71–80 of 153 posts
I love this! first time I see people use 'ed' for work!!! I wonder who else has to deal with ed also... recently I had to connect to an ancient system where vi was not available, I had to write my own editor, so whoever needs an editor for an ancient system, ping me (it is not too fancy). amazing work by the creators of this software and by the researchers, you have my full respect guys. those are the real engineers!
Real Programmers use ed. https://xkcd.com/378/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Otoh: I got react to run my tests without any warnings today.
If I write a bunch of tests for new code, and all of them pass on the first attempt, I'm immediately suspicious of a far more egregious bug hiding somewhere…
Spock levels of fascinating from me. I want to learn how to compile a pdp11 emulator on my mac.
Compiling an emulator is quite easy: have a look at simh. It's very portable and should just work out of the box. Once you've got that working, try installing a 2.11BSD distribution. It's well-documented and came after a lot of the churn in early Unix. After that, I've had great fun playing with RT-11, to the point that I've actually written some small apps on it.
If you want to play around with RT-11 again, I made a small PDP-11/03 emulator + VT240 terminal emulator running in the browser. It's still incomplete, but you can play around with it here: https://lsi-11.unknown-tech.eu/ (source code: https://github.com/unknown-technologies/weblsi-11)
The PDP-11/03 emulator itself is good enough that it can run the RT-11 installer to create the disk image you see in the browser version. The VT240 emulator is good enough that the standalone Linux version can be used as terminal emulator for daily work. Once I have time, I plan to make a proper blog post describing how it all works / what the challenges were and post it as Show HN eventually.
Software archeology
One of the many things I dislike about the SaaS era is that this will never happen. Nobody in 2075 will boot up an old version of Notion or Figma for research or nostalgia. Like the culture produced and consumed on social media and many other manifestations of Internet culture it is perfectly ephemeral and disposable. No history, no future. SaaS is not just closed but often effectively tied to a literal single instal…
We're living the SOA dreams, but it will be an hefty price.
Cool. Can we enter that time portal and live in that alternate reality?
When gasoline was leaded, cigarette smoke was normal everywhere, and asbestos was used for everything you can think of? It is a fascinating decade but also quality of life likely has skyrocketed since.
I suspect the sentiment is more that it would be nice to live in a simpler time, with fewer options, because it would reduce anxiety we all feel about not being able to "keep up" with everything that is going on. Or maybe I'm just projecting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the difference between an emulator and a simulator in this context?
There is LOADS of gray area, overlap, and room for one's own philosophical interpretation... But typically simulators attempt to reproduce the details of how a particular machine worked for academic or engineering purposes, while emulators are concerned mainly with only getting the desired output. (Everything else being an implementation detail.) E.g. since the MAME project considers itself living documentation of ar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember using an ed-like editor on a Honeywell timeshare system in the 1960s, over a Teltype ASR-33. I don't remember much except you invoked it using "make " to create a new file. And if you typed "make love" the editor would print "not war" before entering the editor.
The “MAKE LOVE”/“NOT WAR” easter egg was in TECO for DEC PDP-6/10 machines. But DEC TECO was also ported to Multics, so maybe that was the Honeywell machine you used it on. But, for a whole bunch of reasons, I’m left with the suspicion you may be misremembering something from the early 1970s as happening in the 1960s. While it isn’t totally impossible you had this experience in 1968 or 1969, a 1970s date would be muc…
On the other hand, I never really tried to do anything with TECO other than run VTEDIT.
Cool. Can we enter that time portal and live in that alternate reality?
I mean... Sure? Go buy an actual VT* unit ( maybe https://www.ebay.com/itm/176698465415?_skw=vt+terminal&itmme... ?), get the necessary adaptors to plug into a computer, and run simh on it running your choice of *nix. I recommend https://jstn.tumblr.com/post/8692501831 as a reference. Once you have it working, shove the host machine behind a desk or otherwise out of sight, and you can live like it's 1980.
The alternative is to use a decent VT emulator attached to roughly any monitor. By "decent" I certainly don't mean projects like cool-retro-term, but rather something like this, which I started to develop some time ago and which I'm using as my main terminal emulator now: https://github.com/unknown-technologies/vt240