jhallenworld

I was lucky enough to have access to TOPS-20 at WPI in 1986 - 1988 (The DEC-20 was replaced with an Encore Multimax running UNIX as the student mainframe). TOPS-20 had a bunch of editors, I tried them all. I remember TVI, TECO and EDT, but I'm sure there were more. I already had experience with WordStar (C and assembly language programming on a PC) and various line editors, so although I used it, I never became an Emacs fanatic.

The most important software missing from the new Encore UNIX (Umax) was MM- the TOPS-20 integrated mail and bulletin board program. A friend of mine wrote "bboard" a campus messaging system as a replacement (this was soon replaced with USENET). It had a bad integrated editor, so I wrote my own editor as its replacement, this became the editor JOE. Even so, Emacs was always there as the counter-example. In those days, Emacs was large and slow and had a limited file size, and it was easy to do better if you weren't focused on extensibility.

I don't remember "not running", but I certainly do remember those annoying "garbage collecting... done." messages in C Emacs. The eventual solution from the mid 90s was kind of awesome: improve the garbage collector? No: Just stop showing the message.

I remember getting a DOS port of Gosling Emacs on floppy disk at a computer show (there was always somebody selling "shareware" at those). I lost that disk, and for a long time had no access to the Gosmacs source code, but eventually someone sent it to me. Sadly, we can not share it- James Gosling closed it. Some other Emacsen: MicroEmacs, Epsilon, JOVE and JED.

Amateur Radio predates the FCC- so I almost think it should be the reverse, none of this at the mercy of stuff. Of course government is the real coercive force- in Germany the Nazis revoked ham licenses, racially purified radio clubs and made the amateur radio operators work for them.

I listened to a net on a VHF repeater once- some guy's PTT button got stuck, which ties up the repeater, plus you hear the background sounds from his house. It was quite funny- FCC not needed, instead somebody called him (you heard his phone ring and him saying "What?!" over the repeater).

Fortran was the most portable language before C, so people wrote compilers in it. Using Hollerith character constants.. and without strings..

The problem this can cause is that it could become the root identity for the effective social credit system. For example, if Uber bans you (it happens..), you might need a new phone number and email to get around it. At least you can get around it for now.

This doesn't work for all of their items- some have to go to a larger Amazon return location, and you must provide packaging. I'm not sure what triggers this.

Poe is awesome. If you're near Charleston, it's worth visiting Sullivan's Island- try to find the tree.

When Poe writes about murder, it's often first person point of view of the murderer- I find it more disturbing than later horror writers like HP Lovecraft or Steven King.

How does the receive side recover the transmit side's sample clock? There is a BNC for clock sharing between "multiple units", but I'm not sure if that's used / required between transmit and receive.

Or is there no such synchronization, in which case there would be long-term drift?

I've seen car dealers in MA use Montana dealer plates. At the very least they are cheaper, avoids $220 / year excise tax and registration fees vs. $25 for Montana. I don't think it helps with any sales taxes- dealers don't have to pay when they buy cars, unlike customers. It would help if dealer uses the car personal reasons instead of just having it for resale.

Hmm... maybe I should start a car dealer just to avoid taxes on my next car..

The Montana plate for owners reminds of registering your boat in Wilmington Delaware to avoid state sales tax. You had to create an LLC to do this I think.

I never bothered to learn -C, instead I use:

    tar -cf - . | (cd <dest>;  tar -xf -)

For doing something like duplicating root of a filesystem you may want --one-file-system.

Well I'm grouping these under AI- they have been around a while for sure, but maybe they have reached some kind of critical mass there: I'm imagining people on Chinese social media talking about it as a way to make money.

Also the text to speech is in their own voice. Some are using this as a way to help pronounce english (maybe there is some language training software available for this, I don't know).

1 transistor for DTL... certainly CMOS is more relevant.