t1m

My “first” computer at home was a Burroughs B80. My Dad bought it for his accounting business in the late 70s. It was about the size of two dishwashers, had an 8in floppy, a built in printer and a small flatscreen display (orange on black characters) on a swing arm above the keyboard.

I remember flipping through the B80’s manuals and finding a software section. We could get games for it! I asked dad if we could order some, but unfortunately, he said, the accounting software supplier would void their warrantee if we were to install any other software on the machine.

All of my computer time before buying our Apple ][+ a few years later was spent “playing” data entry on the B80 for Dad’s business.

Back when I was in University, we had an Amdahl mainframe with Unix running under VM. The directory structure included an awful lot of source code. I remember porting source for lex and yacc to my PC-XT running Borland's Turbo C. I assume it was licensed to Universities and source was included under an educational clause, though I'm not exactly sure.

I wonder which version of unix I was using. This would have been around December of '87.

I wrote a language called T for Bell Northern Research, not knowing there was already another T language based on Scheme. The language was used for black box testing testing of terminal interfaces, and so needed good string handling.

One aspect of the language was that Unix regular expressions were a built-in type, and so were associate arrays. These two features worked together in a cool way:

  x['hi there'] = 5
  x['hello'] = 2

  # regular expressions are enclosed in `backquotes`
  x[`hell.`] == [2]
  x[`h.*`] == [5, 2]

I am a Canadian, so I neither have a say, or really can comment on American politics.

This Saturday, my two daughters (ages 11 and 8) are driving a 1,700km journey to North Dakota to show our support for the #NoDAPL movement. I am doing it because my eldest is really into Aboriginal rights right now. These people are just trying to preserve their land.

I hope we don't get shot by Peter Thiel.

Tens of millions of people are going out to the street and are not going to let these little goons take over America.