From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Subject: [TUHS] BSDi Imaging
Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2017 07:50:50 -0500 (EST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170226125050.9691E18C09B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (raw)
> From: Deborah Scherrer
> On 2/25/17 11:25 AM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
>> MtXinu is something I really want.
> I worked there for 10 years (eventually becoming President). I'll try
> to dig up a tape.
Say what you will about RMS, but he really did change the world of software.
Most code (except for very specialized applications) just isn't worth much
anymore (because of competition from open source) - which is part of why all
these old code packages are now freely available.
Although I suppose the development of portabilty - which really took off with
C and Unix, although it had existed to some degree before that, q.v. the tools
collection in FORTRAN we just mentioned - was also a factor, it made it
possible to amortize code writing over a number of different types of
machines.
There were in theory portable languages beforehand (e.g. PL/1), but I think it
probably over-specified things - e.g. it would be impossible to port Multics
to another architecture without almost completely re-writing it from scratch,
the code is shot through with "fixed bin(18)"'s every other line...
Noel
next reply other threads:[~2017-02-26 12:50 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-02-26 12:50 Noel Chiappa [this message]
2017-02-26 20:49 ` [TUHS] Portability (was: BSDi Imaging) Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2017-02-27 1:08 ` Steve Johnson
2017-02-27 6:31 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2017-02-25 3:52 [TUHS] BSDi Imaging Cory Smelosky
2017-02-25 3:53 ` Cory Smelosky
2017-02-25 7:34 ` Cory Smelosky
2017-02-25 21:21 ` Ron Natalie
2017-02-25 18:57 ` Al Kossow
2017-02-25 19:25 ` Cory Smelosky
2017-02-25 20:47 ` Deborah Scherrer
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