One thing about the CDC - it had perhaps the worst command interface I've run into. Data files were modeled as tapes, and you had to keep rewinding them.

Compiling a program appended to the object file, but running ran the start of the file, so you needed to rewind between, lest you run an old version. Much time lost trying to figure out why changes were ineffective.

FORTRAN variables had 8 significant characters, but the linker had only seven, so it was possible to get unintentional aliases.

As a grad student, I got to use a VAX.

"Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ~300,000 years ago explains Neandertal origins", an alternatate take by David Reich, who has done a lot of work in this area. He notes that Neanderthal haplotypes appears largely replaced by Sapiens.

This would make them our siblings rather than our cousins.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ign...

> At the fish counter, he spoke the words that will echo down the centuries as a testimony to the dedication and drive of neuroscientists throughout the ages:

> "I need a full length Atlantic Salmon. For science."

yeah, i've written [supercomputer] code like that

include a SUMMARIUM in Latin and ΣΥΝΟΨΙΣ in Greek, for that real Scholar effect.

I work mostly with remote cloud services or headless servers via VPNs. For the cloud I rely on Firefox over networked X (something that is getting harder to support).

A single-computer desktop is no longer a realistic working environment.

I hear the old Microsoft Word save files used memory dumps, which became an undocumented nightmare of a file format.

You need total control over memory layout of the saved runtime state. No hidden fields. No pointers either - you want to be able to reload at another address. Sooner or later, you might want to add some state, and you'd need a place to put it.

That said, I have used mmap something like this, mostly so state (data) could be paged in on demand.

After all, they're on a mission from Roko's Basilisk!