And the latest revision: Things Every Hacker Once Knew. This time: The Break key. uuencode/uudecode. Why older Internet protocols only assume a 7-bit link. The original meanings of SO/SI. WRU and station ID on teletypes. BITNET and other pre-Internets. There is one respect in which working on this is changing my historical perspective. The section… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.10
The simplest possible method syntax in C
I’ve been thinking a lot about language design lately. Part of this comes from my quite successful acquisition of Go and my mostly failed attempt to learn Rust. These languages make me question premises I’ve held for a long time, and that questioning has borne some fruit. In the remainder of this posting I will… Continue reading The simplest possible method syntax in C
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.9
I’ve shipped another revision of Things Every Hacker Once Knew The pace of suggested additions and corrections has slowed down a lot; I think this thing is stabilizing. I gave in and added the one bit of paper-tape lore people have been bugging me to include, about why DEL is 0xb1111111. Learning that the NSA… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.9
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.8
Heritage games. The legacy of all-uppercase terminals. Where README came from. What “core” is. The ARPANET. Monitoring your computer with a radio. And more… Things Every Hacker Once Knew The response to this document has been nothing short of astonishing. More than half of my non-spam mail over the last three weeks has been people… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.8
loccount: A faster SLOC utility
Here’s my first new project in a while – loccount, inspired by David A. Wheeler’s sloccount tool but much faster and with broader language coverage. I actually wrote this as a learning exercise in the Go language. You can find more details in my NTPsec blog post on Grappling With Go. If you like it,… Continue reading loccount: A faster SLOC utility
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.7
Did I say Things Every Hacker Once Knew was stabilizing? Silly me… Here’s the 1.7 version. Substantial new material on the BBS scene – this is my answer to the people who have been bugging me to at least mention XMODEM/YMODEM/ZMODEM. The expository approach I’m taking is to bin all of UUCP, the BBS scene,… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.7
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.6
The newest version is here. I think it’s stabilizing. The rate of comments and submissions has been dropping. Changelog: How VDTs explain some heritage programs, and how bitmapped displays eventually obsolesced them. Explain why the ADM-3 was called “dumb” even though it was smart. There’s also a mention of RS-323 on network gear. Still nothing… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.6
In which, alas, I must rattle a tin cup
The work on NTPsec is going very well. Unfortunately, since we lost our CII funding in September, my personal situation isn’t.
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.5
The 1.5 revision of Things Every Hacker Once Knew is out. Alas, I had to drop the reference to the Space Cadet keyboard. Turns out it shipped a 32-bit status word and this had nothing to do with 9-bit bytes at all. The indirect reference to the SAIL extended ASCII keyboard is still in. Patrick… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.5
In defense of recording folk history
One of my regular commenters on A&D, Random832, wrote the following in response to my inclusion criteria for Things Every Hacker Once Knew. On “common knowledge at the time”, I think the problem with dismissing things as “fascinating but obscure trivia” means too much exclusion of the real facts behind things that were already forgotten… Continue reading In defense of recording folk history
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.4
New version 1.4 at: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/ New content in this one is an expanded section about outboard modems, their descendants in today’s technology, and the curious survival of the Hayes AT command set. I had actually received a couple of previous requests to add material on the Hayes AT convention, but rejected them on the grounds… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.4
Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.2
The response to this piece has been remarkably broad and positive. I have to note, though, that I didn’t write it as a nostalgia trip – I don’t miss underpowered computers, primitive tools, and tiny low-resolution displays. At least people did notice that it isn’t a you-kids-get-off-my-lawn grumble. I think it’s good for younger hackers… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.2
Things Every Hacker Once Knew
As promised in the comments on my last post, here it is: Things Every Hacker Once Knew Comments and corrections welcome.
Tools generate culture: a trivial example
If I were the kind of person who grumbles about feeling ancient, I’d have been doing it today. I got reminded that younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII like their tongues know the back of their teeth. Man, we all grokked that back when I was new at this. Nowadays not so… Continue reading Tools generate culture: a trivial example
Rust and the limits of swarm design
In my last blog post I expressed my severe disappointment with the gap between the Rust language in theory (as I had read about it) and the Rust language in practice, as I encountered it when I actually tried to write something in it. Part of what I hoped for was a constructive response from… Continue reading Rust and the limits of swarm design
Rust severely disappoints me
I wanted to like Rust. I really did. I’ve been investigating it for months, from the outside, as a C replacement with stronger correctness guarantees that we could use for NTPsec. I finally cleared my queue enough that I could spend a week learning Rust. I was evaluating it in contrast with Go, which I… Continue reading Rust severely disappoints me
How to educate me about prejudice in the open-source community
Every once in a while I post something just to have it handy as a reference for the next time I have to deal with a galloping case of some particular kind of sloppy thinking. That way I don’t have to generate an individual explanation, but can simply point at my general standards of evidence.… Continue reading How to educate me about prejudice in the open-source community
Hey, Democrats! We need you to get your act together!
It’s now just a bit over a month since Election Day, and I’m starting to be seriously concerned about the possibility that the U.S. might become a one-party democracy. Therefore this is an open letter to Democrats; the country needs you to get your act together. Yes, ideally I personally would prefer your place in… Continue reading Hey, Democrats! We need you to get your act together!
Spelunking the alt-right
Recently, on a mailing list I frequent, one of the regulars uttered the following sentence: “I’m told Breitbart is the preferred news source for the ‘alt-right’ (KKK and neo-nazis)”. That was a pretty glaring error, there. I was interviewed on Breitbart Tech once. I visit the site occasionally. I am not affiliated with the alt-right,… Continue reading Spelunking the alt-right
Some of my blogging has moved
I’ve been pretty quiet lately, other than short posts on G+, because I’ve been grinding hard on NTPsec. We’re coming up on a 1.0 release and, although things are going very well technically, it’s been a shit-ton of work. One consequence is the NTPsec Project Blog. My first major post there expands on some of… Continue reading Some of my blogging has moved