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It is unfortunate that people dealing with computers often have little interest in the
history of their subject. As a result, many concepts and ideas are propagated and
advertised as being new, which existed decades ago, perhaps under a different
terminology. I believe it worth while to occasionally spend some time to consider the
past and to investigate how terms and concepts originated.
Ethernet wired LAN was invented at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973, inspired by the ALOHAnet packet radio network and the ARPANET. In 1980 Xerox, DEC, and Intel published a specification for 10 Mbps Ethernet over coaxial cable that became the IEEE 802.3-1985 Standard. Later augmented for higher speeds, and twisted-pair, optical, and wireless media, Ethernet became ubiquitous in home, commercial, industrial, and academic settings worldwide.
Currently, the IEEE 802 family consists of 67 published standards, with 49 projects under development. The committee works with standards agencies worldwide to publish certain IEEE 802 standards as international guidelines.
Thirty-five years ago today (November 2nd), the Internet Worm program was set loose to propagate on the Internet. Noting that now to the computing public (and cybersecurity professionals, specifically) often generates an "Oh, really?" response akin to stating that November 2nd is the anniversary of the inaugural broadcast of the first BBC TV channel (1936), and the launch of Sputnik 2 with Laika aboard (1957). That is, to many, it is ho-hum, ancient history.
Perhaps that is to be expected after 35 years -- approximately the length of a human generation. (As an aside, I have been teaching at Purdue for 36 years. I have already taught students whose parents had taken one of my classes as a student; in five or so years, I may see students whose grandparents took one of my classes!
Chile was building an analog of our modern internet way back in the 1970s. A massive, national communications network for business and government to coordinate efficiently. The engineer (Stafford Beer) who designed it was from Surrey, in the UK, and worked for the Allende goverment that was building this system.
After the 1973 coup, General Pinochet had the system destroyed.
Had it caught on, we might have had global internet in our homes in the 1970s.
The 19-inch rack format with rack-units of 1.75 inches (44.45 mm) was established as a standard by AT&T around 1922 in order to reduce the space required for repeater and termination equipment in a telephone company central office. The earliest repeaters from 1914 were installed in ad hoc fashion on shelves, in wooden boxes and cabinets. Once serial production started, they were built into custom-made racks, one per repeater. But in light of the rapid growth of the toll network, the engineering department of AT&T undertook a systematic redesign, resulting in a family of modular factory-assembled panels all "designed to mount on vertical supports spaced 191⁄2 inches between centers. The height of the different panels will vary, ... but ... in all cases to be a whole multiple of 13⁄4 inches".
Shell is a thing you want to understand and then not use, because you learned to understand it. (in German, from 1998 )
For the rest of this discussion, we assume “Python 3” as an instance of “something else”, but if you are older than 50, feel free to use “Perl” instead.
If you are already doing Python, the rest of this is not for you. You already know these things.
'uppercase' and 'lowercase' are remnants of the moveable type practice of keeping capital letters on a separate case, above the miniscule letters.
What turns weakness into catastrophe is monoculture. All software has flaws, all systems have weaknesses, and you design around that by having multiple different systems with different weaknesses. If the world's banana crop is a single strain, then a single pathogen can take out the lot.
You're not going to harden your IT infrastructure by rewriting Active Directory in FORTH under VMS, much as such an exercise may appeal to the more perversely creative. But the more experience you have of seeing things done differently, of analyzing and understanding systems that don't make the current industry standard assumptions, the better you'll be at assessing and working with different contemporary options.
In this paper, I explore the rise and fall of Gopher as the dominant protocol for file search and retrieval over the Internet. After its creation in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, use of Gopher exploded. The popular press lauded it as an important step beyond File Transfer Protocol (FTP), in terms of both usability and ease of implementation. The growth of Gopher was soon overshadowed, however, by the World Wide Web. A major milestone is this direction was the release of the Mosaic graphical browser by the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications [NCSA] in 1993.
Two #ManhattanProject scientists passed away this week. http://t.co/AvR6O3FD #history #tatomic #WWII
we'll take a behind-the-scenes look at the design and development of Btrfs on many levels — technical, political, personal — and trace it from its origins at a workshop to its current position as Linus's root file system.