> Dennis Clarke wrote: > >>This : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/ >> >>spawned this : http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/01/06/0927209.shtml >> >>Good Lord, its 2007 and yet people can still get all worked up over vi and >>emacs. No wonder we have wars over religion. >> >>For the record, I use vi. Not just any vi either but THE vi in >>/usr/xpg4/bin/vi and I set my env var EDITOR that way too. >> >>Oh .. don't know if anyone knows this bit of trivia in the Solaris world >> but >>Rich Teer wrote his massive 1152 page book, "Solaris Systems Programming" >> in >>the time honoured tradition of using vi and troff. It says so on page >>xxxvi.[1] >> >> wow >> >>Well I entered every character of this message using toggle switches at the >>front panel with my left foot tapping out square wave clock signals to >>manually refresh the DRAM. :-) >> >> >> > What the interesting mix of technology. Aapparently your hardware was > updated recently. I remember toggle switches on the front panel and > ferromagnetic core memory. ;)
I have "seen" core memory but never had to work with it directly. The oldest bit of technology that I had to work with was papertape backup. Well, punch cards of course but we have all seen them. Once upon a time we could buy a kit from HeathKit that had the _option_ of a hex humeric keypad and we would need to write the assemby all ourselves and load it in. Keyboard debouncing was a very real issue and Microsoft was selling bits and pieces of computer stuff in small ads at the back of Byte Magazine. If I had bought ten shares of every company in the back of Byte magazine back then .. sheeze .. I wouldn't want to imagine what ten shares of Microsoft from 1977 would be worth today. Geeks were never any damn good at business anyways .. look at Steve Jobs and Wozniak. MnNealy and Joy. I just don't see Bill Joy ( back then ) running a business and has Scott McNealy ever written a single line of code? How it is that Bill Gates got off the ground is a mystery to me. I guess he had some good geeks too back then. The oldest bit of software from Microsoft that seems to still be kicking around is BASIC and I don't know if they invented that or stole^H^H^H^H^Hbought that. At least vi has a ton of Bill Joy in it and I live with it daily like a bizillion other people. Its the product of real geeks that needed to solve a problem as opposed to make money. Strangely, when good geeks get together and solve a problem we focus on the problem with nary a mind on business. So many business people look at this open source stuff and just sneer. Its insane. You can't make money that way. You don't set up a lemonade stand and then give it away. That's all they care about. Thankfully we geeks ignore the sneers and just solve the problem anyways. The business people catch on later .. maybe. hey gee .. I'm rambling. :-) Dennis _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
