From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: noel.hunt@gmail.com (Noel Hunt) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2017 09:27:07 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] [Uucp] utzoo In-Reply-To: References: <20170330074552.GA32142@minnie.tuhs.org> <20170405062549.GG39557@server.rulingia.com> Message-ID: 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 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." > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: