From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.2 (2018-09-13) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS, MAILING_LIST_MULTI,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.2 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (minnie.tuhs.org [45.79.103.53]) by inbox.vuxu.org (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTP id bdda0b8c for ; Tue, 17 Sep 2019 02:35:18 +0000 (UTC) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 0C5A39BFDC; Tue, 17 Sep 2019 12:35:17 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8376C947CC; Tue, 17 Sep 2019 12:34:56 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 417A1947CC; Tue, 17 Sep 2019 12:34:53 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mcvoy.com (mcvoy.com [192.169.23.250]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id C73A2947A2 for ; Tue, 17 Sep 2019 12:34:52 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mcvoy.com (Postfix, from userid 3546) id 6A93935E11A; Mon, 16 Sep 2019 19:34:52 -0700 (PDT) Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2019 19:34:52 -0700 From: Larry McVoy To: Clem cole Message-ID: <20190917023452.GB2046@mcvoy.com> References: <0bc0d10f-d17c-24df-2a7f-8f154eefd318@kilonet.net> <20190917011752.GY2046@mcvoy.com> <1583C418-2F6E-45D8-93C2-B93032E6CFFC@ccc.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1583C418-2F6E-45D8-93C2-B93032E6CFFC@ccc.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30) Subject: Re: [TUHS] wizards test [was roff] X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" That was exactly the situation I had and I had a tough time so I wrote a little paper about it. Lemme see if I can find it. Yep, found it. It was when I was messing with roff -me. http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/restor.e http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/restor.pdf I was apparently channeling creat(2) because it was too much work for me (or Ken) to add the trailing e. I'm sort of impressed that I wrote that in 1985 because I got to undergrad in 1980, I was an accounting major because my coach in high school was my accounting teacher, you don't disappoint your coach so I did great at accounting, got to college, no coach and accounting was *not* my thing, wandered around for a year or so taking STEM classes, took some Art History and declared that as a major, did that for 2 years (and got really good at it, as in I have corrected errors in a textbook about Greek pottery [1]) only to have my advisor tell me there are no jobs, so I switched to computer science in 1984. Going from nothing to being a sys admin that had to do a full restore in a year or so is kinda neat. But Unix was kinda neat and I was hooked, it's easy to get good when you really like something (ask me about fly fishing :) Doug, I still have the nroff/troff/tlb/eqn/pic (sadly no grap but I wrote my own in pic later) printed out docs that I got from the UW-Madison Computer Science department. I used those to write that little memo. [1] A little rant about art and how hard and how easy it can be. You guys know Picasso? How about Piet Modrian? Most people know both but don't know that they know Piet. They are very similar, Piet painted trees, here is one: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KwU6EePgmxk/T8FixzAZxBI/AAAAAAAAB0s/xUKRQc23MNk/s1600/mondrian.jpg Yep, that's a tree. WTF you say? So all great artist start out doing the simple stuff. Picasso, if you go back far enough, did still lifes of a bowl of fruit. Piet did essentially photographs of trees. But then they get weird, they get more abstract. And more abstract. To the point that you look at that link above and you go "how is that a tree? That's not a tree". You need to see their work in chronological order. You see the stuff that looks like a photograph and then it is a little different, a little different, and you get to the end and you go wow, that actually is a tree. It makes no sense if you just look at one after it gets abstract, it makes total sense if you see it order. I had the good fortune to see an exhibit at New Yorks MOMA of Picasso in chronological order. Holy moly did that snap him into focus. So that's a very long way of saying that it was easy for me to be good at Greek pottery because I already knew that if you put someones work in chronological order it would make sense. The correction I did that I'm proud of is to Janson's history of art (which is the benchmark for art history), there was a Greek artist who did a series of pots and Janson had two pots backwards, the earlier one was the later one. Janson was dead but the book carried on and they took my fix. On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:36:40PM -0400, Clem cole wrote: > Btw. This was some I used as a wizards test. > > You have a working system next to a system that is still running so you have the console and its shell but had the rm -fr / done to it. You have lost all of bin dev etc and lib by the time he hit ^C. So you have some of /usr inc but much of /usr/bin is still there. No compiler or assembler on the broken machine since that was in bin and lib. > > It???s possible to fix it using the other system to help. Just don???t turn the damaged system off ???? > > Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. > > > On Sep 16, 2019, at 9:17 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > >> On Mon, Sep 16, 2019 at 09:11:17PM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote: > >>> On 9/16/2019 8:20 PM, Steve Johnson wrote: > >>> One day I had been furiously editing a long program file for about an hour > >>> and a half when I was called away to lunch, and, being hungry, didn't save > >>> my file.?? When I got back to the terminal an hour later, I discovered two > >>> things -- the system had crashed, and our cat had decided that the pile of > >>> paper > >>> on the floor made a great litter box.?? After a few choice words, I sighed > >>> and picked up my highliter... > >> > >> This should be engraved on a plaque somewhere. Only because I had almost the > >> same thing happen to me, without the cat though. I had a printout of a > >> "mail" program I had written on TOPS-10 at high school. I had to retype the > >> entire thing after the file got corrupted. > > > > I think we have all been there. Something always goes wrong. I wrote > > a paper about how to restore a Masscomp because I did rm -rf . in /. > > I believe we had roots home as / because /usr was a different partition. > > Clem, did Masscomp make roots home / or was that us? Anyway, I did a > > cd something > > and somehow deleted the something and then did rm -rf . > > Much fun was had, I was up all night putting things back together. > > This was probably around 1984 or 1985, I was pretty green. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm