jslabovitz

16 ms·

61.
by jslabovitz 8y ago
Meh. Not great. (But thanks for asking.) Sure, there's definite improvements. More people have access, more of the time, and that's brought in interesting & creative people and projects. (As well as the obvious opposite.) It&#
62.
by jslabovitz 8y ago
ARPAnet, 1982: Late nights on a Heathkit H89 running CP/M, 24x80 green screen... dialing up at 300 baud to a terminal server, probably across the Potomac at the Pentagon, typing magic numbers (pre-TCP/IP) to connect over NCP to un
63.
by jslabovitz 8y ago
Could be better, but this is what I did: for i in `brew ls`; do brew info $i | grep -e 'Built.*with:' >/dev/null && brew info $i; done Out of 144 formulas installed, I've only got one with an opt
64.
by jslabovitz 8y ago
MacDraw and Freehand. I know there are modern vector/bezier-drawing alternatives, like OmniGraffle and Sketch and Affinity Designer. But both MacDraw and Freehand balanced functionality and simplicity and directness so well. In MacDraw
65.
by jslabovitz 8y ago
I just hosted a small house concert last night for about 20 people; the age range was 18-50, I reckon. I put out a sheet of paper with spaces for names & contact info, for folks who wanted to be notified for future shows, and intentiona
66.
by jslabovitz 8y ago
This is kind of amazing: finding Buddha in an advice column. Definitely subscribing -- thanks, original poster, for the ref.
67.
by jslabovitz 9y ago
When I first met Ted, ca. 1991 or 1992, he was indeed doing most of the Xanadu work on his houseboat in Sausalito. But Autodesk was also in Sausalito, just down the road, so Ted was definitely in the neighborhood, if not exactly in the buil
68.
by jslabovitz 9y ago
> Ted Nelson has some novel ideas. But I can't help to think that the failure of the mass adoption of his ideas stems from him being too greedy. If he had open sourced the code he wrote for Xanadu, if he had even published specs of
69.
by jslabovitz 9y ago
I haven't watched the video yet, but I can provide some insight. I spent time with Ted in late 1992 and early 1993, when I lived in San Francisco, and Ted lived just north of the Golden Gate on a houseboat in Sausalito. This was just m
70.
by jslabovitz 9y ago
> [...] my systems were simple enough that I had a pretty accurate mental model of how the whole system worked [...] This is key. I've worked on dozens of systems, platforms, frameworks, etc., and the common predictor of how well I
71.
by jslabovitz 9y ago
I'm self-taught, and now in my 50s. I started programming when I was 10, in 1976. In those earliest days of consumer-class computers, there wasn't really a developed market for practical programming books. However, the manuals tha
72.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
They're giving props to W+K in a backhanded way: "They wasted over six months of our precious time pitching concepts like people laughing while playing the game, and amusing card combinations coming to life on screen." That &
73.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
I agree. I definitely stifle myself online more than I might in a small in-person group, or even a large group, for fear of negative reactions. For me, it's got nothing to do with anonymity or some possible later repercussion; rather,
74.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
I was HNIJ@MIT-MC (and later, rms.g.hnij@mit-oz). I used to be able to google for those addresses and pull up my now-embarrassing questions I posted on various mailing lists as a teenager.
75.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
One more point -- although I believe your statement that ITS did not initially use passwords, I'm almost positive that the policy switched around 1982, and they did require passwords after that.
76.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
Around 1982, I had an account on MIT-MC, an ITS computer. I was not an MIT student -- rather, a curious teenage hacker from DC. I'd found a text file with 'interesting modem numbers,' and one of those was to a DoD TAC (basica
77.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
The app costs $35. I presume this is a workable business for the developer, and therefore little economic incentive for data collection or other backdoor/nefarious tactics. I'm much less trusting of free software like most ad-bloc
78.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
On being horrified, or on early web ads? For the latter: I worked on Global Network Navigator [1] from 1993-1995. GNN was the first commercial website, published by O'Reilly & Associates. I was the technical director of GNN. We exp
79.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
This whole thread is horrifying to me. And I'm saying that as someone who has been online for 35 years, and who (I cringe to admit) worked on the first web-based advertising in 1993. It's like watching a child grow up to be a crue
80.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
I'm a typographer and sometime book designer (as well as a programmer). I've also used InDesign since 1.0, so I'm very familiar with what it does. Having said that, I'd love to find an alternative -- InDesign has gotten
81.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
My workstation is an 11" Macbook Air, and has been for years. For what I do -- mostly Ruby, some C, some shell -- it's perfect. I fullscreen everything, and switch between apps with cmd-tab. I avoid or have disabled most macOS GUI
82.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
Ruby. Not Ruby+Rails, just pure Ruby. If you take away the Rails ecosystem, Ruby starts to feel like an old (but lovely) language. Many non-Rails gems (libraries) haven't been updated for at least five years, if not ten -- so I end up
83.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
There were versioning file systems in the 1960s (MIT's ITS among them, and I think Univac's EXEC 8, though I can't find a reference) [1]. Often, new writes to a file bumped a version (or cycle) count in the file system. I don
84.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
Not so strange. It was way less common to push out software the way we do now. Software releases were generally pretty major events. Leased lines were often slow and very expensive. Even into the mid-eighties getting a software distribution
85.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
This past summer, I ordered a container of household cleaner (16oz bottle with spray pump) from Amazon. Surprisingly, it arrived with no packaging whatsoever -- the bottle of cleaner was taped to a small piece of cardboard that contained
86.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
I live less than two hours west of DC, yet my only connectivity options are a 1.3Mbps DSL link or a ~128Kbps 1x/RTT cellular link. This is pretty normal for West Virginia and other mountainous and rural places in the US. The DSL link i
87.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
Yes! I was just going to post almost the identical comment. I detest talking to computers, whether personal assistants like Alexa or Siri, or the voice-control systems on the other side of a phone call. Apparently computers don't muc
88.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
I've started using jq ( https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ ) in pipelines to parse/transform JSON output from commands that support it. It has some XPath-like notations for specifying elements within the JSON data
89.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
Modern tools are offering the option to write out JSON. Grepping /usr/share/man and /usr/local/share/man on my macOS system reveals a good dozen or so commands that take JSON as input or generate it as o
90.
by jslabovitz 10y ago
TCP/IP wasn't the official transport protocol until 1983. Before that was NCP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Control_Program ). I got on the ARPAnet in 1982, and remember the transition day. FTP and Te

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