Interview with Bill Joy
https://begriffs.com/pdf/unix-review-bill-joy.pdf [begriffs.com]
2019-07-25 03:44
tags:
development
interview
pdf
retro
swtools
text
tty
unix
The following interview is taken from the August 1984 issue of Unix Review magazine.
A lot of text editor history here, featuring of course, vi.
I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn’t being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive. With 92 people in the Labs maintaining vi independently, I think they ultimately wasted incredible amounts of money. I was surprised about vi going in, though, I didn’t know it was in System V. I learned about it being in System V quite a while after it had come out.
Plus some commentary on other topics.
The point is that you want to have a system that is responsive. You don’t want a car that talks to you. I’ll never buy a car that says, “Good morning.” The neat thing about UNIX is that it is very responsive. You just say, “A pipe to B” - it doesn’t blather at you that “execution begins,” or “execution terminated, IEFBR14.”
The trouble is that UNIX is not accessible, not transparent in the way that Interleaf is, where you sit down and start poking around in the menu and explore the whole system. Someone I know sat down with a Macintosh and a Lisa and was disappointed because, in a half hour, he explored the whole system and there wasn’t as much as he thought. That’s true, but the point is in half an hour, almost without a manual you can know which button to push and you can find nearly everything. Things don’t get lost. I think that’s the key.
source: grugq
Unicode programming, with examples
https://begriffs.com/posts/2019-05-23-unicode-icu.html [begriffs.com]
2019-06-11 04:58
tags:
development
library
programming
standard
text
Unicode is more than a numbering scheme for the characters of every language – although that in itself is a useful accomplishment. Unicode also includes characters’ case, directionality, and alphabetic properties. The Unicode standard and specifications describe the proper way to divide words and break lines, sort text, format numbers, display text in different directions, split/combine/reorder vowels South Asian languages, and determine when characters may look visually confusable.
source: HN
C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines
https://begriffs.com/posts/2018-11-15-c-portability.html [begriffs.com]
2018-11-16 03:17
tags:
c
hardware
photos
retro
In this article we’ll go on a journey from 4-bit microcontrollers to room-sized mainframes and learn how porting C to each of them helped people separate the essence of the language from the environment of its birth. I’ve found technical manuals and videos for this article to help bring each computer to life.
source: L
SQL Keys in Depth
https://begriffs.com/posts/2018-01-01-sql-keys-in-depth.html [begriffs.com]
2018-01-02 21:01
tags:
database
development
sql
The internet is full of dogmatic commandments for choosing and using keys in relational databases. At times it verges on a holy war: should you use natural or artificial keys? Auto-incrementing integers, UUIDs?
source: L
An Advanced Introduction to GnuPG
https://begriffs.com/pdf/an-advanced-introduction-to-gnupg.pdf [begriffs.com]
2016-11-22 05:26
tags:
crypto
pdf
security
slides
swtools