When Dave McKay first used computers, punched paper tape was in vogue, “and he has been programming ever since,” according to his biography page at How-To Geek. It adds that “His use of computers pre-dates the birth of the PC and the public release of Unix.” Now long-time Slashdot reader sbinning shares McKay’s “short history of UNIX and how Linux got…
Tag: UNIX
Are We Experiencing a Great Software Stagnation?
Long-time programmer/researcher/former MIT research fellow Jonathan Edwards writes a blog called “Alarming Development: Dispatches from the User Liberation Front.” He began the new year by arguing that software “is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996.” Slashdot reader tonique summarizes Edwards’ argument:
In 1996 there were “LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, Oracle, Smalltalk, Windows, C++,…
Will New Object Storage Protocol Mean the End For POSIX?
“POSIX has been the standard file system interface for Unix-based systems (which includes Linux) since its launch more than 30 years ago,” writes Enterprise Storage Forum, noting the POSIX-compliant Lustre file system “powers most supercomputers.” Now Slashdot reader storagedude writes: POSIX has scalability and performance limitations that will become increasingly important in data-intensive applications like deep learning, but until now it…
Newly-Released Trove of Recordings from the 1980s Includes Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak
“Steve Jobs is now known for revolutionizing just about every part of the tech world, but back in 1988, he was perhaps best known for getting fired,” remembers SFGate:
In his first product reveal since his dismissal from Apple in 1985, Jobs unveiled a new project called NeXT at a meeting of the Boston Computer Society. An audio recording of the event…
IBM Will Feed Four Children For a Day For Every Student Who Masters the Mainframe
This week brings a special event honoring the IBM Z line of mainframes, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp: As part of this week’s IBM Z Day event, looking-for-young-blood IBM is teaming up with tech-backed K-12 CS nonprofits Code.org and CSforALL and calling on students 14-and-up to Master The Mainframe during the 24-hour code-a-thon to open doors to new opportunities with…
What Makes Some Programming Languages the ‘Most Dreaded’?
O’Reilly media’s Vice President of Content Strategy (also the coauthor of Unix Power Tools) recently explored why several popular programming languages wound up on the “most dreaded” list in StackOverflow’s annual developer survey: There’s no surprise that VBA is #1 disliked language. I’ll admit to complete ignorance on Objective C (#2), which I’ve never had any reason to play with. Although…
Bank of America, Google, and Red Hat Executives Join OASIS Board of Directors
OASIS, the international standards and open source consortium, this week announced that three new members were elected to its Board of Directors: Jeremy Allison of Google, Rich Bowen of Red Hat, and Wende Peters of Bank of America. From a report: Their depth of experience in the open source and open standards communities bolsters the Board’s reach and establishes OASIS as…
NSA Warns of Ongoing Russian Hacking Campaign Against US Systems
The U.S. National Security Agency on Thursday warned government partners and private companies about a Russian hacking operation that uses a special intrusion technique to target operating systems often used by industrial firms to manage computer infrastructure. Reuters reports: “This is a vulnerability that is being actively exploited, that’s why we’re bringing this notification out,” said Doug Cress, chief of the…
The Growth of Command Line Options, 1979-Present
Dan Luu, writing in a blog post: The sleight of hand that’s happening when someone says that we can keep software simple and compatible by making everything handle text is the pretense that text data doesn’t have a structure that needs to be parsed4. In some cases, we can just think of everything as a single space separated line, or maybe…
Linux is Ready for the End of Time
January 19, 2038 is for Linux what Y2K was for mainframe and PC computers in 2000, reports ZDNet. It’s the day that the value for time “runs out of numbers” and, in the case of 32-bit Unix-based operating systems like Linux and older versions of macOS, “starts counting time with negative numbers…” “But the fixes are underway to make sure all…