Wrote a couple of articles and spent some time in Nashua (IIRC) with Helmers and Green (the publisher), but had to get back to school in the fall so faded out, and didn't overlap with Tinney's work.

Fun times.

(I know this will get downvoted to hell, but I suggest you find out for yourself.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497435

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C'mon, that's such a cheap take. The Fed has done nothing but destroy the value of the dollar since its founding in 1913.

If you think of education as trying to lead people into being whole humans, seems like literature and philosophy (properly taught) are some of most critical subjects.

First saw the C compiler sources on Geoff Steckel (local guru)'s desk around 1973 at the Harvard graduate computing center, and was absolutely floored at this fascinating-looking language. (Harvard got the first Unix tapes outside of Bell Labs; not sure of the connection there.)

All upper-case, of course, as the DEC lineprinters didn't have lower case yet. Real upper case was struck-through upper.

What a great place to work, and hanging out with the OS developers like Dan Murphy was just icing on the cake.

Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.

I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire.

Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs.

As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.

Has worked for hundreds of people, and what has he got to lose? It's all natural medicines.

Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged...

And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.)

(Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way.

Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.

The current US government is the most corrupt entity in the history of the world, if you multiple corruption times power.

And I love my country (USA), but just hate what the government has become over the past 60-80 years.

If you use some of the lower-tier CASA labs, it's not that expensive (4K/year), but it is definitely a nuisance for a pure desktop plugin like ours that has absolutely no cloud component (other than connecting to GDocs).

Especially when using a fantastic mechanical (Hall effect) keyboard like (still) my favorite Apex Pro from SteelSeries.

Nothing matches or probably ever will match the old MIT AI Lab Tom Knight Hall effect keyboards (Microswitch), but these are mighty close. Something about the heft and the smoothness of those keys has never been replicated. I can still remember that feel quite distinctly 45 years later...