Free Unix (1983) | Hacker News Reader

Free Unix (1983)

article.olduse.net

122 pointslelf35 comments

On Chrome, this will transform the entire web to look like that page. (It's very quick-and-dirty, so not everything works.)

1. Install the Stylebot extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...).

2. Click the "CSS" button added to the right of the omnibar.

3. Click "Options..."

4. Click "Styles" in the left sidebar.

5. Click the "Edit Global Stylesheet" button.

6. Enter the following:

    @font-face {
      font-family: GlassTTYVT220;
      src: local("Glass TTY VT220") local("Glass TTY VT220 Medium") url(http://waltergr.com/misc/Glass_TTY_VT220.ttf) format("truetype");
    }
    
    * {
      color: #e5b800;
      background-color: #0a0600;
      font-family: GlassTTYVT220;
      font-size: 20px;
    }

7. Click save.

8. Load / refresh a page.

9. Bask in the amber glow.

I didn't want to hotlink the font on someone else's server so I uploaded it to one of mine. You should probably put it on a server you own, which is accessible via SSH, and change http://waltergr.com/... to //yourserver.com/...

Here's a screenshot of the front page of HN: http://waltergr.com/misc/chrome-vt220-screenshot.png

Dude. Thanks for this. First thing through my head when I saw this was retro font FTW.

> I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system.

Glorious times! You might be given bare metal and full freedom to create new operating systems, invent languages and write compilers/debuggers/editors for them. Nothing can ever make a software engineer happier than this. In my view anyway.

Will this ever happen again?

Rose-tinted glasses. New bare metal just means an all-new set of hardware engineer droppings to work around. It gets old real fast.

I'd prefer to deal with some hardware engineer's bugs, whose office is next door (considering it's the 1980's) to some brainfucked, overengineered API produced by a hypergiant software corporation today.

It does, especially in the embedded world. I spent a good portion of my two last years working on an operating system for very resource-constrained devices.

The web kids get all the rage, we get all the fun.

How did you get into that line of work?

I didn't do anything special, really. I spent most of my teens hacking around quite eclectically, and especially played with a lot of operating systems and computers, old and new. Other than that, after finishing university, I applied for a job, went to the interview, got the job and so on. Nothing special.

One thing that probably did help me was that, while still being a competent enough programmer (working part-time included), I got my BSc in Electrical Engineering, so it was especially easy to get into the embedded world (being able to go from reading a schematic to writing the driver, while being able to debug stuff with the logic analyzer and the oscilloscope are good assets). But that's not a rule, I was the only one in my team with a degree in something other than CS/CompEng, and I'm still in a minority everywhere I go.

Edit: oh, yeah. The other thing is, I started at a small company. A lot of companies nowadays tend to overspecialize even their fresh-out-of-school junior programmers. It doesn't happen everywhere, but where it does, it's a disaster. I worked on a lot of stuff in my first year, from various peripheral drivers to factory test routines.

Amazing how much more reasonable Stallman seems in that, a fantastic bit of history.

The most innocuous mention of Stallman's name inevitably provokes an emotional remark.

I was struck most by the date of that announcement. Stallman has dedicated 30 years "[putting] together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free". That represents a monumental commitment to principle.

You can call him unyielding, uncompromising, demanding, and I won't quibble. But unreasonable? That word has too many connotations of unfairness or lack of consideration, a bit ad hominem for my taste.

We need leaders at the extremes, the deep thinkers, the rabble rousers, for these are the people who actually change the world. The politicians moderate those influences, making the compromises that are necessary, preventing wild swings of the needle. Be glad that RMS isn't a politician - he is more effective where he is.

And it's yet to be released.

Only sorta. They've written a TON of valuable code, released and used by millions. They've yet to put together a competitive system of only GNU code, though nowadays Debian does let you install Hurd underneath (I'm not sure how much this breaks, but at least many things work).

This might be the empire game envisioned by Stallman, but it's not a GNU project: http://www.wolfpackempire.com/

I couldn't help but think, would Stallman have used something like Kickstarter?, had it existed back then. Or would he have perhaps added a bitcoin address for donations, if it existed?

"It's been three months since $425,000 was donated to this project and I still don't have a working version of HURD. I demand a refund!"

Great post!

Did anybody else have quirks in their vision after reading this?

I went from reading this: http://article.olduse.net/771@mit-eddie.UUCP to this: https://37signals.com/svn/posts/3633-on-writing-interfaces-w... and had some weird focusing issues.

I'd guess that he composed that message on a Lisp Machine and not a CRT, e.g., something like this: http://s7.computerhistory.org/is/image/CHM/500004885-03-01?

It also has a CRT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube)

Yes, the lisp machnes used CRTs, but they did not look like the classic terminals from that era. IIRC they had much higher resolution and were black and white.

That font.

That font is something quite a few of us have probably had to put up with.

Not the font, those pixels.. no, that CRT resolution

DEC VT220, here's a recreation of that font's appearance: http://asdasd.rpg.fi/~svo/glasstty/

That magic hacking glow :-)

To me that font feels just like those old and comfy shoes feel to you.

Though some of you are waxing nostalgic at that simulated CRT display, my first impression was "Good Riddance!". I still have a headache from reading that page.

Fascinating. Is that how it used to be back then?

It you were lucky! (* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAtSw3daGoo) Good amber glow screens were better compared to the green ones. High (invisible) refresh rates were also "professional" equipment. I worked at home by having the computer connected to the antenna input of the plain small black and white CRT TV. That's 50 Hz refresh of the screen. Interlaced. If you grew up on LCD screens you certainly don't know how 50 Hz refresh feels. And I saved the assembly code to the cassette tape recorder. If I was lucky, if it didn't crash and cause the whole RAM to be wiped out before. And I was lucky that I didn't have to key the sequence in with the switches on the front panel, that I also did earlier (not on this one, but the picture is good: http://www.vintagecomputer.net/MITS/680/altair_680_front_pan...). And that all is even not a joke (as in the video I linked first).

Well that is interesting. I started off on a celeron/pentium system so I have no clue how these work. Actually never even came across one of such system in my life. Also since all the old usenet stuff are found on Google Groups, I never even came across this interface before.

If you refer to the picture, it's of Altair "the first home computer," the computer for which Bill Gates wrote his version of BASIC which was practically an OS for that computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

Ever heard of the computer bus -- you know the thing that all extension cards connect to -- well on the panels of old computers you were able to see the state of the bus or to change it with the switches. You've actually felt the bits with your hands and saw them on the lights -- you were able to turn on and of each one with the switch.

I tried my hand at programming this one, I think:

http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/item.php?ii=26

You enter the machine code one binary word at a time using the toggle switches on the front panel.

By the time I was on dial up to a local unix mainframe it was 85 and I had an Amiga and a PC. I actually went and bought a second hand amber screen VT100 work-alike for $50 and started using it all the time because the terminal behavior was rock-solid compared to the emulators available, and the text was very easy on the eyes. Good times.

My first computer that was solely my own was a Compaq Portable III[0], better known as the Compaq Lunchbox. It was a 12 MHz 286 with a whopping 20MB hard drive. It had a gas plasma amber CGA screen (yes it was amber on amber) and a pretty good keyboard for a portable of that vintage. I didn't really use it portable, but it fit nicely on the folding TV tray I used as a desk.

It was an upgrade from using the C64 connected to the TV.

[0] http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/CompaqIIIportable.htm

There's a really well done terminal emulator for the Mac, with jitter, refresh latency and screen curve. It can pretty much mimic the VT102 I have connected to my Mac - I use that to tail log files.

http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

Having had to work on early 80s ttys tends to train you against inefficient keyboard usage. I'll still tend to use history ^substitution^ rather than readline editing at the shell prompt, or avoiding slow sequences in emacs.

Great copywriting! Go for it dude!

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