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pet peeves (computer related)

 
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at the top of my list is microsoft windows' perverse and arrogant use of \ instead of the html and unix use of /.
IMO this was deliberate and detrtimental to our quest for consistency and order.
 
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There are some answers for you here: Why does Windows use backslashes for paths and Unix forward slashes?

Drive letters apparently came from CP/M, even before MS-DOS existed.
 
Randall Twede
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that link does explain the why, and it helps that / is recognized sometimes (i guess).
yeah i remember CPM that is where we got things like ctrl C, ctrl V and ctrl X. which i use everyday.
 
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Randall Twede wrote: i remember CPM that is where we got things like ctrl C, ctrl V and ctrl X. which i use everyday.


At least ctrl-C and ctrl-U go back much further than CPM.

Hint: Bill Gates learned to program on a PDP-10, which used ctrl-C and ctrl-U and others.

My pet peeve is folks who think that all of computer science started with the PC.

 
Randall Twede
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i've got to agree with you pat. people think that since they can use a browser that they are experts. i started on a pdp11 and my professor didnt let us even use a keyboard
 
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Randall Twede wrote:i've got to agree with you pat. people think that since they can use a browser that they are experts. i started on a pdp11 and my professor didnt let us even use a keyboard



How can you do that? Did you use punch-cards or something? (If you didn't have those whenever you were in college, I apologise...Not trying to ask about your age, just wondering). And yes, it annoys me that people think they know everything about a computer, when they don't even know what a browser is (they know what IE, Firefox, and Google Chrome is). They can go online, so they have this warped sense of know-it-all ness. If you guys had a keyboard, WHY couldn't you use it? I could understand no mouse (when it came out), but no KEYBOARD? Please explain this to me. NOTE : I grew up when cell phones were like today's simple cell phones, so I'm a bit naive as you can probably tell when it comes to these things. If you could explain it, that would be great. Also, if you wanted to share like "computer stories" from then, that would be cool. For example : They only gave you like an hour to get on and it took an hour just to set up OR WHATEVER. Just stories how it's changed, etc. Whatever you would like. If it isn't appropriate or you don't want to share, that's your business (obviously). Etc, etc.

Thanks,
John Price
 
Pat Farrell
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Randall Twede wrote:i've got to agree with you pat. people think that since they can use a browser that they are experts. i started on a pdp11 and my professor didnt let us even use a keyboard


Toggling in code with the switches? Cool.
 
Randall Twede
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yeah, we had to use the switches. i was majoring in electronic engineering not computer science. i guess he just wanted us to know how error prone it was to translate from assembly to 0's and 1's
 
Pat Farrell
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Randall Twede wrote:yeah, we had to use the switches. i was majoring in electronic engineering not computer science.


I used punched cards the first few years. The early PDP-10 boot-loaded from high speed paper tape. Which was only high speed in the context of 110 baud TTY33s. Later models booted from DecTape. We booted most of our PDP-11s from paper tape as well. My main use of the PDP-11 toggle keys was to hack lunar lander on the GT40.

Compared to cards, a 110 baud TTY was fast.
 
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Ah the good old days of toggle switches and paper tape.

My first year in the industry, I was sent to a class on writing device drivers, and we developed a paper tape reader/writer.

Fun times.

Wonder how many light years of paper tape it'd take to store a modern operating system?

"OS X Lion -- now available on 57 tons of paper tape!"
 
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Why paper? Wouldn't polymer based be more durable? Or were polymers not invented then?
 
Pat Farrell
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Bear Bibeault wrote:Wonder how many light years of paper tape it'd take to store a modern operating system?


Not that much. Well, I don't know how big Lion is, but the upgrade is claimed to be about 4GB. That requires that you are running Snow Leopard first, so the whole thing might be twice that.

I don't remember exactly how dense paper tape was, I think it was about ten characters per inch. It was punched with one character per row.


So that is only about the diameter of the earth. Way under a light year.
 
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Maneesh Godbole wrote:Why paper? Wouldn't polymer based be more durable? Or were polymers not invented then?


Paper tape usage goes back to early TTY, which were probably 1910 or so. It was well established technology in the 1950s. The paper tape was just paper, it was think paper, maybe almost as thick as construction paper. Came in a roll.

Yes, polymers existed then, at least by the early 1950s. But paper was cheap.

More importantly, no one considered paper tape as an archival medium. It was useful only until you changed the program, which, as now, was pretty often.

Some very early compilers punched their intermediate output to paper tape, and then processed that as the input to the next compilation phase. This practice died out by the early 1970s.
 
Bear Bibeault
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So how much would that weigh?
 
Consider Paul's rocket mass heater.
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