Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: rbowman Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.setup,comp.os.linux.advocacy,sci.physics Subject: Re: Linux Crashing Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2021 19:59:05 -0600 Lines: 52 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net zyvHTLN5msRU5tYqxsCqbQTcU68kYakLUrKXJW9zc+R17+wMRQ Cancel-Lock: sha1:qXi5SzTBWXSM2EunIMPZFY7/y5w= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.6.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.setup:4494 comp.os.linux.advocacy:594855 sci.physics:833296 On 09/29/2021 08:26 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote: > On 29/09/2021 15:07, rbowman wrote: >> On 09/29/2021 05:31 AM, chrisv wrote: >>> Clutterfreak wrote: >>> >>>> So Commodore 64, it looks like, was already "vintage" in 1989. After I >>>> acquired the Commodores I began frequenting a computer assignment store >>>> that sold people's old and new stuff and kept 30% of the money and gave >>>> 70% to owners. It was a heaven for "vintage" parts, systems, manuals, >>>> books, everything. >>> >>> Cool! >>> >>>> I had found a funky half-finished C manual there in >>>> German coming with two disks for Commodore. That's how I learned C. In >>>> school everybody used Fortran in science depts and PL-1 in business >>>> depts. >>> >>> My college programming classes used Pascal. EE curriculum. >>> >> >> I loved Pascal. The University of Maine used it for a didactic >> language and many of the new engineering hires used it. I made some >> bucks writing dll's so Pascal could talk to real world >> instrumentation, robotic arms, and so forth. >> >> The original, pure design by Wirth was characterized as 'a computer >> language only good for telling itself secrets' . > > It was rubbish for real world stuff. You had to compromise it to do > anything. C was designed from the outset to be useful, and I still > revere it, with all its shortcomings. On a small memory machine it is > absolutely the bees knees. > > When I put BDS C on my Osborne 1 I was in tall cotton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDS_C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1 When I'd go into a client's site they would have some sort of weird lashup and crappy tools. With the Osborne I had all my assemblers, compilers, editors, and so forth ready to go in a portable environment. Well, sort of portable. It was 25 pounds but I was younger then. I even did a hardware hack to use the parallel port to burn EPROMs. It paid back the $1800 many times over. The Osborne Executive fizzled but when the Boston Globe was selling theirs as they migrated to PC's I bought 2.