Comment by jantypas2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jantypas2 | Hacker News Reader

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Well, a very long time ago, in a company funded far far away (and since defeated by the empire), I had the "joy" of working with Sendmail. For you youngsters, back then, back when we had dial telephones (tell us more Grandpa!), there were multiple "mail networks", not just this fancy Internet you kids have. Sendmail was a mail processor that could not only arrange to send and receive mail, but it could translate addressing between the different networks (ARPA, Bitnet, CSNET, UUCP, etc.) The problem was, reading a sendmail config file was something like reading assembly code except you weren't allowed to by vowels. It was nearly all symbols -- executable line noise. I got tired of working with it - so I wrote my own sendmail compiler/de-compiler of sorts just to work in English prose. Got me my job at Sun. These days, I'm not sure if it will let me keep my job, or be the justification for my losing it, but I'm working on a programming language for teens called Onyx (after my grandson, who has NO interest in this as he's intending to a be a pilot, but it means unless she works for Boeing, I'm safe for a few more years

I used to work at Sendmail, it was my first job. The entire premise of the company was "Sendmail is so hard to use, let us run it for you". We had software that added a GUI for configuration and management, and Pro Services to set up big installs.

But also we had all the top maintainers of Sendmail. And we ran Sendmail for our corp mail.

Once we had a problem with the network, so we had to reroute corporate mail over a phone line. One of the maintainers came down, typed what looked like line noise for five minutes, and all of a sudden all the mail was working again.

It was crazy to watch him basically read and write raw Sendmail configs. He didn't even use m4.

I used to do this at Uni, and I actually enjoyed it. It was like a complicated puzzle, and the thrill of solving it was powerful. I remember spending days getting a SunOS <-> Lotus Notes gateway working the way I wanted it to.

Ironically, M4 felt over-complicated and abstracted, so I did not want to learn that. Direct edit all the way.

  vi /etc/sendmail.cf

This seemed like an obscure parlor trick that vanishingly few people could appreciate. I was totally OK with that.

And I was truly shocked to later learn that there were people willing to pay for this service. Ah simpler times.

Not directly related, but I'm working on some short stories inspired by some of the hacker/cyberpunk literature from the 80's and since I grew up and learned programming in the late 90's early 2000's, I feel completely inadequate at writing cheesy hacker stories.

Keep them old timer stories a' comin'.

No one's more old-timer than I am! I am the ultimate legacy system. Just ask my grandkids!

Another candidate for the old-time stories would be Internet before the public Internet. Back then, as noted, we have several "nets" connected by everything from fixed circuits, to dial-up telephones (I still know where my Telebit trailblazer is), and radio. And you had to know how to traverse it all. (I had the wall maps that were about as complex as colossal cave -- albeit no vending machine or Dr. Pepper bottles). Back then, kiddies, people actually communicated, they did more than just consume -- in fact, I'm told, I am responsible for the Anishinaabe word for Internet. (I helped bring their place on line years ago.) It supposedly means "The place where people talk who have never met"

Doesn't sound like that was sendmail.mc, but I'm curious what it was.

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