This post is another example of why I like zig so much. It seems to get people talking about performance in a way which helps them learn how things work below today’s heavily abstracted veneer
I miss Openboot firmware that was on SunOS servers and workstations. It was IIRC mostly written in FORTH and we could write forth snippets at the serial console to make mods / query the pre boot environment. I also found the SGI boot firmware similarly functional. Both allowed changing boot settings and allowed to boot from network without any trouble at all. Graphical BIOS that came with the x86 systems was such a downgrade for us especially since you could not interact over serial/remotely with a simple terminal connection. IMHO
With respect to end of sentence spaces. I'm an "old" and learned on typewriters and type two spaces is etched into my muscle memory and my brain. It wasn't until 2016 that while working collaboratively on a large google doc (which was occasionally brought into Word by others) that I was made aware that two spaces were no longer the norm.
It was like an editing PVP game where these would be fixed in near real-time by others in the document we were working on :-)
Yes the web text today removes these today but I still prefer reading text in the old RFC document style where it's not only fixed width fonts, but also right and left column justified. In emacs this can be done by selecting a region and doing a C-u ESC q
I liked programming the m68k cpus. They were also the CPU used in my computer science department curricula for assembly language programming classes.
At school we had lots of Sun{2,3,4}, Apollo, HP, Mac, and NeXT computers which we could practice on. Kinda saw the writing on the wall when we got a 6 CPU i386 sequent symmetry system and then SPARC, MIPS RISC, and PowerPC while nothing really from Motorola. I never enjoyed programming x86 cpus after being self taught on 6502 and then m68k systems :-)
I still have an ATARI Mega ST and a Sun 2 at home for sentimental reasons only.
I’ve used emacs to open and edit binaries back in the old days - basically one long line. We often needed to install proprietary software in non standard locations so changing the embedded strings within binaries worked great and better than using vi (pre vim era). Always best if the new path had a length less than that of the existing one.
In any event I guess the whining about editors will never stop but meanwhile they seem to be GoodEnough(tm) for me and most things.
Emacs used to be mocked for being bigger than the OS but now I think most editors are much larger. I used to work at a University lab helpdesk of sorts where first time users of UNIX systems would ask us for help getting started entering their first CSCI programs on a Sun or other UNIX-like os and my unscientific but high n observation is that vi, emacs, ed or cat all worked and occasionally people would find a way to get confused equally on any method when starting out. Level of education didn’t seem to make a difference.
Editor ergonomics seem to be very personal, like furniture so I’m glad we have so many options.
On another side note I am glad that most text input fields across many operating systems and applications usually do the right thing with Emacs cursor control sequences e.g. CTRL-a, CTRL-n, CTRL-p, CTRL-e. So hopefully that legacy lives on
Editor ergonomics seem to be very personal, like furniture so I’m glad we have so many options.
A long time ago I read some piece by Groucho, about how it's impossible to find a beef (or ham, or turkey, not sure which it was) sandwich any more. He goes to some sandwich shop and ask for a beef sandwich and they offer him a beef + hard boiled eggs + lettuce sandwich with mayo, cherry tomatos and oregano, or a beef + cheese + spinachs + nutmeg sandwich or whatever. But he can't just buy a simple roastbeef sandwich, maybe with a pinch of mustard.
I used Notepad in Windows for simple text, that used to work OK. Then I changed to some free editor created by a guy as a programming exercise with some interesting extras. Now both have the same problem: if I need to open big text files for some reason, it takes forever.
> A long time ago I read some piece by Groucho, about how it's impossible to find a beef (or ham, or turkey, not sure which it was) sandwich any more. (...) But he can't just buy a simple roastbeef sandwich, maybe with a pinch of mustard.
I need to find that piece, because it resonates. For me, it's hot dogs. I can't find plain hotdogs anywhere anymore. All I want is a bun, a sausage, and some ketchup and mustard on top. But no, everyone has to add at least cucumbers and fried onions, and if you're not careful, you'll end up with bread full of a large assortment of veggies, with barely a sausage in sight.
I imagine the reason for this is economics: this green stuff is probably dirt cheap relative to the sausage, but lets the vendor triple the price of a hot dog without making you feel they're price gouging you.
For the past decade in my area, IKEA was the last bastion of pure, unadulterated hot dogs. But even they recently took that off the menu - the basic hot dog now comes loaded with useless greenery.
Fuzzing was used in Thomas J Ryan's The Adolescence of P-1, circa 1977 (in an attack against some IBM mainframe's supervisor).
(TAoP1 is a much-overlooked example of . . . well, I wouldn't call it cyberpunk, but definitely counter-culture computing. In the IBM world, I think that means you refuse to wear a tie. It's technically dated -- think modems-and-megabytes -- but still kind of fun).
I use my cluster of rpis to run light compute jobs so I prefer to run everything in RAM using alpine Linux. I don’t need to have sdcard or nvme adding extra cost. NFS for persistence and cheap independent wall warts plugged into a couple power strips. However I guess if you need the IOPS maybe the nvme is called for and worth the extra cost.
I still read/triage my email with a text only client in a terminal. Much faster for me to consume when the font, spacing and layout is consistent. The bonus is that it also avoids sending good and bad telemetry back to other parties.
