From: noel.hunt@gmail.com (Noel Hunt)
Subject: [TUHS] [Uucp] utzoo
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2017 09:27:07 +1000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAGfO01x_JhxDS=3f=jg3cwfZgo7Fz1OoAmU23R-1LF1G267BNQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.20.1704060851280.81763@aneurin.horsfall.org>
John was certainly...different.
Here is a file I found in his home directory after
he was no longer with us:
A Short History
of
John Mackin
or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Machine
I was born in the dawn of computing, three
days after the first FORTRAN compiler became
operational. My first words were "BALR R4".
My introduction to modern computing was on
a DECsystem-10 (which shall remain nameless).
Continuing down the track with Digital
hardware, I found out about PDP-11s and acquired
a reputation as the Man who could Answer Hard
Questions. I became completely nocturnal in
order to get better system response and avoid
landlords. I ate lots of pizzas, and knew the
octal encoding for any -10 or -11 instruction.
But there was something missing.
In 1977 I saw Level 6 UNIX (a trademark, of
course, of AT&T Bell Laboratories). It was
queer, and it was very buggy, and it was
running on a very unstable 11/40. But it
had that ``je ne sais quoi''. From that
time on, it's been a never-ending progression:
through V7, system III, PWB, AUSAM and Berkeley
to System V, and now Release 2.0. Sometimes
advocating and sometimes resisting creeping
featurism, I can still Answer Hard Questions
(and amazingly trivial ones too). The secret
is to read the manuals -- but I long ago despaired
of getting others to do that.
My interests, apart from UNIX (you mean there IS
something apart from UNIX?), are -- well -- I'm
sure I USED to have some ... ...
On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 8:52 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Apr 2017, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>
> > >And I still bear the scars from the aus.bizarre war... And I'll bet
> > >that not many people remember that little episode :-)
> >
> > Who is going to take the roll of "Iron Bar"?
>
> Oh gawd... It was a sad day when we lost him; I really missed him.
>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-04-05 23:27 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <20170330074552.GA32142@minnie.tuhs.org>
2017-03-31 6:03 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-04-05 6:25 ` Peter Jeremy
2017-04-05 22:29 ` Noel Hunt
2017-04-05 22:52 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-04-05 23:27 ` Noel Hunt [this message]
2017-04-05 23:44 ` Peter Jeremy
2017-04-06 0:25 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-04-06 5:34 ` arnold
2017-04-06 5:42 ` arnold
2017-04-06 6:11 ` Dave Horsfall
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