Notices by Tom Lyon ✅ (aka_pugs@mastodon.social)

Happy Mainframe Day!
OTD 1964: IBM announces the System/360 family. 8-bit bytes ftw!

Shown: Operator at console of Princeton's IBM/360 Model 91.

@larsbrinkhoff Dan Moisa is working on it! He previously cloned a Sun-3/60; I pointed him at the SAIL archives and he's making progress. See image and https://github.com/54weasels/cg4

OTD 1982: The founding of #SunMicrosystems.

Before transistors, relays were widely used in telephony switches. They were much slower, but much more reliable than vacuum tubes.

This 1951 booklet, "NO. 5 CROSSBAR" from Bell Labs describes the bad-ass mainframe of relays. Lots of photos and diagrams.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UBnLJIzYjpGu1401I6F3lDa9fWiXSBu5?usp=sharing

Ever wonder about the state of Data Processing before the computer?

Behold "The Punched Card" - 200 glorious pages from 1952 describing the state of the art of electro-mechanical paper pushing!

With fabulous fifties art and culture!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AQdno-JCFSmA0JcuB7pVtW87XyhnOHFp?usp=sharing
1/2

Beginning to scan some of my telecom stuff.
Here's an ATT map from 1893.

The R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S: high school hackers from the 60s and 70s. I've known a bunch of these folks - smart cookies.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/teenage-hackers

OTD 1962: Inauguration of the Manchester/Ferranti Atlas supercomputer. First with virtual memory!

https://museucapixaba.com.br/hoje/computador-ferranti-atlas-de-1962/

BIll Joy 1975ish vs. 2025.

And there's' the ADM-3 which survives in the fingers of every vi user.

50 years ago today: My first #UNIX users' group conference - the organization that became #USENIX.

OTD 1999: #SunMicrosystems announces the Sun Ray thin client. Great blog about its development: https://marcschneider.weebly.com/sun-ray.html

OTD 1982: Sun is on the Net!

https://www.krsaborio.net/bsd/research/1982/0908.htm

#suntember

You may be cool, but you're not Bell Labs Coding Form cool. (1971) (Don't forget to specify your character set!)

Or maybe Cray is your kink. (1976?)

OTD 1996: Sun Microsystems purchases "Business Systems Division" of Cray after SGI buys Cray. Becomes the wildly successful E10000 server line. Best acquisition ever?
https://t.co/k8bDMQRBnI

USENIX artifact #1. @bcantrill @ahl

UNICOM '83 was a joint conference between USENIX and /usr/group (a more business-y UNIX group).

San Diego with an *all night* Omnimax film festival!

One of the few marketing uses of the orange Sun logo.

43 years ago today: Joining #SunMicrosystems

https://akapugs.blog/2022/05/03/674/

My nickname from high school was Pugs, or Pugsley, inspired by The Addams Family.
My brother Jim, 3 years ahead at Princeton, made sure everyone knew me as Pugs.

So Peter, as UNIX admin, gave me the userid 'pugs'. Which has been constant all these years!

UNIX arrived courtesy of Dr. Jeff Ullman and Bell Labs. Ullman and Al Aho at Bell were deep into their decades-long collaboration (see recent Turing awards), so Ullman convinced Princeton to adopt it.

I remember it as being Version 6 of UNIX, a little ahead of the official release.

At the time, the only time-sharing system at Princeton was APL\360 - which was very cool but very weird. And I had spent the previous summer wrestling with IBM's TSO which was not at all cool, or even weird - just bad.

So UNIX looked very nice - file redirection! pipes! background processing!

I'm celebrating my 50th year of using UNIX!

Sometime in spring of '75, my friend Peter (sysadmin for the PDP-11/45) came around shouting "UNIX is Here! UNIX is Here!"

I asked "What's a UNIX?" and he showed me the 1974 CACM article about UNIX.