Hacker.txt (1993)

Interesting to see Sequent mentioned here. We had one at uni. It was an 8-CPU machine the size of a bank vault. They had it mainly to learn multithreaded programming which was a novelty at that time (even our HP servers were singlecores still)

But the OS (DYNIX/ptx) was pretty barebones and uncommon compared to the big Unix names of the day. It was hard to compile common software on it. Of course in those days we didn't have the gnu ecosystem to smooth things out (having the same compilers and libs available everywhere) so every software package was a huge spaghetty of #ifdefs to handle special edge cases for every different platform. Sequent was not very well represented there so we often had to jump into the code to get something to compile.

So it was not a popular machine, especially once "the internet" suddenly became a thing and browsers had major updates weekly. NCSA Mosaic at first, then Netscape (wow you can now use images as backdrop!!). And that stuff was hard to compile. So the Sequent became less and less popular. And it was easier to get time on it.

I personally also really enjoyed the various rooms of green-screened terminals. Since everyone jumped on the internet and these didn't have graphics capabilities, there was no queues for them unlike the X-Terminals. I could just grab one or even two to have IRC open on one and do some useful work on the other. I could grab them for a whole day if I wanted, nobody cared. And the clear distraction-free UI really helped.

I still love pure text terminals to this day. And it's nice to see they are kinda coming back in fashion.

> If you have someone in your group whose ONLY job it is to desk-check other people's code, that person will find and fix more bugs than everyone else combined.

Ghost engineer! Where are their commits? Tell them to come to the office, or else lay themselves off.

[dupe]

Recent discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42243751