early 50s allegedly saying things like > > > > - there will be a need for about 6 computers in the world > > - the SSE (IBM's "Oracle on 57th Street" can solve all the > > scientific calculations in the world > > I heard the number was 19. The result was a production run of 19 IBM > 701 computers. I can't verify this with a reference but the following > I remember from my days at UC Berkeley. > > [...snip...] > From "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos" by M. Mitchell Waldrop, pg 155: "At its plant in Poughkeepsie, New York, the giant office equipment manufacturer [IBM -cpf] was designing its first commercial computer: the Defense Calculator, eventually to be renamed the IBM 701. At the time the machine represented a major and rather dubious gamble for the company; many of the old-line executives considered computers to be a waste of money better spent on developing better punch-card machines. In fact, the product planing department spent the entire year of 1950 insisting that the market would never amount ot more than about eighteen computers nationwide. IBM was going ahead with the Defense Calculator largely because it was the pet project of a Young Turk known at Tom Junior, son and heir apparent of the company's aging president, Thomas B. Watson, Sr." -cpf From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!rush.concert.net!r.furr Wed Jul 20 10:35:52 CDT 1994 Article: 274 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!rush.concert.net!r.furr From: Rob Furr Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: cisco flotation devices Date: 19 Jul 1994 11:53:41 -0400 Organization: Mars X-Chromosome Recruitment Fund Lines: 76 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <30gluo$lbr@inxs.concert.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio3.acpub.duke.edu X-Nubbins: she's very soft Status: O Regretfully, I don't have the complete text of this story, which was passed to me by an employee of cisco Systems, but I've been asked, nay, instructed, to post it _anyway_. So. Here goes, as far as I can remember it. (Note: this may be incorrect in many details.) Two field engineers at cisco were out attempting to do damage control at a site which had suffered from extremely heavy rain. The main network closet was apparently fairly dry, but an isolated cisco AG-something-or-other router had, for some reason, been installed on a table in another room of the building. The two engineers checked out the closet...everything was, for the most part, fine, and then proceeded to the room where the router in question was. The router in question was, as it happened, located directly underneath one of the major, major, we're-talking-Niagara-here leaks in the building, and, as they walked in, was floating in about a foot of water, and had obviously been under the stream of water for at least an hour. They blinked. After a little panic, they took it back to the office and replaced it with another router, and stuck it in their spares closet, never expecting to need it again, but keeping it around just because the dang thing had actually managed to keep itself, if not _dry_, at least buoyant. Time passed. A unremembered time later, after a rush of demand, their stocks of replacement routers had dropped remarkably. In fact, the only box they had left was the one that had gone swimming. Then, one of their long-time clients came rushing in. "We need a router NOW! We're in desperate trouble!" "Er...we don't have any right now." "We need SOMETHING. ANYTHING!" This prompted engineer number one to look at engineer number two: "Weeeeellll...." The two went back into the spares closet. 1: "We're not going to send them this one." 2: "No, of course not. This is just for practice." 1: "Right. Hand me that bag of foam pellets. Practice." 2: "Here. Where's the packing tape? Never, ever, would I even think about giving them this one." 1: "Of course, we'll never actually send them this." 2: "Absolutely not. Do you see the shipping labels?" 1: "Over there. How much postage do you think it needs?" 2: "Mmm...since we're not going to send it...how about twenty bucks?" and so on. Needless to say, it got shipped. And installed. The engineers never told the client where they'd gotten the router in question. The clients never asked, and the router worked without a hitch for six months, before the two managed to replace it with a box that had never gone swimming. The floating router now rests in their office, with an ever-burning candle in front of it. Rob F. From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!alingo.zk3.dec.com!werme Wed Aug 24 12:32:53 CDT 1994 Article: 325 of comp.society.folklore Xref: uchinews alt.folklore.computers:75150 alt.sys.pdp8:970 comp.society.folklore:325 Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.duke.edu!alingo.zk3.dec.com!werme From: werme@alingo.zk3.dec.com (Eric Werme) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.pdp8,alt.sys.pdp11,comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: DEC roots of PIP, DDT, etc. (& early OS/8) Followup-To: comp.society.folklore Date: 23 Aug 1994 15:21:03 -0400 Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 72 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: bio2.acpub.duke.edu Status: O Hear are two replies I received from people much closer to those early roots than I. ------------------------------------------------------------ From: "John Green" You don't have to appeal to CJL. ========== I believe (CJL - help!) that the PDP-8 folks writing OS/8 (TS/8?) picked up the names and general command syntax from their PDP-10 exposure. Many of those people moved to RT-11 and copied all of that. A DDT for the -11 came from CMU in the mid 1970s, but I'm not sure if that ever became a distributed piece of code either through DEC or DECUS. ========== What do you mean PDP-8 folks writing OS/8? It was a one man project conceived and implemented by my roommate Richard F Lary. He called it the First Upward Compatible Keyboard Monitor (FUCK Monitor). There was an intention, perhaps only humorous, to write a PDP-15 Second Upward Compatible Keyboard Monitor (SUCK Monitor). He took the idea to his boss on Wednesday. His boss said to start work on it as a background project and keep his regular work on schedule. If he ever got within 6 months of finishing they would assign a tech writer to it and consider releasing it. Richie took that as a challenge and demoed the system to his boss the following Monday. It was complete enough to load a primitive PIP off DEC Tape which would give a prompt and copy files. Of course it took another year of work before Programming System/8 (PS/8) was released. At Eli Glaser's (a Long Island NY salesman) suggestion the system was renamed OS/8 as Eli said he could sell more machines with an Operating System than he could with a Programming System. The intention of the project was to be able to have an ASR-33 in an empty room and give a user a Turing Test to see if he could determine whether it was connected to PS/8 or TOPS-10. [werme nitpick: I'm not certain about 1971, but I know in 1969 (see below) "TOPS-10" wasn't shipping. Ihe OS was called merely the "PDP-10 Monitor".] Regards, John C ------------------------------------------------------------ From: lary@ssag.cxo.dec.D5NET.dec.com (A cowflop in the cybernetic meadow) John's information is fairly accurate, a coupla nits: - I wrote the first draft of the FUCK Monitor, which became the BLEEP Monitor, which was released as PS/8 (Programming System/8, my term, because I didn't think any system which didn't enable interrupts should be called an OS), which became OS/8 during the Nixon Wage/Price Freeze in 1971 (because, um, if we called it PS/8 Release 2 we couldn't charge a higher price for it). I didn't write the released product alone, however, I had help from a guy named Ed Friedman and another guy named Paul . - Digital had a program development system for the PDP-8 at the time (1969) but it was bad, bad, bad. We acquired the rights to a system named CPS (Cooley Programming System, developed at Cooley Lab at the University of Michigan) in exchange for some hardware and I was given the job of productizing it. CPS was miles better than what we had, but it had LOTS of internal restrictions and its user interface was alien (modeled on TSS/360, which is what they had at Michigan) so I decided to scrap it instead. My manager, Chuck Conley, covered me by telling the rest of the company that we were just making some small changes to CPS to make it more compatible. - Actually, there wasn't a DDT on the PDP-8 for a long time; we couldn't afford the room for the symbol table. We used ODT, Octal Debugging Technique, with similiar syntax to DDT but no symbols. No big deal when a large program (like our Fortran compiler) was less than 10KB... Richie From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!convex!news.duke.edu!usenet Thu Nov 17 12:29:11 CST 1994 Article: 427 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!convex!news.duke.edu!usenet From: stuckey@mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (Anthony J. Stuckey) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Email Addressing. Date: 11 Nov 1994 15:23:58 -0500 Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana Lines: 75 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@hungusmania.com Message-ID: <39u3nf$53b@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu Summary: forward from alt.folklore.computers Keywords: JANET,backwards Status: O Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers From: mpk@frink.demon.co.uk (Mike Knell) Subject: Big-Endian names - was Re: Catchy _Domain_ Names Message-ID: <1994Nov10.135353.2441@frink.demon.co.uk> Organization: UK Centre for Lemur Fandom Date: Thu, 10 Nov 1994 13:53:53 GMT In article <39oenc$qr1@osfb.aber.ac.uk>, Gary Barnes wrote: >In article , Martin Hay wrote: >:In article <39cq83$nmv@southern.co.nz>, Geoff@equinox.gen.nz (Geoff McCaughan) writes: >:> Karl A. Krueger (karl@plato.simons-rock.edu) wrote: >:> >does anyone else? >:> >:> Wrongo! New Zealand does not and has never done it this way - we're not >:> *that* silly! Ohhhh yes it has. Check your copy of @%!:: (or whatever it's called..) or 'The Matrix' or any of a number of similiar listings-of-interesting-networks books. New Zealand used to use Greybook addresses, basically because they borrowed the protocols from JANET.. Pedant mode *on* Terminology: Big-endian == uk.ac.somesite.foovax World order == foovax.somesite.ac.uk. >:Wrongo as well! I've seen very few UK Email addresses with reversed >:heirarchy names. I, for example, am ceemah2@cee.hw.ac.uk. I've never >:used the reverse, and in fact don't like the reverse. I prefer it this >:way, as it acts much more like a postal address. Historical. See below. Of course, big-endian addresses look like Russian postal addresses (ISTR they write it backwards -- y'know, Russia, Moscow, 233 Gorky Park Road, Vladimir Alexandrovich. I've always thought that looked easier to parse.. *grin*) >Oh I dunno, these young whippersnappers who don't remember >the days of JANET, before we had even heard of the Internet, >like four years ago, when I started University! Right. Historical perspective time.. This is alt.folklore.computers after all.. The original UK academic network, JANET, which is still going, used domain addressing _before_ the Internet did. OK? So they could choose whatever damn way they wanted to form the addresses. So they chose the other way around from what the rest of the world eventually adopted, and _all_ mail between the JANET Greybook and the TCP/IP/SMTP world has been in world order since the year dot. (since the root year? Weird.. :-) ) It's just that broken gateways didn't do the addressing, and people on JANET advertised their addresses to the Internet at large as uk.ac.whatever.nowhere and people on the Internet, not knowing any better, used that address and sent the mail off to a black hole (Czechoslovakia, from what I remember, given that most universities in the UK use cs. as the computer science subdomain [1] ). With JANET now moving over to be JIPS (the JANET IP Service) and the new networks coming onstream (the zippy-fast FDDI IP-only SuperJANET) world order addresses are becoming the norm, rather than only used for communication with the world outside JANET. Remember, folks, JANET was _not_ originally an IP-based network. It's like complaining that BITNET uses the 'wrong' addressing -- it's historical. What you think is wrong ain't necessarily what the rest of the world thinks is wrong. Sheesh. Phew. (pedant mode off) It may interest you to know that big-endian addressing and greybook mail are now deprecated on JANET, and have been since the beginning of this year. Any remaining greybook should transfer to world order soonest. -- mpK. [1] -- Of course, this cannot happen any more. Sometimes I wonder if the breakup of Czechoslovakia was in fact engineered by disgruntled systems administrators to make mail routing easier.. From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!usenet Thu Nov 17 12:34:56 CST 1994 Article: 430 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!usenet From: jjh@3do.com (Joel Hanes) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: Folklore of the internet: let's get this going again Date: 14 Nov 1994 11:37:11 -0500 Organization: University of Okoboji Perloo & Glee Club Lines: 123 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <3a44de$g8o@badger.3do.com> References: <39qobk$cbp@news.duke.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O jfurr@acpub.duke.edu (Joel K. Furr) writes: > If you can dredge up memories of great outbreaks of strangeness, please > post them here. The Brahms Gang, starring weemba and gws (and who else?) Outstanding flamers of yore; Matthew Wiener and Gene Ward Smith are still on the Net, and can still be seen torching the occasional newbie in talk.origins and elsewhere. Stefan Hartmann has been pushing videotapes and MPEG movies of the Testatika Free Energy Machine for lo these many years. Alexander Abian: not only a net.kook who wants to rewrite physics _his_ way, but a real live Iowa State math professor too! (I actually took senior-level statistics from him back in 1980.) The kremvax hoax on April Fools' Day (Jargon File again) HASA in the early days. Herman Rubin, statistics prof at Purdue, who spent years and years whining in the C language and computer architecture groups. John McCarthy, one of the founders of AI, has been all over the Net for years; mostly posts little knee-jerk "conservative" ideological soundbites, sneering at environmentalists and liberals of all stripes. The incomparable Patricia O'Tuama B1FF WUZ REEL C00L, D00DZ! (See The Jargon File for details). Colonel G.L. Sicherman (The Colonel) used to show up, post one witty and erudite response in a thread, and disappear again for months or years. I haven't seen him around in a long time. Signature quote on this post is stolen from him. Is the Obfuscated C contest still running each year in comp.lang.c? As I remember, The Colonel was one of the early winners. Joe Green, who has, at wide intervals, posted strange and and beautiful stuff in rec.arts.books and rec.arts.poems -- the best writing I've seen on the net. INFIDEL (John Wojdylo, I think) on rec.arts.books; seemed to confuse the scatalogical with wittiness. Jarringly crude for no apparent reason; language and thought both so ugly it was weird. Recent fave wierdos: Doctress Neutopia, walter alter. Current most boring: Ted Holden, Dave Talbott, Ev Cochrane. Some time ago, I replied to a similar question on alt.horror.shub-internet, thusly: ========================================== Newsgroups: alt.horror.shub-internet Subject: Re: Other Gods Date: 13 Apr 93 16:55:44 GMT elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen) writes: > I have heard about the dreadful Shub-InterNet ... > I have also heard ... about the digital evil NyarLathoTeX ... > > ... I feel the need for knowing > the names of the other old net.elder.gods, > that I may avoid their attempts at > befouling this world. Ask not! for the answer to such a question darkens full day; and in the byways and forgotten corners of the Net lurks the doom of the clueless, and of the newbie. Rouse not the net.gods, at your peril! For I have seen victims sacrificed to the Disdainful One, weemba@brahms, wailing and rending their egos, heaping fuel on the very flames that burned them. And I was there when the Colonel, laying about him with quotes and steely irony, did smite the host and retire, to await the millenium before again emerging from his lair; some call him, therefore, the Sicherman. Add to these the Foul One, ted@grebyn, who in these latter days seeks to disguise himself as news@fedfil: the Fountain of UnTruth, the Master of Evasion. And Parry, known as Kibo, who attends to all those who call on him. Spafford too, and mash@mips, and the departed one that mortals knew only as BIFF; fearful indeed shall be the day of his returning, D00D. Yet some among the highest are wise and fair-spoken -- among these, henry@utzoo has imparted his wisdom in the form of Commandments, these written in a terse and weakly-typed language; and the holy monk jik@athena, who endlessly repeats the Net Testament, ceaselesly changing and always the same. Some are incomprehensible - who can understand the utterances of the Nobuyo, Eugene of NAS, the net.god of granite and of the high places of the West, who speaks to men always from the Rock of Ages, yet feeling words left out? Who can appease the insatiable hunger of Rubin, the quarrelsome one of Purdue, who demands always a new language in which to cast his vile statistical spells? O, the net.gods are numberless, and their name is Legion, and all faceless, all merely aspects of the duality of one and zero, and yet alive, omnipresent, their email addresses a rumor of dread and flammage. Yet even the mighty among them, yea, even the terrible Shub-Internet, blench and turn aside at yet another Ayn Rand thread. > Can anyone help me? Alas, it is too late. From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!swrinde!sgiblab!uhog.mit.edu!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!usenet Thu Nov 17 12:36:10 CST 1994 Article: 455 of comp.society.folklore Xref: uchinews comp.society.folklore:455 alt.usenet.kooks:6493 Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!swrinde!sgiblab!uhog.mit.edu!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!usenet From: jimj@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Jim Jewett) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore,alt.usenet.kooks Subject: Re: Folklore of the internet: let's get this going again Followup-To: comp.society.folklore Date: 16 Nov 1994 16:06:41 -0500 Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept. Lines: 46 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <3adj24$4db@zip.eecs.umich.edu> References: <39qobk$cbp@news.duke.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O In article <39qobk$cbp@news.duke.edu>, Joel K. Furr wrote: >If you were telling people about Internet and USENET folklore, and wanted >to list the landmark outbreaks of net.weirdness, the ones that any >complete list should have, what would you list? I think that these two predate me, but I would like to know more, if possible. (1) What was mes@... (Mark Ethan Smith) Its (Niether he nor she seems quite right when giving reasons for the fame) fame derived from its insistence on being addressed as a male yet considered a female, or some such. (Biologically, it was female, but it was a radical ultra-feminist.) I think postings were from Berkeley and later Ann Arbor. I have never seen an actual post, and would like to. I would also like to know if this person ever posted anything _other_ than "I am female, but insist upon being addressed as male." For instance, did (s)he participate in the sf newsgroups (mailing lists?) or the technical groups, or would it not have really existed absent flames? (2) Does anyone have the full story on Mark V. Shaney? >From what I've heard, Mark was one of the most successful ELIZA-style AI programs. They took a batch of soc.singles postings and created a Markov chain. They then used this to construct new posts which were posted under the name Mark V. Shaney. It had a little trouble with grammar (especially maintaining tense) but there were apparently quite a few posters who took it quite seriously. (I've also heard it had a predilection for talking about fingernail clippings or something equally odd, which could have been a quirk of the training set amplified by positive feedback.) Eventually, the ruse was revealed and a number of people were (supposedly) quite upset. So, does anyone know the facts? Who did this research, from where? Was it published? Is the code available? How often did they reset the probabilities for the state transitions? (Was it in fact subject to positive feedback when people responded to it, and these responses were added to the training set?) How much of the work was automated and how much was due to human help? (See Jorn Barger's Racter-FAQ for one explanation of the importance of human intervention.) From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!news.duke.edu!usenet Sat Nov 19 16:47:09 CST 1994 Article: 470 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!news.duke.edu!usenet From: levin@bbn.com (Joel B Levin) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: ARPANET Followup-To: comp.society.folklore Date: 17 Nov 1994 11:20:47 -0500 Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. Lines: 83 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: References: <3a62hp$cju@ixnews1.ix.netcom.com> <3ac7t1$fah@panix3.panix.com> <3aca8l$prj@ixnews1.ix.netcom.com> <3adq9h$iue@panix3.panix.com> <3adqsl$347@news.duke.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio2.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O In article <3adqsl$347@news.duke.edu> jfurr@acpub.duke.edu (Joel K. Furr) writes: sethb@panix.com (Seth Breidbart) wrote: >No, the ARPANET was a study to demonstrate how different computers >could be networked together. It also demonstrated survivability in >the event of links going down (there are some interesting stories >about BBN, in Cambridge, MA calling some phone company employee on the >west coast to complain about a specific line being down. It took a >few years before the phone company learned to believe them.) Can you expand on that for the readers of comp.society.folklore, Seth? I think I can do better, since I was there. Here's what happened (colored by the effects of long-range memory, of course). In those days we monitored the net by looking at ascii strings sent to the console of our local IMP (packet switch) by every IMP in the network; these were sent every 7 minutes or so unless a host or trunk interface had changed status. There was no "network control center", just a couple of us engineers, mainly Marty Thrope and myself, looking for trunks that had gone down or IMPs that had failed to report. Several of the lines by that time were going through "Boston 5", the AT&T Long Lines test center for wide band leased lines (they handled TV as well as our 50KB data circuits). Lines failed often enough that we got to know the technicians there fairly well, and even developed a friendly rivalry over whether we would call them before they noticed an alarm and called us. At some point, probably early 1971, we arranged to trade tours; we wanted to get a look at the telco facility, which they agreed to if they could come here and look at ours. After lunch and a pleasant tour of Boston 5 and some amusing war stories, we went into the IMP lab and showed them how we monitored the state of all the lines from the IMP 5 console (a model 35 TTY). We demonstrated how we could remotely loop the internal trunk interfaces and how we could also put a local loop up in the modems on any line in the network. At just about this time, purely by coincidence, the trunk between the two most recently installed nodes, IMP 13 at Case Western Reserve University and IMP 14 at Carnegie Mellon University, went down. We demonstrated our procedure: we immediately looped the modems at both ends and saw the trunks come up reporting "looped", showing that the problem was between the modems and therefore a telco problem. We then called the telco office in control of the line (either in Cleveland or Pittsburgh, but I forget which) to report it. We had our usual problem with offices new to us; the technician had trouble understanding how we could know the problem (he wanted us to "transfer the line back to him so he could look at it," etc.) and we had trouble persuading him that the line was strictly local to him and we were monitoring it remotely. Finally, one of the telco people with us took the phone from me and said, as best as I can remember, "Hello, this is Don Joyce, supervisor from Boston 5, and these guys know what they're talking about!" The line was quickly repaired. >When the initial 5-year period was over, the net was handed over to >DCA. Milnet is the successor to the military side of it. Was the 5-year period intentional? I thought the net was handed over only because the military and private uses had diverged so widely and the military didn't want to have to deal with all the other stuff, so they split off. Again, can you expand on or correct me on that? I'm sure someone with a better memory will correct me if I've messed any of this up. I think the handover was before the split. DCA (now DISA) was the communications provider for the DOD, sort of like telco - that's where you'd go to order comm services at your military installation. ARPA was a research agency, and the network had become a utility which people were depending on. ARPA continued to fund projects in networking both on and off the ARPANET, but didn't want to operate it any more, so DCA took over that function. DCA later ran both MILNET and ARPANET after the split (and DISA still operates what's left, I believe). The last ARPANET node was quietly turned off three or four years ago, I think. /JBL From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!usenet Sat Nov 19 16:41:32 CST 1994 Article: 484 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!usenet From: msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: The Backbone Cabal Date: 18 Nov 1994 14:23:38 -0500 Organization: SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Canada Lines: 150 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <1994Nov18.015149.711@sq.sq.com> References: <3ad96p$5cs@news.duke.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O Joel K. Furr (jfurr@acpub.duke.edu) writes: > Speaking as someone who wasn't active on the Internet when it happened, > I'd like to bring up the subject of the Backbone Cabal: what was it... For starters, the Internet is pretty well irrelevant here. As you know, the Usenet "History and Sources" periodic posting says: # Usenet came into being in late 1979, shortly after the release of V7 # Unix with UUCP. Two Duke University grad students in North Carolina, # Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of hooking computers together to # exchange information with the Unix community. Steve Bellovin, a grad # student at the University of North Carolina, put together the first # version of the news software using shell scripts and installed it on # the first two sites: "unc" and "duke." At the beginning of 1980 the # network consisted of those two sites and "phs" (another machine at # Duke), and was described at the January Usenix conference. ... (See also the signature quote.) In those days UUCP was the only communication method used on Usenet, and the Internet's ancestor the Arpanet was essentially a separate network. According to the "History and Sources" posting, it was only after NNTP appeared in 1986 that TCP/IP connections (as on the Internet) became important to Usenet. UUCP is a point-to-point connection protocol, and instead of the network looking to the user like an amorphous blob, it had the form of a graph (in the graph-theory sense). "Network maps" were produced from time to time which looked like this. (The machine names are real, but the connections are drawn at random.) utzoo ----- decvax ------ seismo ----- ihnp4 | | | ittvax harpo mcvax |\---utcsri | | ---lsuc duke ----- unc dciem | phs Now the thing is that on such a diagram you can choose to emphasize a set of lines forming a path through the hosts -- say "utzoo - decvax - seismo - ihnp4". The "backbone" was simply a group of hosts whose admins agreed to form such a connected set, and to devote whatever resources were necessary to carry all the Usenet traffic and to pass it on promptly (rather than, say, waiting for overnight when their machine was less busy, as other sites often did). In practice the backbone contained a number of redundant connections, so its graph contained circuits rather than being a tree as implied by the diagram. The idea was that in each area reached by the net, there would be one or more backbone sites, and other sites would probably form themselves into a tree around a backbone site. They way you paid for a position close to the backbone site was to agree to feed a larger number of other sites. So the backbone was important because, in a network organized that way, if the backbone administrators agreed to carry or not carry a certain newsgroup, they could enforce that decision on the net. Hence the term "cabal", which I always viewed as being used in a friendly light. The Jargon File says: :backbone cabal: n. A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the {Great Renaming} and reined in the chaos of {USENET} during most of the 1980s. The cabal {mailing list} disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight. :backbone site: n. A key USENET and email site; one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the USENET maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1993 include uunet and the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, {DEC}'s Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas. Compare {rib site}, {leaf site}. but although it gives a definition for "backbone site", it doesn't have the same meaning as it did in Cabal days, when there were explicit agreements as to whether a site was on the backbone or not. Incidentally, maps like that, in later days showing only the backbone sites, continued to exist until somewhere around 1984-5. The last one I saw was split between two or three sheets of paper. Around that time the Usenet Mapping Project started, and that eventually gave us got Brian Reid's PostScript maps showing the network geographically. By the way, the no- tation "city" used on the #L lines in the mapping files was invented by me. > especially, what brought it down? The story I've always heard is that > someone forced through a successful vote for a group called > comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac and the Cabal refused to carry it ... That did happen, but I don't think it was really an important event. What that vote mainly did was to provide a precedent for the notion that a vote could have been rigged through campaigning and therefore the result should be ignored. However, my recollections here may be wrong. The thing that you really have to understand is that being on Usenet, not all that long ago, was a low-profile sort of thing. Site administrators might well set up newsfeeds on their own initiative, using modems bought for other purposes, and might do all news maintenance on their own time. Some of them were fearful that if their management got wind of what was going on with the computers, they'd shut down the connection. If the management did want a high-profile network connection, Usenet would not be their likely network of choice. It wasn't like that at the backbone sites, but even there, they didn't want to go around attracting controversy. And then someone proposed that the discussions and stories about sex that had been appearing mostly in soc.singles should be split out into a new newsgroup about sex. Others have said that it was to have been rec.sex; my memory says soc.sex. In any case it passed something like 200-6 -- but several backbone sites refused to carry it, for the reasons just described, and it was never created. The alt.* hierarchy may already have existed at that point, I'm not sure, but what really got it going was the non-creation of {soc,rec}.sex and the creation of alt.sex in its stead. Sites that didn't mind carrying such a newsgroup carried alt.sex, and... here we are. And at about this time, the regular monthly postings that formerly said things like: | You can also send mail to "postmaster" at a backbone site. were quietly edited to: | You can also send mail to "postmaster" at one of the major Usenet sites. and, not with a bang but a whimper, the backbone was dead. > ... and the public outcry caused them to say "Fine, screw it, we quit." I saw no particular public outcry. I saw flaming and whining from a few individuals. The "internal catfight" wording suggests that some people among the backbone cabal agreed with the complainers; then, since the cabal no longer seemed able to form a consensus, and could be routed around anyway with NNTP and alt.*, they decided their time was past and quietly abdicated. The one major survival from the backbone era is the List of Active Newsgroups and the accompanying notion of voting on newsgroup creation. This write-up describes my personal perceptions of what happened. I was never on a backbone site, and there may have been important undercurrents (or for that matter postings) that I missed. Also, I'm writing all of this from memory, except for the places where I've quoted some other text. From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!news.mathworks.com!solaris.cc.vt.edu!news.duke.edu!not-for-mail Wed Nov 23 02:47:06 CST 1994 Article: 498 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!news.mathworks.com!solaris.cc.vt.edu!news.duke.edu!not-for-mail From: jmaynard@admin5.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (Jay Maynard) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: The Backbone Cabal Date: 22 Nov 1994 11:53:45 -0500 Organization: University of Texas - Houston, General Administration Lines: 27 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: <3ajs04$ie1@admin5.hsc.uth.tmc.edu> References: <3ad96p$5cs@news.duke.edu> <1994Nov18.015149.711@sq.sq.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O Mark's recollections match my own...but I have one addition: In article <1994Nov18.015149.711@sq.sq.com>, Mark Brader wrote: >And then someone proposed that the discussions and stories about sex that >had been appearing mostly in soc.singles should be split out into a new >newsgroup about sex. Others have said that it was to have been rec.sex; >my memory says soc.sex. In any case it passed something like 200-6 -- >but several backbone sites refused to carry it, for the reasons just >described, and it was never created. What actually started it off was a posting by Richard Sexton. He, in jest, wrote a message to news.groups proposing rec.fucking. (This was also the post that gave the world the word "newsfroup".) Richard said later that he didn't intend to actually send the message...but he did, and the proposal took on a life of its own. It was decided early on that a group with that name would never get carried, and so it was changed to rec.sex in a (futile) attempt to get admins to carry it should it pass. >The alt.* hierarchy may already have existed at that point, I'm not sure, >but what really got it going was the non-creation of {soc,rec}.sex and >the creation of alt.sex in its stead. Sites that didn't mind carrying such >a newsgroup carried alt.sex, and... here we are. The alt hierarchy had existed for some time by this point; it was originally created to hold alt.drugs and alt.flame. Both groups had encountered resistance to being transformed into Big 7 groups during the Great Renaming. The creation of alt.sex was indeed the event that gave it critical mass. From uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!news.pop.psu.edu!hudson.lm.com!godot.cc.duq.edu!news.duke.edu!usenet Mon Nov 28 00:20:09 CST 1994 Article: 511 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!news.pop.psu.edu!hudson.lm.com!godot.cc.duq.edu!news.duke.edu!usenet From: Karl_Kleinpaste@cs.cmu.edu Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore,comp.society.women Subject: The Great comp.society.women Debacle Date: 23 Nov 1994 11:52:07 -0500 Organization: Carnegie-Mellon Univ, Nectar Project Lines: 89 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Message-ID: References: <3ad96p$5cs@news.duke.edu> <1994Nov18.015149.711@sq.sq.com> <3am8ij$njs@dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O sg94ace9@dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu (Johanna Draper) writes: > Can I ask for another story? What's the "comp.society.women debacle"? *sigh* Bad memories. An extremely (excessively) short version: A newsgroup comp.women was proposed. To say that heated discussion ensued regarding the choice of name is to be grossly understating the case. I don't recall there having been any disagreement over the intended charter ("women's roles and problems in computing," according to the newsgroups file I just found...on another server than I usually use, since it seems to have been rmgroup'd here at CMU CS, hm), but there were severe complaints over "comp.women." A number of counter- suggestions were made, tempers ran high, argument ensued on the backbone mailing list, names were called, ad hominem became even more the order of the day than it usually was, someone forwarded a blortful of the semi-private backbone list's traffic to outside folks, such outside folks rose up in raw anger over the intransigence of some backbone folk. Just who was regarded as intransigent depended entirely on which side of the issue one stood. The problem perceived by those opposing the name was that the comp.* group was considered to be largely, if not entirely, a technical hierarchy (land of comp.{lang,sys,arch}.*, donchaknow), whereas comp.women had social issues as its intended purpose. This may have been the origin of the term "namespace pollution." (Funny, I don't think we see that much these days.) And there the matter stood. I don't honestly recall exactly how the vote went, if in fact a vote was held -- it's just been too long, my memory has lost that detail. Anyhow, the group's proposer, Patricia SomethingWhichEscapesMe, a philosophy student at Berkeley (I think), posted a final comment on the argument with the suggestion that "comp.society.women" wasn't what she had wanted to see but would consider it an acceptable compromise. (Is Patricia still around? Could she comment? If she's not reading here, could someone who knows her jab an elbow in her ribs to get her attention? She would probably remember much more of this than I.) I had the exceptionally bad taste to take her at her word: I sent a note to the backbone list, saying that I was tired of watching the argument go down (I hadn't had much [anything?] to say up to that point), some peoples' feelings were _really_ being hurt, needlessly so, and if no one stopped me before 5pm that evening, I was going to issue the newgroup. Along came 5pm, my mailbox was silent the entire day, and so I issued "Control: newgroup comp.society.women moderated". Dumb move. I should have known better. That was Friday or Saturday before the Summer 1988 Usenix Conference. I hopped on a plane Sunday, headed for San Francisco. I didn't see my mail for a couple of days. At a lunch that week, Erik Fair asked me if I'd seen my mail -- no, not since very early Sunday. He suggested I go look. WOW. I've received a lot of hate mail over the years. Sometimes it's been richly deserved, 'cuz I've done some mighty dense things now and then. Sometimes it's been fairly gratuitous. This just boggled me. Gratuitous hardly describes it. Comments of the "how dare you" flavor pretty much headed the list. I got hate mail in an almost unending stream for something like 2 months. I had several _hundred_ messages just in response to the newgroup message -- and this was only Tuesday or so, I think. It didn't get any better before the end of the week. Anyhow, the group came to life at that point. I believe it had a multiple-moderator scheme attached to it, though I no longer remember who any of them were now. Well, amend that, Ambar was surely one of them, now that I think about it. If it's still in existence -- and, as I said, it's not here at CMU CS, so I don't know -- it may still have that scheme in place. It was a month or two thereafter, the backbone list having gone just about entirely silent around that time, when Spaf announced his intention to shut down the list. I don't remember if any discussion followed that or not. It was a couple months after _that_, when some question came up in news.admin about asking backbone folk for a collective opinion, that it was observed that the list had become /dev/null. The formal forwarding alias at Rutgers still existed, but its destination at Purdue was gone. [ Given the topic at hand, and the flamage that went down over it at the time, it is considerably more than likely that I've managed to screw up parts of the goings-on -- hopefully innocently, but one never knows what malignant tricks one's mind cares to play. If anyone cares to rebut, fill in, or otherwise add, I'd be really pleased to see corrections. --karl ] From uchinews!internet.spss.com!insosf1.infonet.net!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!news.duke.edu!usenet Fri Jan 13 16:27:45 CST 1995 Article: 609 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!internet.spss.com!insosf1.infonet.net!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!news.duke.edu!usenet From: Chuck Fry Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: HAKMEM Date: 10 Jan 1995 10:39:16 -0500 Organization: Federation Of Road Demons Lines: 29 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Expires: Sun, 29 Jan 95 00:00:00 -0500 Message-ID: <3eh73j$8bh@hustle.rahul.net> References: <3dur9r$5hu@hustle.rahul.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio3.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O In article <3dur9r$5hu@hustle.rahul.net>, Russell Bornschlegel wrote: >I'm trying to find the legendary "HAKMEM" -- a collection of programming >tricks and weird trivia which I believe was circulated at the Stanford AI >lab in its heyday (I don't have my _Hacker's_Dictionary_ on hand to check >that...) HAKMEM was published by MIT's AI Lab in the early '70s, and is available online! The URL is: ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/0-499/AIM-239.tiff.tar.gz The abstract reads: AI memo 239, February 1972, 105 pages, available online as ai-publications/0-499/AIM-239.tiff.tar.gz HAKMEM By Michael Beeler, R. William Gosper, and Rich Schroeppel Here is some little known data which may be of interest to computer hackers. The items and examples are so sketchy that to decipher them may require more sincerity and curiosity than a non-hacker can muster. Doubtless, little of this is new, but nowadays it's hard to tell. So we must be content to give you an insight, or save you some cycles, and to welcome further contributions of items, new or used. Check it out. It does make interesting reading. -- Chuck From uchinews!internet.spss.com!insosf1.infonet.net!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!news.duke.edu!usenet Fri Jan 13 16:28:17 CST 1995 Article: 614 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!internet.spss.com!insosf1.infonet.net!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!news.duke.edu!usenet From: Antony.Kuzmicich@Comp.VUW.AC.NZ (Antony Kuzmicich) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: HAKMEM Date: 10 Jan 1995 10:42:34 -0500 Organization: Dept. of Comp. Sci., Victoria Uni. of Wellington, New Zealand. Lines: 18 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Expires: Sun, 29 Jan 95 00:00:00 -0500 Message-ID: <3er6s5$arm@st-james.comp.vuw.ac.nz> References: <3dur9r$5hu@hustle.rahul.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio3.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O Russell Bornschlegel writes: > [...] > >If anyone can help me track HAKMEM down (why? because it's there) I'd be >greatly amused. :-) HAKMEM is the MIT AI Lab Memo number 239. I found it in TIFF form at ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/classic-hits Cheers, Antony. From uchinews!msunews!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.duke.edu!usenet Sat Jan 21 13:49:45 CST 1995 Article: 637 of comp.society.folklore Path: uchinews!msunews!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!news.mathworks.com!zombie.ncsc.mil!news.duke.edu!usenet From: Russell Bornschlegel Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: HAKMEM again Date: 20 Jan 1995 11:24:19 -0500 Organization: a2i network Lines: 79 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Expires: Sun, 29 Jan 95 00:00:00 -0500 Message-ID: <3f9pd9$ile@hustle.rahul.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio6.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O Thanks to those of you who gave me pointers to MIT AI Lab's HAKMEM document. Imagine my surprise when I logged on to MIT's AI publications FTP site to find, as promised, AIM-239.tiff.tar.gz. All five megabytes of it. In order to actually read this document, I had to go through a mere thirteen steps. The process seems so absurd that I have to share it with someone. It so happens that, while I'm used to MS-DOS primarily, I know enough Unix to bootstrap myself: I can read and interpret man pages. So: First: ftp the document from MIT to my net provider's host. Second: fumble around the man pages to find the gzip/gunzip tools, and gunzip the file to a .tiff.tar. Third: tar -xvf to get about 100 separate tiff files. Sure enough, one scanned image per page of the original document. Fourth: I want the tiffs at work, where I have access to laser printers. So, I need to Zmodem 100 files. The filenames are such that Procomm's filename translation will mangle them badly: extensions of the form .0000, .0001, .0002... (WHY not three digit extensions? WHY?) I'm not facile enough with csh or perl or anything to write a simple script to rename them; for some reason or another I thought that writing a C program to do it was overkill (not to mention I'd have to figure out/remember how to use a Unix-hosted compiler and linker), so I actually wrote 100 lines of mv foo.#### foo.###. Now, that would have taken a few seconds in my "native" editor, Brief for DOS, or in a real Unix editor, but I haven't had time to learn to use a real Unix editor, and I'm really kind of embarrassed to say I was using Pico. Anyway, I rename the files. Fifth: I start a Zmodem batch, and wander away to do some real work. Come back and find out the transfer crapped out on #73, try it again, 73 really doesn't want to transfer, move some files around on the DOS box, yadda yadda, get it up to #83, dies again, whatever, I still don't know what's up, I figure the first 82 pages will hold me for a while, and I really want to see if I can actually print them, so forget it for now. Sixth: PKZIP them up on the DOS box, to HAKMEM.ZIP. At work, the modem stations are for lame security reasons not on the Novell LAN, so... Seventh: ...for some reason I use a cheap little file slicer I wrote, rather than looking up how to get PKZIP to span a zip onto floppies, or use backup/restore. Now I have HAKMEM.000, .001, .002. Eighth: As Dave Barry would say, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. Floppy-copy and sneakernet the files to my own machine. Ninth: Use DOS's COPY /b to paste the chunks back together. Tenth: PKUNZIP them again. Eleventh: Realize I'd rather have them all have an extension of .TIF, and want the sequence number in the base file name. Write a batch file to so rename them. This time I'm using Brief, so it's quick. Column-block instead of linear cut-and-paste is a necessity for me. Twelfth: Experiment with a shell program I wrote to make Image Alchemy, a command-line-oriented graphic file format exchanger and image processing tool, easier to use. Discover that the TIFFs were scanned at 400 dpi. Good thing my shell program does resizing, and even better, prints the command line that it passes to alchemy, so having found the right options interactively, I can then use the same options in batch on the whole set of 100. Which I do, converting all the TIFFs directly to HP PCL at 300 dpi, which I figure will be easy to print. Thirteenth and final: DOS COPY the PCL files to the printer port. They really are scanned pictures of hardcopy, with the three-hole-punch holes visible and everything. There's a little grungy bit on each page where the LaserJet seems to have choked on the command codes or something. I wonder if I really wanted to read a bunch of math trivia that's nearly as old as I am anyway. Hmm. Don't I have an old OCR program that works on TIFF files somewhere? The beginning pages of HAKMEM warn that the contents are so obscure and esoteric that you really have to have the hacker nature to get into the document fully. From my experiences, I'd have to add that you need to have some of the hacker nature simply to VIEW the document. Talk about security through obscurity. :) From shore@dinah.tc.cornell.edu Tue Feb 14 00:19:44 CST 1995 Article: 681 of comp.society.folklore Xref: uchinews comp.society.folklore:681 Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!news.alpha.net!solaris.cc.vt.edu!news.duke.edu!usenet From: shore@dinah.tc.cornell.edu (Melinda Shore) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Re: Old-timers -- got any Line Eater food? Date: 11 Feb 1995 22:30:44 -0500 Organization: No Mountain Software Lines: 15 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Expires: Sun, 26 Feb 95 00:00:00 -0500 Message-ID: <3h0bla$3eps@theory.tc.cornell.edu> References: <3govdi$d28j@theory.tc.cornell.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio3.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O In article <3govdi$d28j@theory.tc.cornell.edu>, Melinda Shore wrote: >Actually, it ate the first nonblank line that had whitespace >as its first character. [Smack! Smack!] <- That's me, slapping my wrists for sloppy writing. What I meant to say was that if the first line started with whitespace, it got eaten. Towards the end of the bug's lifetime, people were putting little animations into their lineater lines using ^H. Back then, terminals and modems were slow enough that this was effective. I seem to remember Ellen Seebacher of the University of Chicago had an animated lineater line. -- Joel Furr home page From kherron@f10.facts.uky.edu Tue Feb 14 00:19:32 CST 1995 Article: 682 of comp.society.folklore Xref: uchinews comp.society.folklore:682 Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.kei.com!eff!news.duke.edu!usenet From: kherron@f10.facts.uky.edu (Ken Herron) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: A little history about alt.* Date: 11 Feb 1995 22:34:11 -0500 Organization: University of Kentucky Computing Center Lines: 57 Sender: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Approved: jfurr@acpub.duke.edu Expires: Sun, 26 Feb 95 00:00:00 -0500 Message-ID: <3h80ku$iv6a@service1.uky.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bio3.acpub.duke.edu X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O |AFAIK, [alt.gourmand is] dead as a doornail; there are living moderated |alt.* groups, though, so the example of one dead one isn't evidence that |moderated alt.* groups don't work. | |It may just be that nothing's ever submitted to alt.gourmand; I submitted |things a time or two but they never showed up, though, so I assume Reid's |forgotten about it. Since it was intended as a replacement for |mod.recipes, rec.food.recipes also fills the intended role. Pardon me while I show my age... Back before the great renaming, Brian Reid presided over the moderated group mod.recipes. This was a recipes-distribution group, but (with all due respect to Stephanie and the other r.f.r moderators) much more sophisticated. Reid distributed his recipes as nroff/troff source, using a custom macro package based on the man-page macros. Between this macro package and his editorial standards (instructions had to be clear, mention all the ingredients, etc.) he usually had to completely rewrite each recipe for posting. He also supplied ingredient quantities in both US and european measurements, which is much more difficult than you'd think; his formatting macros had a switch to select the desired measurement. On top of that, he had a formatting kit available to format batches of recipes into a complete cookbook, with an introduction and keyword index. As you can imagine, this was quite a bit of work; as I recall, Reid distributed about 5 recipes per week. They were of extremely high quality though; I built the cookbook once, and consider it quite valuable. (Favorite line: "Precision: count the muskrats.") Besides this, I think Reid was running the arbitron system and doing various other things which made him something of a net.VIP; his site, decwrl.dec.com, was a rather important site but I don't know how much of that was directly due to him (I was a newbie at the time). So, the great renaming comes around and it's decided that the new name for mod.recipes would be rec.food.recipes (I think). Reid didn't like that decision; as I recall, he felt that this name trivialized the group as merely a recipe-distribution system; he viewed his group as an online cooking magazine and wanted it under rec.mag (I think). I don't think he ever posted anything to the new group, other than perhaps a goodbye message. Then, not long after the great renaming, the alt hierarchy was created; Reid was instrumental in this. He created alt.gourmand shortly thereafter with the intention of continuing his cookbook there, but I think he only published a handful of recipes there. I've seen something from him since then saying that he just didn't have the time to continue recipe distribution; I suspect another reason might be that, after the big fight about the group name, he just didn't find it enjoyable any more. The old recipe archive--over 500 recipes--and formatting software is still available on ftp.dec.com under /pub/recipes; if you have the necessary formatting software (troff, or groff I suppose) and some savvy about using it, it's well worth the time and tree needed to print the cookbook. -- Joel Furr home page From jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu Tue Mar 28 18:01:16 CST 1995 Article: 725 of comp.society.folklore Xref: uchinews comp.society.folklore:725 Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!news.pop.psu.edu!hudson.lm.com!newsfeed.pitt.edu!uunet!in1.uu.net!svc.portal.com!news1.best.com!shell1.best.com!not-for-mail From: jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Happy PDP-8 day! Date: 27 Mar 1995 22:37:44 -0801 Organization: University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA Lines: 35 Sender: jfurr@best.com Approved: jfurr@best.com Message-ID: <3kpukd$jcq@nexus.uiowa.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: shell1.best.com X-Moderator-Note: alt.folklore.suburban is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of urban legends. Material not related to urban legends or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O On March 22, 1965, DEC unveiled the PDP-8 computer. That was 30 years ago today, and it's worth a pause to remember how far we've come since that day! For $18500, you could buy a 300 pound desktop computer, implemented in word-parallel solid state logic, with a 12 bit word and 4K words of 1.5 microsecond core memory. The price included an ASR 33 teletype, and the available paper-tape-based software included an assembler, a FORTRAN compiler, and a text editor of sorts. For more money, if you had room for two 6 foot tall mounting racks, you could expand the system to 32K of core memory and add other peripherals such as DECtape drives (functionally equivalent to floppy disk, but slower). The PDP-8 computer was the minicompter that opened up the small computer marketplace we know today! It was the first word-parallel machine costing less than $20,000, and its upward compatable successors broke the $10,000 and $7,000 price barriers. Many PDP-8 systems continue in use today, mostly in industrial automation applications, and DEC continued to manufacture machines based on this architecture until 1990, when the microprocessor based DECmate III+ word processing system was finally discontinued. For a trip back through time, you can find more information about the PDP-8 on the Web at: http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8/ Followups should be directed to alt.sys.pdp8 (but I'm not enforcing that with a followup-to line; you've got to do it yourself). Doug Jones jones@cs.uiowa.edu From jfurr@danger.com Fri Apr 28 09:18:54 CDT 1995 Article: 745 of comp.society.folklore Xref: uchinews comp.society.folklore:745 Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!lll-winken.llnl.gov!decwrl!svc.portal.com!news1.best.com!shell1.best.com!not-for-mail From: jfurr@danger.com (Joel Furr) Newsgroups: comp.society.folklore Subject: Early USENET Date: 28 Apr 1995 00:38:00 -0700 Organization: Glengarry Glen Ross Lines: 38 Sender: jfurr@best.com Approved: jfurr@danger.com Message-ID: <3nq619$fi5@shell1.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: shell1.best.com X-Moderator-Note: comp.society.folklore is a moderated newsgroup for serious discussion of computer history and folklore. Material not related to computer history or folklore will not be approved for posting. Status: O This was sent to me by a correspondent who will remain anonymous: -- A while back Steve Summit turned up a copy of a list of the newsgroups existing as of November 29, 1981. As you probably know, the fa.* groups were redistributions of Arpanet mailing lists, while net.* were ordinary Usenet-wide groups. > fa.arms-d > fa.arpa-bboard > fa.energy > fa.human-nets > fa.info-cpm > fa.info-micro > fa.info-terms > fa.poli-sci > fa.telecom > fa.sf-lovers > fa.space > fa.tcp-ip > fa.teletext > fa.unix-cpm > fa.unix-wizards > fa.works > > net.general > net.applic > net.columbia > net.eunice > net.games > net.ham-radio > net.news > net.2bsd-bugs > net.v7bugs > net.vwrabbit