3 ms·

I am reading the book, now that you mentioned. I only reach the part when David was hired by Microsoft though. Actually I'm super interested in his earlier work

I am reading the book, now that you mentioned. I only reach the part when David was hired by Microsoft though. Actually I'm super interested in his earlier works in Dupont and DEC as they paved the way. I took him as an inspiration. His “What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply them to problems.” rings so true with me, and he as a natural leader also makes me look up to him.

nickpeterson 2y ago
"Work on computers, not apply them to problems" feels like the kind of mentality that gets a lot of people into trouble :)
- hnthrowaway0328 2y ago
  I think what he means is system programming, not application programming. But TBH I'm so sick of my DE job that I indeed don't care at all about business problems. Sure we all need them for jobs, hey but that doesn't mean I have to love them. Would that impede my career progression? Sure, but as long as I can get into a system programming without being too close to business, I'm happy for life. Other people can climb the greasy pole, good luck for them.
kelsey98765431 2y ago
Difficult realm for me to investigate myself. I have found that better than any book is to pull old VMS images out and get them up on a SIMH/Vax emulator and poke around! It's a quite laborious process and documentation of the process is sparse, last time I ended up using the Computer History Museum remote access program to interact with ancient VMS. To actually learn how to use the thing I ended up diving deep into textfiles.com archives for references to VMS and got the hang of the basics enough to start learning via the online (built in) documentation. I would also point you towards usenet archives if you want to learn more about the development history of VMS, what what i have been able to piece together it was really rock solid and loved and quite a shame that "open"VMS is mostly just a legacy compatibility licensing agreement and the technology is in a bit of a glacial deep freeze. The fact that every file on the entire OS had version control - by default - before 1990... that blows me away and I feel like there's so many beautiful secrets to learn from this codebase. I always imagined it would be written in some abstract arcane language, when I learned it was in C i got a bit scared knowing what microsoft calls C has very little resemblance to how C is typically used on unix likes, and with the knowledge that many VAX admins dumped VMS for BSD I was quite afraid I may be out of my element. I was surprised to find the C library is essentially just posix, I felt pretty much completely at home on VMS compared to any version of windows I have had to write C for. Pleasant experience, shame what happened to it, wish there was more about its story told in an authoritative context like a book. If you stumble across anything nifty please feel free to share I may come back and read this read again someday. Cheers

nickpeterson 2y ago

"Work on computers, not apply them to problems" feels like the kind of mentality that gets a lot of people into trouble :)

hnthrowaway0328 2y ago
I think what he means is system programming, not application programming. But TBH I'm so sick of my DE job that I indeed don't care at all about business problems. Sure we all need them for jobs, hey but that doesn't mean I have to love them. Would that impede my career progression? Sure, but as long as I can get into a system programming without being too close to business, I'm happy for life. Other people can climb the greasy pole, good luck for them.

kelsey98765431 2y ago

Difficult realm for me to investigate myself. I have found that better than any book is to pull old VMS images out and get them up on a SIMH/Vax emulator and poke around! It's a quite laborious process and documentation of the process is sparse, last time I ended up using the Computer History Museum remote access program to interact with ancient VMS. To actually learn how to use the thing I ended up diving deep into textfiles.com archives for references to VMS and got the hang of the basics enough to start learning via the online (built in) documentation. I would also point you towards usenet archives if you want to learn more about the development history of VMS, what what i have been able to piece together it was really rock solid and loved and quite a shame that "open"VMS is mostly just a legacy compatibility licensing agreement and the technology is in a bit of a glacial deep freeze. The fact that every file on the entire OS had version control - by default - before 1990... that blows me away and I feel like there's so many beautiful secrets to learn from this codebase. I always imagined it would be written in some abstract arcane language, when I learned it was in C i got a bit scared knowing what microsoft calls C has very little resemblance to how C is typically used on unix likes, and with the knowledge that many VAX admins dumped VMS for BSD I was quite afraid I may be out of my element. I was surprised to find the C library is essentially just posix, I felt pretty much completely at home on VMS compared to any version of windows I have had to write C for. Pleasant experience, shame what happened to it, wish there was more about its story told in an authoritative context like a book. If you stumble across anything nifty please feel free to share I may come back and read this read again someday. Cheers