(no subject)

[pne]

Exploring a little of alt.folklore.computers after I found those articles about Dr. Dobb's Journal was interesting. I read a couple of threads in their entirety and all posts by Dennis Ritchie and /BAH (jmfbahciv at aol.com) -- when I could still read Usenet at work (before the firewall blocked that port), alt.folklore.computers was one of the newsgroups I read there and I had Watched /BAH after seeing that she wrote a fairly large number of posts with interesting information about how things were "back then". I'm not sure exactly what she did but I think it was at DEC.

Interesting to read experiences people had with old line printers, IBM machines and terminals I'd never heard of, and so on.

Comments

[thedward.livejournal.com]

Speaking of computer folklore, have you read The Story of Mel (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Story-of-Mel.html)?

Jargon File

[pne.livejournal.com]

Yes. Heart-warming :)

I first read it in the Jargon File v2.9.8 (IIRC) which I downloaded as a text file and printed out ... that would be about 10 years ago. (At least, I think the story of Mel was already in that version.)

I also have two books and one Jargon File T-shirt (which came free with one of the books when I bought it in the MIT bookstore).

Pity the Jargon File isn't really available as plain text any more (at least it wasn't last time I looked -- the HTML [or SGML?] was the source and the generated text had "rivers" of whitespace running down the columns).