Notices by Lars Brinkhoff (larsbrinkhoff@mastodon.sdf.org)

@ramin_hal9001 @kentpitman I think there are many aspects to "Emacs philosophy" but one of them is "ITS philosophy". This again has many aspects, one example of which is the how Emacs is "unexeced" when built. This seems rather quirky today, but makes perfect sense and is standard procedure on ITS and other PDP-10 systems.

Another aspect is the user interface which is based on key strokes. This UX tradition can be traced all the way back to the TX-0 and the TMRC community (original hackers).

@etchedpixels GNU Emacs is only at 30.1 whereas the original is 170. So TECO is a factor 5.6 better than Lisp at this point.

Happy birthday PDP-10! #OnThisDay 58 years ago, the PDP-10 was first powered on. Whoopee, it goes!

@kentpitman @ldbeth @kim The first TECO ran standalone on an MIT PDP-1. In 1964, it was ported to the AI lab PDP-6, also running standalone.

In 1966, Bob Clements brought TECO along to the Stanford AI lab and ported it to their PDP-6 running the DEC Monitor timesharing system. From this rather early and crude TECO stems all DEC versions.

Back at MIT, TECO was updated to run under the ITS timesharing system and there was a frantic development, culminating in EMACS.

@amszmidt Ths reminds me of an anime I saw a long time ago when a dead, or nearly so, body fell into a mainframe type computer, tangled with the wires, and became part of the machine. Good times. But try as I might, I haven't been able to find it since. Help?

@screwtape @amszmidt That could well be. I haven't followed Emacs closely; is compilation to machine code in yet?

@amszmidt Be the CONS you want to see in the world. Being wired into a PDP-10 is only one of the perks.

@screwtape @amszmidt How so? Even Emacs 13 has a Lisp compiler. Or are you referring to one of the other two elisps?

Good to see that timely documentation was as important then as it is now.

@amszmidt Why not Alto?

@amszmidt Or are you dancer?

@kentpitman @amszmidt @screwtape Your translator isn't there (yet). CGOL is.

I believe the major use case for the translator was the IMSL math library? The library is preserved, but it's copyrighted software now owned by Perforce, so there are obstacles to making it available. I made some notes here: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/issues/676

I wrote my own NCP and can now make TELNET connections both ways between my laptop and ITS.

This will be the year of ARPANET on the desktop.

There were a bunch of CDC hosts on the ARPANET. Does anyone has an inkling whether some of this networking software has survived?

Feliz Navi!

I'd like to offer some UUCP resources for the modern world.
https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2017-March/010467.html
https://github.com/DoctorWkt/4bsd-uucp
https://sdf.org/?tutorials/uucp

I suppose most of you recognize this note from 55 years ago.

I'm slowly building on the work of David Walden, Bob Armstrong, Charles Anthony, and others. They previously demonstrated an ARPA network running on four emulated IMPs. Now for the first time, there's a PDP-10 host in the mix.

It's a start. Er, restart.