enf

Never move from a neighborhood you like to one you don't like, because you'll never be able to get back in.

It's not even a good joke. The song has two verses as well as the repetitive chorus, and he ignores them for the sake of the joke.

This paper always makes me sad because there are real things to be said about the structure of repetition in music, but Knuth treats it as a joke.

CP/M ED is more in the TECO tradition than anything else, through the DEC influence. It is oriented around characters rather than around lines as the ed family is.

When the cover is missing, it usually means a book or magazine was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher for a refund.

Looks like there may have been some DMCA takedowns, judging from what some of the missing URLs like https://archive.org/details/BYTE-1988-03 display.

I don't know the story, but 4.3BSD, which went into NeXTStep, was not open source. It wasn't until 4.4BSD that BSD was available without a paid Unix license.

NeXT tried to get away with a closed-source fork of GCC for Objective C, but eventually backed down under legal threat.

I've been using Milo Yip's implementation of Grisu2, which references another paper: https://github.com/miloyip/dtoa-benchmark

That doesn't look like a 3B2. Maybe an AT&T 6300.

There are plenty of genuinely interesting things to say about song structure, and it bothers me that Knuth treated the whole thing as a joke.

Read http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2015/11421/pdf/Sampl... instead

You might want to read A Quarter Century of Unix, http://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:qc...

I don't know why they were slow to embrace backspace. Maybe just because most of the control character that did make it in came from Teletype's requirements, but the Model 33 couldn't backspace so they didn't ask for that one.

The cent sign didn't make it into ASCII because no one ever made a serious proposal to include it, not through conscious exclusion.

ASCII-1963 did not have Backspace and therefore did not have character composition. The concept of composing accents appeared in ASCII-1965, by which time ¢ was already gone.

Hi Nelson! The # and DEL conventions came from Multics.

Note that from the ASCII perspective, DEL does not mean "delete the previous character." It is meant to be overpunched over a character, effectively deleting the character under the cursor, not before it.

In spite of this, the first DEC machines to use ASCII immediately seized DEL for command-line editing, because it and ESC were the only non-printing characters to have their own keys.

Meanwhile CTSS had begun operating on a variety of terminals and had to use whatever varying features they had available. It adopted " for character erase, ?, :, ~, or _ for line erase, and BREAK, #, or DEL for interrupt, depending on what was available. The second edition of CTSS standardized on ", ?, and BREAK as terminals became more standardized.

In 1966 Multics had begun to be prototyped on CTSS. The TYPSET editor in particular adopted # for character erase and @ for line erase. (There is no reference to a change in triggering interrupts at this time.) I am guessing this is because " and ? were more useful than # and @ in general text, but there is no documentation for the reason.

Multics adopted the neo-CTSS # and @ conventions, and added an elaborate input canonicalization layer that worked on a stream of characters. I think the canonicalization buffering was what led to treating interrupt in the kernel as a character rather than as an out-of-band signal. Notably canonicalization handled the backspace character, but used it for underlining and overstriking rather than for corrections, contrary to our expectations now.

Anyway, Unix adopted the Multics input conventions, with a much simpler canonicalization layer, and kept them until BSD brought Unix to people who were used to DEC operating systems. They retrofitted the DEC conventions of DEL, ^U, and ^C into Unix, where they stuck into the present.

OK, good point. I probably misread it.

Another paper disputes Miller's claim to priority: https://archive.org/details/first-unix-port

You may be interested in the similar process I went through in 1997 to make a PDF of the Sixth Edition manual, including the papers: https://github.com/ericfischer/v6man/

The files for the Fourth Edition papers did not survive, only what is what is archived at ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixArchive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v4/

The paper about the Unix speech implementation: https://archive.org/details/synthetic-english-speech

The much more comprehensive history is Peter Salus's A Quarter Century of Unix, now online as page scans at http://wiki.tuhs.org/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=publications:qc...

Steve Wozniak was on the board of directors, so we met him once at an all-hands meeting. (The other major celebrity appearance was from Thomas Dolby, who was involved with the Beatnik Audio Engine that we used for sound.)

The SnowBored easter egg was the subject of some internal controversy because it wasn't part of the standard QA testing process. There were initially some bugs in invoking it from localized keyboards where the asterisk wasn't on the 8 key.

The company was bought by Microsoft, and the Kin was the ill-fated result. Many of us went to Google and made Android; others went to Apple and made the iPhone; still others went to Palm and made the Pre.

Danger, Inc. Good people, making an important thing (the Sidekick), under hardware constraints that were neither too limiting nor too generous.

No, it was a very minimal kernel that did just enough to handle the hardware and schedule threads. There was no memory management; everything ran in a single process.

Later versions started looking a little bit more like a conventional operating system. For instance, a file system was added in 3.0 to support the removable SD card.

The Sidekick had its own OS, like no other. I believe later versions after I left the company were based on NetBSD.

The previous generation (Indy/Indigo2) felt rock solid. The cheap feel of the O2 was a real let down. But they probably couldn't justify the cost of making really nice keyboards and cases once Linux became serious competition in every other way.

That is still a permission to build, not an obligation to build, no matter how strict the zoning is.

Rezoning gives nothing but the right to rebuild your own property as you wish to. No one is being forced to sell.

Every person who moves into one of the new townhouses on the 1200 sqft lots is a person who is not outbidding you for the house on the 5000 sqft lot.

England had a colloquial notation, taught in schools, for several decades: tonic sol-fa. But it could only talk about melody and rhythm, not harmony. It fell out of mainstream use in the late 1960s, perhaps as the music publishing industry consolidated and globalized, making it easier to have a single international edition of each song instead of separate editions by country.

Some platform signs are already referring to it: https://twitter.com/enf/status/860516293442543617

Thank you!