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Things Every Hacker Once Knew (2017)
- bell-cot 3y agoYou know you're getting old when...something like this has aged off HN's /newest page with only 2 upvotes, and no comments.
- pjmlp 3y agoOr when you remember having been through all the items being discussed.
- bayindirh 3y agoOr when you used real VT320s to configure devices, switches or talk with things in general. ...or written code to do the same, albeit programmatically.
- baz00 3y agoOr had to crack open the vt320 and fix it with the service manual and a soldering iron!
- yetihehe 3y agoI had to connect to a cisco router with a serial dongle (window->usb->serial->cisco) not that long ago. After successfully configuring, I could change configuration in the same exact way going over network (window->encryption->tcp->ethernet->decryption->cisco), but underneath, it's all teletypes talking to each other[0]. [0] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
- bayindirh 3y agoI can understand. We still have a drawer full of different console cables with a couple of USB-RS-232 converters. Our tradition during new hardware installs, yelled through the datacenter over CRAC, wind and fan noise: A: You said blue one, but it's not connecting to $NETWORK_DEVICE B: Try the other, slightly darker blue one, with the sticker XYZ. That's the one I used IIRC. A: Oh, OK.
- bityard 3y agoMy $work has an R&D lab with hundreds of the enterprise/carrier network appliances we sell, and ALL of the automation for the whole thing happens over RS-232 serial.
- dboreham 3y agoVT320 would'av been a luxury fur us.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 3y agoThe author has himself to thank for a chilly reception amongst some.
- jgrahamc 3y agoActually, there was an even older style of tty interface derived from telegraph circuits and called "current loop" that the ASR-33 originally used; in the 1970s dual-mode ASR-33s that could also speak RS-232 began to ship, and RS-232 eventually replaced current loop entirely. This is what the KIM-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1) uses and it's pretty common for current loop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_loop) interfaces to still be used in the context of industrial control and it's also the basis for MIDI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI#Electrical_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI#Electrical_specifications).
- ajb 3y agoCurrent loop is used where the length of the cable could be huge. If you put in 20mA at one end, you know you will get it out at the other irrespective of length, which is not true of voltage.
- dboreham 3y agoCurrent loop was commonly used into the 80s : anywhere that needed a long cable run. From memory a VAX 780 could do 19200 but only over 20mA loop.
- jwestbury 3y agoThe section on hardware context reminds me of what is probably a little-known fact these days -- that Oregon Trail (amongst many other games[0]) was originally designed as a teletype game. 0. https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-forgotten-world-of-teletype-computer-games https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-forgotten-world-of-teletype-c...
- spiritplumber 3y agoWe used "ascii soup" to refer to the output of mismatched tty configurations between serial devices for industrial stuff.
- livrem 3y ago> Google Groups is where you can find what has been preserved of the historical USENET archives I recommend archive.org instead. There are many great collections there with USENET groups saved as mbox files that you can download. Install something like mboxgrep, import into a mail reader, or just read the files as text. Just one example: https://archive.org/details/usenet-comp https://archive.org/details/usenet-comp
- Kye 3y ago> cd .. https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical
- zozbot234 3y agoDiscussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498365
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Things Every Hacker Once Knew - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498365 - Jan 2017 (321 comments)
- theodorethomas 3y agoMid 1980s, trying to connect from one London University computer (at Imperial, a CDC Cyber?) to another (at Queen Mary?), to try some symbolic algebra package that was only available on a Unix minicomputer: spent a good 2 hours just finding the right terminal settings and configuration settings for all the intervening software. Left me feeling I would rather code what I could on an 8-bit 2Mhz 64K machine.
- vmilner 3y agoYep - those were the days when there was a pretty good chance that people doing Uk computer science degrees had a working knowledge of Z80 or 6502 machine code from hacking Elite/Jet Set Willy/Manic Miner on their ZX Spectrums/BBC Micros...
- brabel 3y agoI worked with data acquisition systems around 1998. RS-232 was still king (though USB was quickly displacing it), using DB-9 connectors... I always assumed DB-25 had always been for printer's parallel connectors :D would be really confusing to get RS-232 with one of those for me. I think the author doesn't mention there were other protocols as well, like RS-485 which had a much greater range in terms of distance (and I think it also used DB-9 though if you connected it to the wrong protocol, one of the sides would definitely go up in smoke :D ). Anyway, very interesting post!
- pixl97 3y ago>one of the sides would definitely go up in smoke Ah the PC-VEI standard Pin Compatible, Violently Electrically Incompatible. Dell had a number of personal computers around the 95'ish era that power supplies with an ATX compatible connector. But it wasn't electrically compatible so if you swapped a regular PC power supply or vice versa you'd like the smoke out of a motherboard.
- bityard 3y agoI had an amber WYSE serial terminal for a while in the mid 2000's that someone gave me new-in-box. I remember three things about it: 1. It had a sharp display and came with some fonts that were truly beautiful compared to the typical 80-column PC font. 2. It had a DB-25 serial port. 3. The keyboard was an absolute piece of garbage.
- IIsi50MHz 3y agoWe had WYSE dumb-terminals with orange plasma displays in my high school, with an empty slot to upgrade them to smart terminals. The keyboards were very reliable. They saw a lot of use for "WordPerfect 1.0 for UNIX". The most unfortunate thing was that if you didn't stagger logins, the poor little minicomputer they talked to would slow to a crawl. Try getting 40 people to sign in at once, and the mini would became unresponsive for all or most of a 45 minute class period. But groups of five, and you could get ~50 people signed-in in few minutes.
- adrian_b 3y ago
- mjg59 3y agoWhat's interesting about this is just how bad it is at tying this to the modern world. For instance, just after discussing how the "AT" Hayes command prefix has useful properties for automatic synchronisation of line speed: "That property is still useful, and thus in 2017 the AT convention has survived in some interesting places. AT commands have been found to perform control functions on 3G and 4G cellular modems used in smartphones." But modern modems aren't connected over serial. There's no concept of line speed. This property is entirely irrelevant to modern hardware. A much more plausible explanation is simply that extending the interface made it easier to extend existing codebases to new contexts. "IoT devices still speak RS-232" This is actually dangerously untrue! RS-232 used positive voltages for 0 and negative voltages for 1, between 3 and 15 volts each. Attaching RS-232 to a modern IoT device's serial interface is likely to kill the device. What is common between old-school serial and the serial ports on modern devices is stuff that's out of the scope of RS-232 (eg, the 8N1 framing isn't defined by RS-232), and using the RS-232 terminology to describe it is about as accurate as calling it RS-422. "If you know what UTF-8 is (and you should) every ASCII file is correct UTF-8 as well." I mean kind of? ASCII is a character set, it doesn't define the on-disk representation. An ASCII file saved with each character packed into 7 bits isn't going to be valid UTF-8 without some manipulation. This is just an odd claim to make given the earlier discussion of varied word lengths and transfer formats that weren't 8-bit clean. "But in 2005 Linus Torvalds invented git, which would fairly rapidly obsolesce all previous version-control systems" (cries in Perforce) Git was a huge improvement over CVS and SVN. Claiming that it rendered everything that came before it obsolescent just suggests massive ignorance of chunks of the software industry. And yes this is all ridiculously pedantic, but given the entire tone of the article is smugly pedantic it doesn't seem unfair to criticise it on that basis.
- hn92726819 3y ago> ASCII is a character set, it doesn't define the on-disk representation ASCII is an encoding, and sometimes people refer to the ASCII charset as "ASCII" too. So it does define on-disk representation. A file with the leading 0s removed is no longer ascii-encoded. Similarly, a gzipped ASCII file is also no longer an ASCII file
- 3y ago
- allo37 3y agoIt's funny, I work in embedded systems and much of this is still relevant to me. RS-232 itself (as in the specification for the physical layer) isn't used as much, but the underlying UART comms protocol is still alive and well. A Beaglebone dev board, for example, can be booted by uploading the bootloader over XModem.
- koz1000 3y agoAnd a lot of smaller microcontrollers still use a UART port and serial protocol to reflash the device. It's the lowest common denominator for hardware interface and the simplest thing that works.
- allo37 3y agoHah, to me flashing an MCU over UART is a luxury. When I first started working with MCUs I needed to use a chip programmer that cost several hundred $ and flashed using a high-voltage (relatively speaking) parallel interface. Then there were serial programmers that used a proprietary protocol to talk to the chip. And then finally we had bootloaders and self-flashing MCUs that made this whole process sane and affordable! And of course to our ancestors, we're spoiled kids with our electronically erasable ROM ;)
- CableNinja 3y agoI remember being blown away as a modern teen seeing an old EPROM being erased and how to do it. It felt more hacker like than todays "just push a button"
- koz1000 3y agoI worked with erasable EPROMs back in the day. It was a pain in the ass.
- fuzztester 3y agoSome more: hex octal binary how to convert between the above 3, and between them and decimal bit twiddling the difference between ASCII and binary files (even pre-unicode) the fact that a source code program compiled on one processor architecture will not run on another without recompilation on the target, apart from cross-compilation - at least in most cases this was true, though there might be differences nowadays, for apple products, java and other bytecode, etc. endianness ... I have actually talk to various people who did not know all of the above topics, although not necessarily all in the same person
- galangalalgol 3y agoPeople with computer related degrees?
- hobs 3y agoI still remember my google buddy talking about being aghast his intern (who was a CS major who obviously passed with flying colors and went to stanford or yale, I dont remember) not knowing what an IP address was.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fuzztester 3y agoI've conducted interviews of professed Unix devs or sysadmins, some years ago, who didn't know what the setuid bit was, or confused it with the sticky bit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_bit
- fuzztester 3y agoSome. One was Comp. Engg. Not sure if any CS.
- bityard 3y agoHeh. These days, a computer science degree is essentially equivalent to a coding degree. But depending on the decade and curriculum, it was traditionally a branch of mathematics and one could theoretically go all the way to PhD while never actually touching a practical computer. There used to be a saying: Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. And that is why in this article, ESR has titled it, Things Every _Hacker_ Once Knew. Hackers usually have some sort of passion for the technology itself and want to understand ALL of the practical details and history of a thing. Hackers are _very much_ about computers.
- zabzonk 3y agoi actually liked working with rs232 back in the early 80s. give me my trusty breakout box, a soldering iron, my own hand-crafted terminal emulator and i was happy as larry. it was really hard to do anything destructively wrong - at worst the thing just wouldn't work. certainly a lot easier to deal with than things are today, should something go wrong.
- ggambetta 3y agoI have fond memories of (badly, sloppily) soldering together a null modem cable to play Doom multiplayer. Good times.
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoI had trouble finding them, but just bought 5 pieces maybe two weeks ago :) 5.55eur/piece!
- wrs 3y ago“Um, actually”, '\n' is ctrl-J, not ctrl-N. And '\r' is ctrl-M, not ctrl-R.
- fluoridation 3y agoI don't understand the bit about the AM radio. Surely he must have meant something in the range of 0.5-1.5 MHz, which is the typical band for AM. I don't think a radio broadcast receiver could pick up an EM signal in the sub-20 kHz range.
- yetihehe 3y agoIf it had audio amplifier, it could. I remember when I could hear some radio station from simple computer speakers. The catch - transmitter was on the other side of the street, but if I remember correctly, it was FM station - how could a simple audio amplifier pick this up - I have no idea, but strange things can happen with harmonics. It was barely audible and very low quality though.
- fluoridation 3y agoMy PC speakers do that. I'm pretty sure that's the cable between the sound card and the amplifier acting as an antenna and picking up the broadcast as interference. Then it gets treated by the speaker system as if it was the actual audio signal. Here's the thing, though: either AM or FM, radio broadcasts are definitely not in the human hearing frequency range. EDIT: Thinking about, maybe what he meant is not that the carrier signal is in the sub-20 kHz range, but rather that the switching happens at around that frequency. For example, gates opening and closing modulating the amplitude at audible frequencies.
- yetihehe 3y agoI gave this as an example of what COULD be picked up. Audio-frequency EM (from "processors" running at measly hundreds of kHz, with actual operations at tens of kHz) picked up by crappy audio amplifier in some old radio - that could happen very easily.
- ratboy666 3y agoThe first "home computer": Altair 8800. The first peripheral: an AM radio: Steve Dompier - https://www.futurefarmers.com/superfund/gazette/Pop-Ups/Arming-DompieerMusic.html https://www.futurefarmers.com/superfund/gazette/Pop-Ups/Armi... The Altair had a 2Mhz clock.
- bewo001 3y agoThis use of AT commands in 4g modems was really something that made me laugh out loud when I started dabbling with those devices. The muscle memory still worked. The lack of dialing and modem sound was a bit of let-down, though. It is astounding that the 3g/4g modem industry did not come up with a better way to talk to their devices. Even ISDN had a widely implemented proper API.
- eternityforest 3y agoWhat would a better protocol look like? Backwards compatibility is pretty nice in a lot of areas.
- gpvos 3y agoI don't know what the modern commands look like, but I hope that at least they abolished the in-band signalling so you don't have to do <wait 1 second> +++ <wait 1 second> .
- yetihehe 3y agoFor newest Quectel BG95 LTE Cat M1 you can either use buffer access mode (AT+QIRD for receiving data) or still use that in-band signalling (direct push mode) with +++. You could also use external pin for exiting from that direct mode, but +++ is still available and useable when you don't have any more free pins on your MCU.
- bewo001 3y agoI understand that there were good reasons why it was done. But out-of-band control is so much nicer to work with. One channel for control, one for data. No parsing of text. No escaping of '+++' to avoid that a '+++ATH' in the data stream closes the connection (I wonder how the download time of a file containing only '+' differs from a file with other characters). And with increasing mobile network speeds, you really want something like DMA instead of reading individual bytes from a serial interface.
- 3y ago
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2017)
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoSome previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498365
- velcrovan 3y ago[flagged]
- brutusborn 3y agoThere’s nothing racist in the article so it doesn’t matter. A bad person can create good things. No need to focus on the bad.
- velcrovan 3y agoNo one actually believes this in practice. Everyone has a threshold of gross, spiteful or violent behavior in others beyond which everything they do becomes tainted. If ESR didn’t consistently use his platform to promote hatred, maybe he’d still be on the near side of that threshold for me and most other people.
- brutusborn 3y agoI do. My threshold for judging content is: is the content valuable to me. This is a function of the content, not the personal history of the author or their associates.
- scaramanga 3y agoAn excellent argument for unbanning Al-Qaeda's magazine, "inspire", which contains a lot of useful information.
- petee 3y agoSo attending a KKK food drive would be acceptable if they aren't actively being racist at it? Pretending they haven't said abhorrent things is arguably just as dangerous.
- brutusborn 3y agoA more relevant example would be: a scientist creates an algorithm and a paper that explains it. This scientist was also a serial killer. The algo and paper retain their value regardless of how many murders the author commits. Their past deeds might be an interesting bit of trivia, but has no bearing on the value of their work.
- jjice 3y agoSomething I always thought was so neat about ASCII was that upper to lowercase was just a flip of the sixth bit away. Now I'm curious was that process is for Unicode or more specifically UTF-8. Is it all table look ups?
- Macha 3y agoYes, but even in the era of ANSI code pages, it was that way for many "accented" characters and non Latin alphabets. And you still needed a little more in ASCII than blindly flipping bits or you'd turn your numerals into control characters.
- jlokier 3y agoOutside of English, upper and lower case isn't that simple. Consider German. Lower case letter "ß" was converted to two upper case letters, "SS" or "SZ", until fairly recently, when a new character "ẞ" was officially added. Much software still uppercases "ß" to "SS". For example: $ python3 -c 'print("große".upper())' GROSSE Consider Turkish. Upper case letter "I" converts to lower case "i" in English, but in Turkish the same letter converts to lower case "ı" (no dot). Lower case letter "i" converts to upper case "I" in English, but in Turkish the same letter converts to upper case "İ" (with a dot). So you have to know which language you're using. It's not enough to know the character. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ß https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ß https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I_in_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I_in_comput...
- red_admiral 3y agoThe ASCII table on Wikipedia (from the military standard) is even better at showing the internal structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII Maybe one could make the perfect ASCII table by grouping the bits as (2, 5) rather than (3, 4) - then you can see the "shift key clears bit 6, control key clears bits 6 and 7" principle for the letter keys.
- petee 3y agoI am a fan of the 4-column style, which what you are saying, separating into 2 bits & 5. I think it's alot more intuitive to see the modifiers in action https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/ https://garbagecollected.org/2017/01/31/four-column-ascii/
- bvan 3y agoGreat article. Much of these things were still very relevant in the 80’s and early 90’s.
- Izkata 3y ago> For most hackers that transition took place within a few years of 1992 - perhaps somewhat earlier if you had access to then-expensive workstation hardware. My library used these teletype machines into the late 90s, maybe even the early 2000s. Don't remember exactly when the transition was, but I remember using them in middle school or early highschool. I actually remember thinking how clunky the web interface was when they upgraded, how you had to make sure the focus was in the text input box. It didn't "just work" like the older system.
- Aardwolf 3y ago> don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it. If it was up to me, remove the more useless old codes that take up precious 1-byte UTF-8 codes and replace them by common characters. Like "Record Separator": if it's that useful to have a record separator character, why aren't we using this one instead of e.g. commas for comma separated values? I find that the degree symbol (°) is a glaring omission from ASCII.
- derekp7 3y agoI love using FS and RS in my shell scripts, esp. when I'm processing text data export from a database. As long as the data doesn't include binary data (such as images), I can be pretty certain that the data doesn't include FS and RS characters since they don't appear on a keyboard -- therefore I can preserve things like line breaks in text fields, and don't have worry about if someone inserted a " | " character in the contents of the data. Of course a pre-pass is to strip out FS / RS just to make sure in case it got in accidentally, and to also know the purpose of the data to ensure that they shouldn't be in the text. But so far that has made my scripts a lot more reliable. The other alternative is to do the light-weight processing using a heaver scripting language that can deal with structured data natively, but setting FS and RS is often times a bit more expedient for me.
- orthoxerox 3y agoIt pains me greatly that Hive still can't ingest FS/RS-separated (or \001/\002-separated) data nor does it correctly handle CSV because someone hardcoded \n as the record separator so deep they can't make it configurable.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago> Like "Record Separator": if it's that useful to have a record separator character, why aren't we using this one instead of e.g. commas for comma separated values? I've done ETLs to/from systems that do use these control characters. It's a joy compared to CSV. I have nothing to escape and no complex parsing logic. Embedded CR/LF-- no problem. Fields containing commas-- no problem. We should be using these control codes for their purpose but nobody knows about them anymore.
- efdee 3y agoI hate to sound so negative but this feels so incredibly cringy. Smug, condescending and pedantic.
- hyggetrold 3y agoThat's a lot of ESR's writing. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
- tom_ 3y agoThings every hacker once knew: esr is a dick. (Something that can easily be true, even while he has done some small number of valuable things. Though I do claim this essay is not one of those things)
- btilly 3y agoI remember once that I was at a Boston Perlmongers meetup, probably early January 2005, and commenting that someone needed to tell ESR that he wasn't God's gift to women. Everyone laughed. I went on to share a cringy story of ESR hitting on my then-wife. Which inspired a woman present to speak up and share a story of ESR hitting on her. Which lead to the next and then next story, until every last woman in the room shared their own ESR story. I was astounded. I'm hardly the biggest fan of political correctness. But to the extent that political correctness is a backlash, ESR represents what it is a backlash against.
- ksherlock 3y agoI'll just throw this out there.... circa 2001 so I suppose you were aware of it at the time. https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/ https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/
- btilly 3y agoTrust me. Everyone was aware of it. The thing is that his advice offered there isn't even particularly bad. But he'd just taken the importance of being confident when hitting on women to a ridiculous extreme. With no self-awareness. My ex found an unattractive cripple introducing himself. She didn't know who he was. His pass was essentially, "I'm worth $30 million. You may touch me. I might fuck you later." Her response boiled down to, "Eww." She was shocked to later find out that his first line was actually true at the time. (This was a few days after https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html.) But, that notwithstanding, her response remained, "Eww."
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoSoftware has a "built on top of" problem. When you're doing construction, you can either re-use an existing building and all its existing components, or upgrade a few components inside the building, or you can knock it down and build from scratch. Software doesn't do this. Instead it takes the lead pipes, CAT-3 wires, horsehair insulation, and single-glazed windows, and installs them in a new skyscraper. We keep reusing and building on top of shitty old tech from decades ago because it's easier than inventing something better (PVC, CAT-6, blown insulation, triple-glazing), or we're avoiding making some old standard obsolete because some old buildings still use it and the landlords don't wanna pay for upgrades. So we get a working skyscraper, but for some reason we still need to train new engineers on horsehair insulation.
- doodpants 3y agoPeople try to build all new, better software tech all the time! But doing so breaks backwards compatibility with existing stuff, which greatly hinders adoption. So it mostly remains relegated to experimental research projects, and if you're lucky, the best parts of it get incorporated into existing projects gradually over time.
- lost_tourist 3y agoProbably where the "new tech needs to be several times as good as the old stuff if it want to replace it" to overcome the momentum and resistance to change.
- bityard 3y agoI love how most of the comments here seem to be from people who don't think there is anything valuable to learn from the previous 60+ years of computer evolution. What you're missing is that the reason WHY lots of this "shitty old tech" is still around is because it has stood the test of time. Nobody keeps all of this around in modern technology out of pure nostalgia. This stuff is still useful because it largely solves a problem elegantly, and/or provides a useful abstraction with more modern systems. Or because there's simply no escaping the need for compatibility with existing systems. Yes this "shitty old tech" has warts. ALL of your code will in a few decades too. What was that XKCD about standards again?
- digitalsushi 3y agoOur father's shrines are our children's ashtrays. I'm mentoring a couple guys on my team, both born solidly after the year 2000 by their own anecdotes, building them up as Linux infrastructure engineers. I covet the video cameras we use on our remote meetings, because I can tell when to stop talking about the history by their body language drooping. I've had a few a-hah moments, using connections to the same history ESR scribbled above, but largely I am finding that regaling the younger people with details from before they were born is not interesting because they were not here for it and have no connection to it.
- adamrezich 3y ago> but largely I am finding that regaling the younger people with details from before they were born is not interesting because they were not here for it and have no connection to it. I don't understand why this attitude is so pervasive nowadays. in my opinion, curiosity about one's craft's history is a crucial part of the hacker spirit. I can't imagine, for example, never having used a landline, yet not finding phreaking to be incredibly interesting to learn more about, even though it's about as far from practical knowledge today as it could be. did we mess up somewhere and fail to convey this aspect of the hacker spirit to the youth? or are things just changing too rapidly?
- mistrial9 3y agostackoverflow literally removed the mentorship stage for a generation
- sockaddr 3y agoI think things are more competitive and fast-paced nowadays than when we entered this space and so history and all of the details that come along with it aren't necessarily their first priority. I don't blame them. For example, When I was first getting into computers I felt like I had all the time in the world to perfect writing batch files and I could pour over a single magazine at a leisurely pace for weeks until the next one came out. Nowadays every time you use your face to unlock your magic pane of glass there's a language, a new framework, a new more impressive AI you can build your business on or some creepy guy trying to scan everyone's eyeballs, it's just different.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoWhy do we even have those weird characters in ASCII still? We need a newer version where the characters people actually use are stored in the least bits.
- dboreham 3y agoYou can use Baudot 5-channel code.
- bityard 3y ago> Eventually ftp was mostly subsumed by web browsers speaking the FTP protocol themselves. This is why you may occasionally still see URLs with an "ftp:" service prefix; this informs the browser that it should expect to speak to an FTP server rather than an HTTP/HTTPS server. In the earlier days of the web, it was not totally uncommon to see people hosting their home pages on an FTP server rather than an HTTP server. Netscape and IE both spoke FTP just fine, and for some people, access to an FTP account was more convenient than paying for separate web hosting. Or settling for GeoCities. If the page had a lot of images, it was quite a bit slower than HTTP though.
- complex_pi 3y agoFirefox supported FTP until a few months ago. Not sure which version though, but it is fresh in memory: I had some such URLs in my history that couldn't be displayed anymore
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jackdeansmith 3y agoAs someone born in 1997 and working in the software industry, one thing I’ve learned is that the discipline of software engineering is sometimes mostly about understanding the history of a system. Love reading stuff like this because sometimes it really makes some concept click!
- layer8 3y ago> FF (Form Feed) = Ctrl-L […] Many VDTs interpreted this as a "clear screen" instruction. Software terminal emulators sometimes still do. This was commonly used on Usenet as a spoiler tag, because the rest of the message wouldn’t be displayed until the user pressed PgDn (or equivalent) past it. It was visible as “^L” on the screen, so you knew there was more coming up, and the rest of the screen was cleared, until the ^L scrolled out of the screen.
- MarkusWandel 3y agoOld fart comments here: 56K really was the maximum for telephone modems. This is because the telephone network, internally, transmitted 8 bit samples at 8K samples/sec - 64Kbps - except the occasional low bit got stolen for other signaling, so the net data rate was a bit less (and the result was inaudible to a telephone customer). Instead of trying to synchronize the modem to the stolen bits, it was simpler to just use the 7 that were reliable - thus 56Kbps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed-bit_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed-bit_signaling 9600bps as the defacto terminal speed was older than 9600bps modems (those were the cat's pajamas in the mid-late 80s or so). It was simply "fast enough" for a terminal user and "slow enough" for the terminals of the day. I had one (a Volker-Craig 4404 if I remember correctly) that could not keep up at 9600bps and had to be used at something less, maybe 4800bps.
- geostupid 3y ago4800bps! Back in my day we were happy to get 2400! Sadly, I had a 1200 baud; my uncle told me his first was 300. I remember a 110 setting, which might go all the way back to the '48 Berlin airlift!
- MarkusWandel 3y agoThe 4800bps was directly attached to a computer, no modem. If both were set to 9600, the terminal would miss characters. But most dumb terminals were fast enough to keep up at 9600.
- js2 3y agoI had a 300 bps modem that could do half-duplex 1200 bps with another of its kind, the coolest modem ever made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT#The_Apple-CAT_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT#The_Apple-CAT_II BTW baud != bps. A full-duplex 1200 bps modem is actually 600 baud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Evolution_of_dial-up_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Evolution_of_dial-up_spe...
- memling 3y agoI heard Shoemaker or Levy once talk about the modem on Voyager...running at a blistering 10 bps. I keep our old 2400 bps modem around as a curio. The memories are interesting and fun for me, but I get that they may not be so much for some of the other engineers I work with.
- rcurry 3y agoGood old RS-232 - my first programming job was working for a company called Digiboard that made RS-232 concentrators for companies that were running hundreds of terminals over that protocol. You’d be astonished at how many terminals some of our clients had networked to a single machine over a serial port.
- mikewarot 3y ago>In fact, until well into the 1980s microcomputers ran slowly enough (and had poor enough RF shielding) that this was common knowledge: you could put an AM radio next to one and get a clue when it was doing something unusual, because either fundamentals or major subharmonics of the clock frequencies were in the 20Hz to 20KHz range of human audibility. Oooh boy is that wrong. Even the IMSAI ran at 1 Mhz or better.
- bitwize 3y agoHe's kinda wrong, but not when you take into account RF modulation. The first "useful" application for the Altair was having it play music by making it run various delay loops at different speeds that generated RF frequencies that could be picked up as tones on a nearby AM radio. You could even faintly hear the CPU or the video chip working on old bitty boxes like the Commodore 64, VIC-20, or TI-99/4A because it would leak through to the audio portion of the RF signal to the television. VICE even has an option to emulate this for a more authentic feel of using an old Commodore machine.
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- o11c 3y agocontrol-? is weird. backspace is still used for formatting bold or accents in intermediate stages of man pages. Note that SI, SO, ESC are ultimately defined by ISO 2022, which despite its common mindshare is about more than codepages. Properly supporting them was needed until "assume UTF-8" finally became common, which is very recent. Nethack is already mentioned in TFA ...
- nayuki 3y ago> Preserving core values Speaking of this, maybe someday the line between volatile "memory" and non-volatile "storage" (currently HDD and flash) will cease to exist. Then we no longer have to ask if a file is loaded into memory or it's at rest in storage.
- zzo38computer 3y agoI would still use RS-232 if I needed to connect something with it, since I still think it is good (although many of the messy things are unfortunate, but it also has many good features). If I designed a new computer, it would probably have RS-232. I still use Usenet (and some other people still use it too), with NNTP. In fact, I started using Usenet only a few years ago. The Usenet provider named "Eternal September" is the one I currently use, and was named due to the 1993 mentioned there. I don't use Google Groups and all spam I have seen on Usenet these days comes from Google, and I hate it and some other people say similarly, that they would reject messages from Google. I also used FidoNet, but that was longer ago, and it was with internet. (It might still be in use; I am unsure.) Of course I know of FTP (I don't use it and I think that HTTP is much better), Gopher (I still sometimes use), etc. Mostly ANSI terminal emulators are used today, although xterm also supports Tektronix emulation as well, although as far as I know nobody uses it these days (I have only used it once). I know of the games before GUIs, and even still play some of those older games these days (and have written some). Of course, I know what ASCII and UTF-8 are, although I mostly don't use UTF-8; I mostly use purely ASCII (and when needing non-ASCII, prefer character sets other than Unicode). Some of my (modern) designs do use the ASCII controls for similar meanings than their original uses. Actually, it is not only myself; even a mode in the SQLite command shell, and some other formats I have seen, are able to use the ASCII separator controls for those purposes. It is rare, but there are a few people who have made use of them. Also, you will sometimes see notations such as "^H" and "^W" where strike through is unavailable. CTRL+G for bells is still used on terminal emulators at least what I use (and the NNTP client that I had written will use that to ring the bell once the download of a set of articles is complete). Actually, even sometimes when I play the GURPS over the computer, we will use the bell to notify the other side that we are ready. And, of course CRLF will still be used when working with DOS programs (and, fortunately vi can be switched to CRLF or LF only mode, so this is useful when you are using it to edit DOS programs). I have not used 36-bit computers nor punched cards, although I have used emulations of punched cards. I also dislike the syntax for octal literals in C (starting with "0o" instead of just "0" would be better, or starting with "8#" like in PostScript would be another way), although I do sometimes use octal (although it is rare; I use hexadecimal much more often, and so does everyone else).
- mfuzzey 3y agoIn embedded serial UART protocols (which may or may not use the RS232 physical voltage levels - often not) are very much still alive. When you bring up an embedded Linux device, be it based on an old or a brand new SoC the first thing to get running is the UART connection, first to the bootloader and then to the kernel.
- dmvdoug 3y agoBut was “tty” pronounced “titty” or “tee-tee-why”? Because I see titty.