A is for awk, which runs like a snail, and
B is for biff, which reads all your mail.
C is for cc, as hackers recall, while
D is for dd, the command that does all.
E is for emacs, which rebinds your keys, and
F is for fsck, which rebuilds your trees.
G is for grep, a clever detective, while
H is for halt, which may seem defective.
I is for indent, which rarely amuses, and
J is for join, which nobody uses.
K is for kill, which makes you the boss, while
L is for lex, which is missing from DOS.
M is for more, from which less was begot, and
N is for nice, which it really is not.
O is for od, which prints out things nice, while
P is for passwd, which reads in strings twice.
Q is for quota, a Berkeley-type fable, and
R is for ranlib, for sorting a table.
S is for spell, which attempts to belittle, while
T is for true, which does very little.
U is for uniq, which is used after sort, and
V is for vi, which is hard to abort.
W is for whoami, which tells you your name, while
X is, well, X, of dubious fame.
Y is for yes, which makes an impression, and
Z is for zcat, which handles compression.

so I've been reading a lot about terminals lately. i asked the question "what distinguishes a terminal from a dispaly+keyboard?" and here are the conclusions i've come to:

1: terminals are not merely displays with attached IO. these have existed historically, and no one called them terminals, meanwhile terminals that actually existed all have output behavior that's strongly divergent from just displays

2: terminals are a very rich domain, and few people know the great diversity of terminals that existed historically

3: the best definition of "terminal", which distinguishes them from displays+keyboards, at least in the context of historical terminals, is: A terminal is a computer peripheral that transmits and receives data from a host computer, the data being best understood as an instruction or command (both to the host machine and the terminal), and where there is typically some internal state maintained on the terminal which describes the current displayed content and interaction possibilities (but which may not include all the possible content that can be understood as "displayed")

the rest of this thread is going to be a discussion of terminals of different forms, likely many of them will be unfamiliar to you, or if they seem familiar, the details of what they could do and how and why will likely be unfamiliar. anyway, let's see some terminals

the archectypal terminal in many peoples minds, the thing that people think of when you mention terminals, is the Character-oriented terminal. the oldest form of these were just teletype machines, literally just typewriters that were electrically controlled and which could be used to communicate with a computer, which could type characters, and also receive typed characters. here's an ASR 33 teletype, which is a particular machine used for communicating with computers. because these were literally type writers, they are called hard copy terminals
a teletype integrated into a stand

the upgraded form of this is the glass teletype or video display unit, which enables far more possibilities. probably the most widely known character-oriented glass teletype is the VT100, which still forms the basis of many minimum viable terminal emulator programs today. character-oriented VDUs were effectively just video based versions of teletype terminals. instead of a paper print out, they stored a screen's worth of characters in internal memory
a vT100 showing a display with a cable-attached keyboard

its worth pausing here and bracketting these two toots by observing the large gulf in time and cost and so forth between these machines. we're talking like decades between the first teletypes and the first VDUs. teletypes existed looooong before computers, even. and even when VDUs existed, teletype terminals were still commonplace, because VDUs were expensive as heck initially

the expense was not because of the CRTs or anything like that, it was because of memory. that is to say, computer memory, not just terminal memory. and also because of computer speed

what i mean by this is, well.. let's consider a situation where you just drive a TV from a computer. suppose its, i dunno, 1960. everyone's got a TV in 1960 so they're cheap, right?

but now, if you want to drive it from a computer, you need to invent some mechanism for outputting a video signal. how are you gonna do that? real-time digital synthesis in the computer? fat chance! you might be able to control an oscilloscope that way, and many demos existed, but not a TV, with its raster graphics. and while you're doing the oscilloscope control, what else do you have time for? depends on the complexity of the thing you're drawing. funny lines for art or simple games? maybe. but text? forget it. you have no time for other programs

if you use a teletype as your output, you can just send a command to print a single character, it does, and then the character is still there on the paper indefinitely even if the computer turns off. so your program and just proceed to the next thing it needs to do

but what if you still want to use a TV? i mean, teletype machines are loud and fiddly mechanical devices

maybe you think, why not replicate the teletype's page, by storing character data in the computers memory and then use some specially designed circuit to non-destructively read that memory very quickly and generate a video signal? some sort of "video unit"

well that's nice, but for a computer in 1960, you're gonna use a lot of memory. i mean, suppose its 6 bits per character optimistically, then a standard 80x24 terminal takes 11520 bits, which is not a HUGE amount of memory but not dirt cheap either

in the 1960s you could get core memory for about a dollar a bit, which meant your little video output would be over $10,000. just for the memory! why bother when you can just use a bog standard mass produced teletype?

plus, if you were doing this by video, you'd have to wire up locations for video signal transmission to the remote displays. whereas a teletype can just be connected to a phone line if you need it. or you do wireless transmission of video? but that's still a lot. now you need radio engineers involved. why bother.

EVENTUALLY memory chips started to be built in the late 60s and costs really dropped for memory, and the size of the chips were small enough that you could actually start building VDU terminals that could produce some semblance of a terminal like the VT100

BUT the first VDUs weren't character-oriented! they weren't just glass teletypes!

the first VDU terminals to be produced were actually what are called BLOCK-oriented terminals. a block-oriented terminal does not send and receive data one character-qua-command at a time, but rather in large blocks. and the data was not merely a pile of characters but a far richer thing

the data that was received was an entire menu or form (like an HTML form), sometimes with things like data format validation info, and data sent was either a menu item selections or form field information

technically there were some hard-copy block-oriented terminals as well but they're pretty rare, because of the complications of making them work, and they're not merely a teletype

an example of a block oriented terminal, which is from 1964 (not the earliest but a fun one regardless) is the IBM 2260. it stored a very small number of characters in a delay line memory, which was probably the cheapest option for the amount of memory needed at the time. another fun one, from 10 years later, is the hp vt2640
a man using a 2260 in a computer room
a man using a 2640 in an office

these terminals LOOK an awful lot like the sorts of things we normally think of as terminals, they LOOK like character-oriented terminals like the VT100, but they were controlled very differently, and you used them very differently. you'd basically send them a large blob of data describing the entire screen, with form fields and so on, including layout information, subdivisions of the screen into static data regions vs. form regions, etc etc.

then, the user would be able to navigate around the menu items and form fields and enter data, all of which was stored locally on the terminal. only when the user pressed a send button was all of that information bundled up and shipped back to the host machine

there is, incidentally, another kind of text-oriented terminal that is "line-oriented", and all i could find about those is that they were, well.. line oriented. which i assume means that the data came across to it in blobs of one line at a time

i don't know if it sent data one line at a time as well. character-oriented terminals typically sent data for every keypress. modern terminal emulators are character oriented on send, but we typically use them with shells that simulate a line-oriented send

now, you may think this is the end of things for terminals but this is just the beginning

well actually you're right to say its the end sort of because character-oriented terminals were VERY popular and lasted a VERY long time, and also they sort of were the LAST thing that was developed

but its not the end of the thread, at least :p

the next kind of terminal that i'll discuss is a vector terminal. i mentioned before the idea of controlling a CRT like you control an oscilloscope, and some very folx realized that this is actually a REALLY good idea, because vector art is quite small in size, so you can get very far with a very small amount of memory

The CSD 3324 SPF secures Group 3 fax communications for mission-critical government, corporate and private applications. The CSD 3324 SPF connects to Group 3 fax machines providing secure fax communications using the AES 256-bit encryption algorithm and Diffie-Hellman public key exchange key management for proven cryptographic strength, and ease of deployment and operation. The CSD 3324 SPF's secure fax encryption features are identical to the CSD 3324 SP secure voice telephone and fax encryption system; therefore, secure fax exchanges are 100% interoperable with the CSD 3324 SP secure fax encryption capability. The CSD 3324 SP also has AES-based secure voice.

Since 17 October, to our knowledge any email with the NewClimate URL (newclimate dot org) in the email body, link, signature, reply header or contained anywhere in an attachment is unjustifiably quarantined by Microsoft email servers without any notice, regardless of who sends or receives the email.

"das Zusammenwirken welcher Zufälle den Auftragswert gemäß § 46 Abs 2 BVergG haarscharf unter 100.000 EUR ergeben hat, sodass die Vergabe mittels Direktvergabe formfrei und nicht per Durchführung eines förmlichen Vergabeverfahrens erfolgte"

Wir können nicht ausschließen, dass Daten abgeflossen sind“, schreibt das Unternehmen in einer Stellungnahme. „Auf Basis bisheriger Erkenntnisse könnte es sich dabei um Geschäfts-, Mitarbeiter- und Kundendaten handeln.“

Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc.
a
The bank refused to spell their customer's name correctly, so the customer raised a GDPR complaint under Article 16.

Wann aber die notwendige Überleitung von der Cyber-Krise in den Cyber-Defence-Fall vorgenommen wird und welche Schritte zu setzen sind, darüber herrscht Unklarheit. Das stellt der Rechnungshof in seinem heute veröffentlichten Bericht „Koordination der Cyber-Defence“ fest.

Obwohl auf diese Weise 147.000 der rund 300.000 handschriftlich ausgefüllten Dokumentationsbögen nicht mehr auffindbar sind, seien die praktischen Auswirkungen gering, sagt Holzer. Denn im elektronischen Impfpass sei ohnehin alles eingetragen: „Wir wissen genau, wann jemand in welcher Impfstraße von welchem Arzt, mit welchem Impfstoff und mit welcher Chargennummer geimpft wurde. Allerdings fehlt uns diese ergänzende Dokumentation – nämlich der Dokumentationsbogen.“

Die handschriftlichen Dokumentationsbögen wurden damals eingescannt und dann vorschriftsmäßig vernichtet. Eine externe Festplatte, auf der die gescannten Formulare gespeichert wurden, fehlt. "Wir sind jedoch überzeugt, dass wir die externe Festplatte und den dazugehörigen Laptop noch finden", sagte Landesrettungskommandant Anton Holzer.

Durch Cyberangriffe und Betrug mit Kryptowährungen ist seit 2017 weltweit ein Schaden von mindestens 30 Milliarden US-Dollar (28,5 Mrd. Euro) angerichtet worden – das haben Forscher und Forscherinnen des Complexity Science Hub (CSH) in Wien und der Universität Montreal berechnet

https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl

FIDO token management for psychics, a.k.a. "Austrian Roulette". Give it up for A-Trust GmbH

Nowify is an opinionated time management system based on the following principles:

"don't make me think": design your life and let a computer calculate your next moves
push over pull: active/annoying systems are better than passive ones
active feedback: use simple stats to see yourself more clearly
meta-routines: humans change -- use a system to update your system
bite-sized: modular without being fancy

nur fünf Prozent der DNS-Server, der Kontrollinfrastrukturen, um Domänen aufzulösen, in Österreich stehen. Auch nur 20 Prozent der Mail-Server befinden sich in Österreich. 80 Prozent der Mail-Server sind im Ausland, auch von Behörden und Gemeinden.

Jetzt geht das Land einen Schritt weiter: Die Zusammenarbeit soll auf KI-basierte Dienste am Arbeitsplatz ausgedehnt werden. Im Rahmen der KI-Strategie der Landesregierung wollen Nextcloud und die Staatskanzlei gemeinsam ein generatives Sprachmodell für die Landesverwaltung entwickeln, das speziell auf Verwaltungstexte angepasst ist.

„Wir stellen den Kolleginnen und Kollegen der Landesverwaltung zukünftig KI-Dienste direkt am Arbeitsplatz zur Verfügung", erläutert der Digitalisierungsminister und Chef der Staatskanzlei in Schleswig-Holstein, Dirk Schrödter. Neben dem Einsatz von bestehenden KI-Diensten wie ChatGPT solle auch die Entwicklung digital souveräner und offener Lösungen vorangetrieben werden. Das mit Nextcloud zu entwickelnde Sprachmodell soll als Open Source zur Verfügung stehen.

Damit verschwindet ein Stück Technologie-Geschichte. Die Handy-Signatur gab es ab Ende 2009 und war für viele Österreicher*innen der erste Schritt in Richtung E-Government. Wann sie genau zu Grabe getragen wird, ist noch nicht bekannt. Die Stadt Wien und ELDA nennen den 5. Dezember 2023 als Datum – laut Finanzamt sei dieser Stichtag aber nicht bekannt, sondern lediglich „Ende des Jahres“. Eine Anfrage der futurezone bei der Stadt Wien läuft. Update: Laut der Stadt Wien wurde der 5. Dezember 2023 vom Finanzamt genannt, "im Rahmen von Gesprächen zur Umstellung" der Handy-Signatur auf ID Austria.

Bei der Umstellung von der Bürgerkarte auf den Elektronischen Identitätsnachweis (E-ID) gibt es "wesentliche Verzögerungen". Ursprünglich für Anfang 2020 angepeilt, kündigten die zuständigen Ministerien den Echtbetrieb jetzt für Mitte 2023 an, geht aus einem am Freitag veröffentlichten Rechnungshofbericht hervor. Mängel fanden die Prüfer vor allem im früher zuständigen Wirtschaftsressort, dort kam es wegen fehlender Finanzierung und Personal zu einem längeren Projektstopp.