An introduction

Talk about the project itself, the community, where we are and what we need. Great place to introduce yourself and make friends as well.

An introduction

Postby Mettacrawler » Wed Feb 08, 2023 4:48 pm

The forum summary says this is where to make introductions. Here's a little about me.

When I was pre-teen, my mother gave me a vinyl LP record of a musical adaptation of a Danny Dunn storybook (most people are more familiar with Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, Danny Dunn was another one in that genre). It was Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine. That's when I stared wanting a computer, it was like propaganda to hear about a machine that did your homework. I would play lunar lander on computers at SciFi conventions. In 1977 I was at a Radio Shack in a shopping mall. There was a TRS-80 on display with the instruction manual. I flipped though it and used the display model. That was my first experience using a computer other than playing games.

I didn't have enough money to buy my own computer other than a Sinclair ZX-81 which I didn't want. By 1980 I scraped together $350 and bought an ATARI 400 on a Father's Day sale. I jokingly think that I bought my dad a gift that would keep him from having me living in his basement. By the time I was through with the 400 it had 48K of memory, the vendor said it could only have 16K. I had replaced the membrane keyboard with an inline, full travel one.

Around that time my high school had invested in dozens of Japanese Z80 micros using CP/M and someone slipped me a copy of Sorcim Pascal/M; I didn't find out that it was an expensive product until I was reading old computer magazines online and saw the price in an ad. That's how I was able to learn Pascal as my second computer language in the same year.

BYTE magazine was always pushing UNIX and that was the second wave of propaganda. By 1982 or 1983 I had a rudimentary C compiler on the 400. I traded up to an ATARI 512 with a 68000.

I was sexually harassed at work by my boss. It was at a university health science library. He said to my face "I really want a lover I can [bang] all night". I was very against the idea of sleeping with a boss. I get delayed reactions to things. Eventually I took it out on him. There was one AT&T UNIX PC (a mc68010 with an external MMU to do demand paging not a PeeCee) running SysVR3 but with pagedaemon, the BSD name, not vhand, the SysV name, for the page reclamation process. My boss had vague plans to use it for a library database someday. It uses MFM drives which are meant for PC AT where there is infrequent disk access. There is very high disk activity while running UNIX with only 1MB of RAM, maybe 740KB that's not in use by the kernel. The drive didn't last long, I had to replace the 20MB one, this time with a 40MB drive. A library database on that rig would have gone up in smoke.

I brought a black garbage bag to work and put the UNIX PC in it and placed it outside the door. I came back at night when the office was locked up but the computer was still there in the bag. I took it home. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like the other way if I had gone home with him and we ran Ingres on the UNIX PC until it croaked.

So I had a UNIX system by 1985 or so. I did some freelancing, I had a software title on the market in 1985 through a company which was run by a nice man and wife. People would send them software since they marketed that. If they didn't like something then I could have it. I got a copy of David Beckmeyer's Micro-RTX and MT-Cshell, a unix-like environment for the ATARI ST. I later installed MINIX on the ATARI ST.

I got on the Internet in 1988 at a job. I was allowed to share an Iris-4D 70/GT, my first UNIX workstation experience. I stayed on the Internet because I had a friend there. At some point we got into as discussion about UNIX workstations and I suggested that he should get a NeXT. He was very pleased with the one he got and gushed about it from time to time. The only time I remember him asking me for help was with compiling TeX; I told him there was a -bsd flag to the C compiler and that's all it took. I knew about that because my Internet access at that time consisted of dialing into a LAT and using that to telnet to his NeXT where I could build software. My friend knew about this. I also could telnet from there to the MIT AI lab to see what was the GNU developers were up to. At one point I stumbled across a tcp-to-chaosnet bridge (protocol converter) and connected to ai.ai.mit.edu which was running ITS. I didn't really spend much time on ITS then, it wasn't until much later that I really got into it for about a year on KLH10 running the PI distribution.

At some point in the early 1990s I bought a surplus 368 running Microsoft Xenix which I erased in favor of Minix. I remember my first home TCP/IP setup was KA9Q between the 386, the UNIX PC and the ATARI ST 512. I created a routing loop which showed up on the breakout box. The 386's power supply blew out and I decided to spend money on a new 486 instead of fixing the 386. The first OS I used on it was NetBSD 0.8 which came out in 1993.

Around that time I was working in a procurement shop. We had a seemly-endless succession of different UNIX boxen and Apollo running Aegis. I remember working in about 2000 were my employer removed an HP 9000 D-Class tower from the data center and I was permitted to keep it in my cubical and I put Debian Woody on it back when that was still supported. I had a personal collection with a Sun3, Sun SPARCstation 4, DEC VAXstation and two Alphas, I don't remember if there were other ones. I gave them all away to enthusiasts after I grew tired of them. I have no way of knowing how many different *nix computer types I've used.

I switched from NetBSD to OpenBSD, where I was a developer, to FreeBSD because my boss at the time wanted FreeBSD. Because of the FreeBSD ports tree I stared to use Gentoo. That lead me to using other Linux distros.

These days I spend time exploring UNIX philosophy.

"Everything is a file" (EIAF), a term which some say is a UNIX philosophy, appears to really be a Linux philosophy. None of the core UNIX people ever wrote that EIAF was part of their philosophy. It raises the question of what it really means for something to be a file. Does it have to have a representation as an object in a file system or is having a file descriptor good enough? Does a file need to support open/close/read/write or is something still a file when it supports other system calls like getdents? Is a symlink a file, supported only by four calls, symlink, readlink, lstat and unlink? Does procfs cause processes to be files even though you need to use clone and wait, which procfs does not provide? Should everything be a file? Does the Linux USB API suffer from requiring so many /sys files to be opened that it is recommended you use libusb as the API?

The core UNIX people support Rob Pike's observation that the "cat -v" option (which was committed to SCCS by Bill Joy but that doesn't prove he wrote it, just signed off on it) was against the UNIX philosophy (originally from Doug McIlroy) "Make each program do one thing well." The cat program is documented as being the concatenator and the -v flag cause cat to modify the input which is out-of-scope with the said purpose of concatenation. See http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ However, 6th Edition UNIX has both "sort -u" and "uniq". Is the -u flag out of scope? Is de-duplicating part of sorting? Either de-duplication is part of sorting or they went against their philosophy, creating both "uniq" which does one thing well and "sort -u" which does more than one thing.

I'm also doing a little fooling around with Arch Linux ARM on my Mochabin lately.
Mettacrawler
 
Posts: 56
Joined: Sun Mar 18, 2018 7:19 pm

Re: An introduction

Postby Mettacrawler » Thu Feb 09, 2023 5:05 pm

Mettacrawler
 
Posts: 56
Joined: Sun Mar 18, 2018 7:19 pm

Re: An introduction

Postby Mettacrawler » Sat Feb 11, 2023 5:52 pm

Do you think I made a mistake by getting AI to write my introduction?
Mettacrawler
 
Posts: 56
Joined: Sun Mar 18, 2018 7:19 pm

Re: An introduction

Postby moonman » Wed Mar 22, 2023 5:36 pm

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Mettacrawler', 'D')o you think I made a mistake by getting AI to write my introduction?


I don't believe too many people read it because that's a lot of text. It's a little weird for sure lol
Pogoplug V4 | GoFlex Home | Raspberry Pi 4 4GB | CuBox-i4 Pro | ClearFog | BeagleBone Black | Odroid U2 | Odroid C1 | Odroid XU4
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[armv5] Updated U-Boot | [armv5] NAND Rescue System
moonman
Developer
 
Posts: 3387
Joined: Sat Jan 15, 2011 3:36 am


Return to Community

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests