5 ms·

>> One day, Linus accidentally attempted to use his hard drive to dial the university, resulting in his master boot sector starting with "ATDT" and the universi

by lb1lf 3y ago

>> One day, Linus accidentally attempted to use his hard drive to dial the university, resulting in his master boot sector starting with "ATDT" and the university modem-pool phone number. After recovering from this, he implemented file permissions in his kernel. Now this nugget made my day. I love Finnish deadpan humor.

nicholasjarnold 3y ago
dropped by to comment the exact same thing. good ole' /dev/*. make sure you're sending bytes to the correct one!
freedomben 3y ago
Everything is a file! :-D
rcarmo 3y ago
Yes, but the "I recommend this installation method" bit is slightly better :)
dekhn 3y ago
I've actually seen a rare case where a rebooting machine with messed up DMA tables managed to deliver incoming network packets to the hard drive, corrupting it. It took a bunch of really smart people a long time to figure that out.
deckard1 3y ago
Reminds me of how I nuked my first Linux drive. I was using the cthugha[1] music visualizer app. You had to pass in a CD-ROM device as well as a DSP device (long before ALSA existed). Instead of the DSP I probably passed in my hard drive. Whoops. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)
- ofalkaed 3y ago
  I miss OSS and /dev/dsp, being able to write to the audio output like it was a file was great fun. I spent many hours back in the day just using bash scripting to make sound, I never got things good enough to make any worthwhile music but I did enjoy myself. Never accidentally specified /dev/hda instead of dsp but I did once do rm -r /usr instead of ./usr, switched to always using absolute paths for such things after that.
  - Jenda_ 3y ago
    > I miss OSS and /dev/dsp, being able to write to the audio output like it was a file was great fun. I usually spawn "aplay" and pipe audio data into stdin, like it was a file.
  - anthk 3y ago
    use play from sox.
nocoiner 3y ago
I literally laughed aloud about 1992 being the year of Linux on the desktop.

by lb1lf 3y ago

nicholasjarnold 3y ago

dropped by to comment the exact same thing. good ole' /dev/*. make sure you're sending bytes to the correct one!

freedomben 3y ago

Everything is a file! :-D

rcarmo 3y ago

Yes, but the "I recommend this installation method" bit is slightly better :)

dekhn 3y ago

I've actually seen a rare case where a rebooting machine with messed up DMA tables managed to deliver incoming network packets to the hard drive, corrupting it. It took a bunch of really smart people a long time to figure that out.

deckard1 3y ago

Reminds me of how I nuked my first Linux drive. I was using the cthugha[1] music visualizer app. You had to pass in a CD-ROM device as well as a DSP device (long before ALSA existed). Instead of the DSP I probably passed in my hard drive. Whoops. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)

ofalkaed 3y ago
I miss OSS and /dev/dsp, being able to write to the audio output like it was a file was great fun. I spent many hours back in the day just using bash scripting to make sound, I never got things good enough to make any worthwhile music but I did enjoy myself. Never accidentally specified /dev/hda instead of dsp but I did once do rm -r /usr instead of ./usr, switched to always using absolute paths for such things after that.
- Jenda_ 3y ago
  > I miss OSS and /dev/dsp, being able to write to the audio output like it was a file was great fun. I usually spawn "aplay" and pipe audio data into stdin, like it was a file.
- anthk 3y ago
  use play from sox.

nocoiner 3y ago

I literally laughed aloud about 1992 being the year of Linux on the desktop.