HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: ina_craig@actew.oz.au (Craig Alexander)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: You know you've been playing games too long when...
Date: 25 Jan 93 10:31:36 EST
Organization: ACT Electricity & Water

In article <_dm3jvq@rpi.edu>, jonesr2@aix02.ecs.rpi.edu (Kazrak) writes:
> Today, I determined that I've been playing Lemmings too long.  How?  Well,
> when my fiancee and I were approaching the door to her building and I was
> trying to figure out how one of us could unlock the door without the other
> bouncing off and heading in the other direction, I figured I was a goner.
> 
> -- 
> Roger "Kazrak" Jones, Jr. is: jonesr2@rpi.edu, userham1@rpitsmts.bitnet
> "The line between good and evil, hope and despair, does not divide the world
> between 'us' and 'them.'  It runs down the middle of each one of us."
>                                                 -Robert Fulghum

I have heard stories of the game Tetris affecting people like this but much
more severely. Some people have said that they have gotten to the stage where
they can play tetris in their heads without needing a computer. 

Craig
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Craig Alexander , ACT Electricity & Water
EMAIL : ina_craig@actew.oz.au
MAIL  : PO Box 996          PHONE : (06) 248 3372 BH
	Woden ACT 2606
	Australia
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: cbuckley@unix1.tcd.ie (Colm Buckley)
Subject: Re: Pentia
Organization: Trinity College, Dublin
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 10:02:12 GMT

Various people write :

>>	Looks like you forgot to brush up on your Latin and Greek.  If
>>Intel follows its logic, P6 should be called Heptium, not Sextium.  But
>>then, for marketing purposes, they just might...remember the time when
>>Apple insisted SCSI be pronounced "sexy"?

"Pent-" is Greek. The Latin equivalent would be "Quin-". If Intel followed
the Greek sequence, the P6/686 would be called "Hexium" (Latin "Sexium"),
the P7/786 would be "Heptium" (Latin "Septium"). I *think* that the Latin
and Greek prefixes for "eight" are both "Oct-", and "nine" is "Nov-" in
Latin and "Non-" in Greek. However, it's a long time since I studied Latin
and Greek, so I'm probably wrong :-)

-- 
Colm.
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
| Colm Buckley                        | "My program doesn't work."       |
| Department of Computer Science,     | "You forgot the semicolon."      |
| Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland  | "But..."                         |
|                                     | "Line 376. Check."               |
| cbuckley@unix1.tcd.ie               | "But..."                         |
| CBUCKLEY@vax1.tcd.ie                | "Trust me."                      |
+-------------------------------------+----------------------------------+
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.lang.misc
From: esh@prague.tss.com (Edward S. Hirgelt)
Subject: Re: BCPL
Organization: Teknekron Software Systems, Inc.
	<1993Jan21.164142.27673@osf.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 00:01:47 GMT

All this talk about the features of BCPL is nice. It seems that some of
the features of BCPL are similar to those of BLISS. What's the
historical connection, if any, between BCP and BLISS?

... I miss those by-gone days of Bliss-10 hacking on the PDP-10s ...

Enjoy,
Ed
--
Ex vitio alterius	|Ed Hirgelt			|esh@tss.com
sapiens emendat suum.	|Teknekron Software Systems, Inc|
(Publilius Syrus)	|Palo Alto, Ca.			|
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: kst@telesoft.com (Keith Thompson @pulsar)
Subject: Re: Vestiges of FORTRAN, Memes and Syntax (Was: Re: i is for iteration)
Organization: TeleSoft, San Diego, CA, USA
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 02:24:20 GMT

In article <jcmorris.728064198@mwunix> jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org (Joe Morris) writes:
> See if your local library has a copy of an early edition of CRC Tables
> and look at the mathematical section for examples of the use of
> these letters as indices.

I happen to have a copy of the 1938 edition of Mathematical Tables from
the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.  It uses i as the index in the
explanation of the Sum (Sigma) and Product (Pi) notations on page 282:

]       In particular,
]
]       m + n
]       -----
]        \
]         >   x  means x  + x    + ... + x   , (n + 1 terms in all)
]        /     i        m    m+1          m+n
]       -----
]       i = m

A nifty book, but I haven't used it nearly as much since scientific
calculators became cheap.
-- 
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith)  kst@telesoft.com
Alsys San Diego, 5959 Cornerstone Court West, San Diego, CA, USA, 92121-9891
"Listen to me, people!  We must stick them with quills -- it's the only way!"
Xref: sparky alt.folklore.computers:19304 comp.std.misc:182
From: sverkerw@csd.uu.se (Sverker Wiberg)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.std.misc
Subject: Re: Metric again... (Was: 8-bit news (was Re: Commodore keyboard ...))
Date: 26 Jan 93 17:18:57 GMT
	<C157D5.G1F@panix.com> <C15FJ7.CLL@world.std.com>
Organization: CS, University of Uppsala, Sweden
NNTP-Posting-Host: minsk.docs.uu.se
In-reply-to: kibo@world.std.com's message of Wed, 20 Jan 1993 10:52:18 GMT

kibo@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) writes:

   In article <C157D5.G1F@panix.com> jhawk@panix.com (John Hawkinson) writes:
   >In <C14vqy.9v8@mach1.wlu.ca> scooper6@mach1.wlu.ca (stephen cooper 9209 U) writes:
   >
   >>Well, you know how the percent sign has one '0' on the bottom:  % or 0/0
   >>(bad approximation)?  Well the mil sign has two on the bottom:  like 0/00
   >                                ^^^
   >You mean mill. ``mil'' is a unit of length.

   Typographers *do* refer to this as a 'per mil'.  That's what I've always
   called it, and it's what Bringhurst's _Elements of Typographic Style_
   calls it.  (In PostScript it's 'perthousand'.)

Over here, the character (and 'unit') is named (in mainstream)
'promille', and is typically used as a measure of intoxication (0.5
promille behind the wheel means goodbye to the driving license...)



--
Sverker Wiberg  <sverkerw@student.docs.uu.se>
  o===[----	Klia din hund p} magen.
Organization: Hidden - I don't speak for them...
X-Stuff:      <This should be witty, but I'm too tired right now.>
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 13:32:21 EST
From: David B. Horvath, CDP <MBADBH@rohvm1.rohmhaas.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: What is an IBM 5120?
Distribution: world

The 5100 was the series number (51xx) with actual computers with
various numbers where the xx is.  Apparently, the 5120 was a
floppy disk based (instead of cartridge tape) based 5100.

  - David
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: abg1@quads.uchicago.edu (andrew brian gross)
Subject: Re: Atari 1450 XLD
Reply-To: abg1@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 16:43:47 GMT

In article <1993Jan24.203953.11538@athena.mit.edu> joshg@athena.mit.edu (Josh Gagliardi) writes:
>
>Many years ago, my father used to get a catalog of gifts he could order from
>his company in return for having sold equipment.  We looked through the
>catalog one year, and here was this neat computer, the Atari 1450XLD.  It
>had a built in floppy drive, a little space above it for diskettes, and 
>a modem, I think.  We ordered it, and after almost a year of little 
>"Manufacturer's delay" postcards finally got an 800XL with a disk drive in 
>the mail.  what happened?  Was the machine ever built?
>
>--Josh Gagliardi
>joshg@athena.mit.edu

It was never made available in production quantities, but at least a few
of them got out.  I worked at a computer store in Columbus, OH, and we got
a couple of them (the owner new a bunch of folks at Atari).  This was in,
oh, about 1985 or so.

The neat feature of the 1450XLD, if I remember correctly, was that it had
built in speech synthesis... or am I misremembering?...  That's the great
thing about computer folklore: it's the only topic that I ever feel old when
discussing.  :-)

 
-- 
"Brave, foolish, or both-- there is  | Andrew B. Gross 
 something attractive about an       | abg1@cicero.spc.uchicago.edu 
 outrageous and futile undertaking." | "Cultivate philosophy and run like hell."

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: cmcurtin@bluemoon.use.com (Matthew Curtin)
Subject: Re: hacker language articles
Organization: Blue Moon BBS ((614) 868-998[024])
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 93 18:39:17 EST

Jim Ennis <JIM@UCF1VM.BITNET> writes:

>  I am trying to assist a friend in writing a paper about the history of
> computer hacker/user language.  I have a copy of the Jargon file and
> a couple of the book references from the end of the file.  I am looking
> for any suggested magazine articles which the net might know of which
> describes instances of hacker language or how the language came about.

Try The New Hacker's Dictionary, edited by Eric Raymond. Published by the 
MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18145-2 (hardcover) ISBN 0-262-68069-6 (paperback).

 __________________________________________________________________________
| C. Matthew Curtin             ! "But I am the enlightened one, they are  |
| P.O. Box 27081                ! but mere sheep, following each other in  |
| Columbus, OH 43227-0081       ! the name of compatibility." -B. Heineman |
| 614/365-3272                  !                IRC:GS-Matt               |
|_cmcurtin@bluemoon.use.com_____!___Apple_II_Forever!_GNO_your_AppleIIGS!__|
Xref: sparky alt.folklore.computers:19205 comp.lang.misc:4147
From: spackman@disco-sol.dfki.uni-sb.de (Stephen Spackman)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: BCPL
Date: 23 Jan 1993 15:50:19 GMT
Organization: DFKI Saarbruecken GmbH, D-W 6600 Saarbruecken
	<1993Jan21.164142.27673@osf.org>
Reply-To: stephen@acm.org
NNTP-Posting-Host: disco-sol.dfki.uni-sb.de
In-reply-to: dbrooks@osf.org's message of Thu, 21 Jan 1993 16:41:42 GMT

In article <1993Jan21.164142.27673@osf.org> dbrooks@osf.org (David Brooks) writes:
|>I was always struck by the purity of the idea of a language with just
|>one data type, the (32 bit where I was) word.
|
|The worst consequence of that was its effect on pointer arithmetic.  Adding
|one to a value that is being thought of as a pointer must point to the next
|datum, which results in much behind-the-scenes shifting (on Titan, the
|shift was in a different direction from byte-addressed machines).  One of
|the pleasures of the Sigma was its word-addressed-ness.

Just exactly the same as C, given a tolerably intelligent compiler, but
without the "extra unnecessary" datatypes. Not that data types are ever
extra or unnecessary, but you see what I mean - you could generate
identical object code once you had re-extracted the type info from the
source.

|Another consequence was that the floating point operators (a late addition)
|have to be lexically different form the integer versions:
|
|	   x <- y #+ 1.0;

Oh, how terrible. My vote goes with keeping the damned things as library
functions with names like, hmm, "ieee_floating_point_add()". Keep the
terse syntax for operations with meaningful semantics, that's what I say
:-).

|>It had some nice syntactic elements as well. I can't think of any
|>languages where you can make tests of the form
|>
|>    IF 4 <= x <= 8  $( ... $)

|Usually converted into two tests and a /\ in the first stage of syntactic
|analysis, though :-)

Oh, no, probably not. I'd guess (not knowing the language) that if x has
side effects you can tell the difference. Can it?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
stephen p spackman    +49 681 302 5288(o) 5282(sec)    stephen@acm.org
      dfki / stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 / d-w-6600 saarbruecken 11 / germany
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: bmb1021@ultb.isc.rit.edu (B.M. Buck)
Subject: Re: VIC-20 returns!
Organization: Rochester Institute of Technology
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 14:39:04 GMT

In article <1jmt1iINN522@armory.centerline.com> jimf@centerline.com (Jim Frost) writes:
>baylor@NEBULA.SSD.LMSC.LOCKHEED.COM writes:
>>I have fond memories of my VIC-20 (The first computer I owned).
>>  I gave it away to a friend's teenaged son, who now thinks I must
>>  be a saint. (versus nothing, it has remarkable capabilities)
>>Aside from that, with the proper hardware, it can be used as one
>>  of those intelligent house environment controllers. (Turn down the
>>  heat at night, turn on the water heater 1/2 hour before I use it,
>>  but remember I get up at different times weekdays, weekends, and 
>>  holidays, allow extra time for the house to heat if the outside
>>  temperature is TOO cold . . . ) Even when they were still selling
>>  them, they were cheaper than the dedicated controller units.
>
>You can do a lot with the serial output port of that machine, but if
>you're going to use it for switching I strongly suggest you be
>careful.  I believe the documentation says that the serial output port
>can support up to a 100mW draw; it's serious about that and you can
>break things if you exceed it.
>

Actually, there is no reason to limit yourself to just the serial port.
On the C-64 and (I think) the Vic-20 (By the time we got around to doing
this, the Vic was in storage), the "expansion port" contains all the
memory addressing and data lines, the clock lines, the r/W lines, etc.
It's a relatively simple matter to make memory-mapped I/O devices that
sit in the expansion port.  We built a small test device that flashed
banks of LEDs, one LED per bit for a few addresses.  The LEDs were
isolated from the computer by latches, and so they stayed lit until a
zero was written to that location.  Writing a basic program to POKE and
PEEK these locations to do stuff was relatively easy.  For bigger stuff,
we were going to use TIP-31s instead of LEDs.  

As a thought, I think it might be slightly easier on a VIC-20, since you
have more free memory locations to work with.

>I built a phone dialer into mine, running a relay off of one of the
>output lines to manage on-hook/off-hook and wired the sound output
>into the microphone so I could generate dialing sequences (it was fun
>multiplexing the single voice to get the two-tone necessary to dial).
>Unfortunately I must've screwed up something at some point because I
>blew the motherboard.  It may have been that the relay was too great a
>draw, but I never knew for sure.  After I toasted my VIC I bought a
>C-64 and didn't bother playing with it like that anymore.
>
I shudder to ask, since youhad a hook switch, why didn't you do pulse
dialing?  

>(This brings back fond memories of Ma Bell. :-)
>
>jim frost
>jimf@centerline.com


-- 
-----
Buddha Buck            bmb1021@ultb.isc.rit.edu
(insert-file ".disclaimer")
"I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV."
Xref: sparky alt.folklore.computers:19141 comp.lang.misc:4133
From: ludde@cyklop.nada.kth.se (Erik Lundevall)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: BCPL
Keywords: where`o'where
Date: 21 Jan 93 12:17:54 GMT
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

In <1jkj39INNgv8@function.mps.ohio-state.edu> dicks@math.ohio-state.edu (Ethan Dicks) writes:

>BCPL was used extensively in writing the early versions of AmigaDOS.  Against
>the wishes of many of the Amiga Corp.'s employees, Commodore bought
>a version of an operating system called Tripos from a company in
>England (MetaComCo, I think).  Tripos was written in BCPL.  It took
>almost five years to correct that mistake.  All of AmigaDOS is now written

Only the actual "DOS" part (file handling etc) was the port of Tripos and thus
written in BCPL. The rest (multitasking exec, graphics subsystem etc) was
written in C and assembler.

The annoying part is more the bad integration of Tripos into the rest of
the system, rather than BCPL itself.


>One langage "features" that made writing some system utilities very
>prone to bugs was the BPTR.  A BPTR is like a regular old pointer in C,
>except that is the address of some data *right shifted twice*!.  This

The problem with BCPL pointers is not that they were used at all, but that
they are used in the programmer interface to the DOS subsystem. 


>to see BCPL go!  MetaComCo (or MetaCompost, as we called it around
>here) sold a BCPL compiler for AmigaDOS.  I don't know anyone who ever
>bought one.

Did they? I don't remember that. I thought it was only for the Atari ST
computer. There are free BCPLs available though.


>-ethan
>-- 
>dicks@zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu -or- erd@kumiss.cmhnet.org

-- 
-Erik Lundevall             ludde@nada.kth.se           
                            ludde@adder.adsp.sub.org    
Your fault. Core dumped.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: rgeorge@seasnake.micro.umn.edu (Rogers George)
Subject: Re: What one-liner, joke, saying would you like to see on a T-shirt
Organization: University of Minnesota CIS
Distribution: usa
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 04:12:17 GMT

In article <C18G3u.9wn@bcstec.ca.boeing.com> saddler@bcstec.ca.boeing.com (Ray, just Ray) writes:
>sunday@cup.portal.com (Sunday and Associates) writes:
>>	We are preparing a commercial release of T-shirts intended for
>>the Usenet civilization and related societies.
>
>Altho not gut-busters, here's a start:
>
>- Visualize Whirlled Peas  <-- I'd buy that one!
>- You have new mail.
>- $rm -r /
>- /earth is 98% full, please delete anyone you can

how about...
- [fodder for the line eater]
- I bet K*bo won't see this.

rgeorge@staff.tc.umn.edu

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: paladin@world.std.com (Thomas G Schlatter)
Subject: Re: Public-access Unices
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 05:09:58 GMT

In article <1jl48hINNcvj@srvr1.engin.umich.edu> ftit@yahara.engin.umich.edu (Sergej Roytman) writes:
>
>I have a friend who's graduated and gone out into the Real World not
>long ago.  He's a EE and discovered the joys of the Internet only in his
>last term here.  Since he's out of here, his account should be deleted
>soon, and he asked me to find out where there are public-access Unices.

see alt.internet.access.wanted
From: Benjamin.Dobson@newcastle.ac.uk (Ben Dobson)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: You know you've been playing games too long when...
Date: 27 Jan 93 13:08:39 GMT
Organization: Computing Laboratory, U of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK NE1 7RU.


>>>I have heard stories of the game Tetris affecting people like this but much
>>>more severely. Some people have said that they have gotten to the stage where
>>>they can play tetris in their heads without needing a computer. 

After playing Tetris for a couple of hours I find myself wondering how to walk
and trying to make a new line from what i'm seeing - I'm telling you I've seen a 
photocopier that was definiately a square block and I couldn't fit it in anywhere.

My friend has just got lemmings - I've heard it's just as addictive.
Now where can I place that long thin one.
 
Mail : Benjamin.Dobson@newcastle.ac.uk    @ @
Newcastle University                       ^
England. NE1 7RU.                         `-'           
                  "Be happy, smile, and don't be sad"
From: 01ksdavis@leo.bsuvc.bsu.edu
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: VIC-20 returns!
Date: 25 Jan 93 03:02:58 GMT
Organization: Ball State University, Muncie, In - Univ. Computing Svc's

In article <1993Jan21.122919.21205W@viper.edb.tih.no>, terjej@edb.tih.no (Terje Johansen,o90b) writes:
> As a joke and as a remembrance of my first computer-days,
> I bought a VIC-20 with a cassette-player yesterday.
> Any ideas what I can use it for, except for doorstop and to scare 
> the shit out of future grandchildren?

	Well, my first computer was a VIC-20 and it was what I learned to
program in BASIC on.  Anyhow, it was remarkable the things I could do with the
sound effects and the keyboard graphics capabilities.  

	One of my program was where you would "build" your own spaceship, and
then you could watch it fly off or print it out.  Another one of my favorite
programs involved a VW Beetle like character and shooting things with it.
                                                                         
> I was thinking of maybe connect it to some device, like a simple 
> window-alarm circuit with a bell or something. Anybody done something
> like this?
> 
> Hell, humorous suggestions will also be appreciated - just remember
> that with 3.5k Ram there are SOME limits to what can be done...
> 
> -- 
> Terje Johansen at Trondheim College of Engineering, Norway.
> 
> War isn't fought to decide who is right
>    but who is left.
	You yourself said that there must be some use other than to scare your
grandchildren.  Well, this reminds me of one of the things that happened to me
the first summer that I had the Vic.

	Mom let me play with the computer, but said that I shouldn't have it on
all the time because it was summer and I should be outdoors.  Well, I had been
working on a program that plays different sound effects, and one day my mother
yelled at me (axtually, she yelled at me often, and still does today) for being
on the computer.  I was not on the computer.  Turns out I teached a mockingbird
my Vic-20s entire sound effects repertoire.

	Kyle
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: jgreco@solaria.mil.wi.us (Joe Greco)
Subject: Re: Smart Disk Drives (C64)
Organization: Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 08:02:06 GMT

In article <rjg.727134176@pulaski>, rjg@doe.carleton.ca (Richard Griffith) writes:
: Does anyone know anything about the undocumented bootstrap program for
: the C64. From looking around I seem to recall that a special file
: name (possibly beginning with a @, it has been a while) if it existed
: would be loaded into the RAM in the drive and then executed. 
:
: I never tested it but can remember looking at the code.

I believe you're thinking of the 1581, which (if I recall correctly, since I
don't have one and haven't had one in years) could be taught to do horrible
things on powerup using that technique.

There is a technique used by the 154x and 157x drives to load a service
diagnostic routine from disk and execute it (kinda a last-ditch effort to
determine what is wrong with a half-functional drive).  This may be what you
are thinking of, but has nothing to do with the C64.  Using a special plug,
which grounds the data and clock lines of the serial bus, the drive is
powered up.  When the plug is removed, the drive will try to load "*" as a
USR "utility" file type and execute it.  There is a bizarre format to this
file involving a load address, length, data, and checksums after each block
of data that I don't have readily available (but could find out if anybody
gives a rip).  It is the same format used by the "&" utility loader, since
this is a special variation of it.

However, this requires a little hacking to get the drive to do this.  I've
seen a VIC programmed to lock the lines low, to do this, if I recall, so you
do not necessarily need the service plug..

All of this from memory, five to ten years out of date, not responsible for
any errors contained in this information, if it is life or death I can get
you more information.

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - System Administrator		       jgreco@solaria.mil.wi.us
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/321-9287