Notices by JohnMashey (johnmashey@mstdn.social)

@amoroso
1 of 4/ Cable Repair Adminstrative System(CRAS) was Bell Labs software built late 1970s for telcos:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1982.tb04342.x (sorry paywall),
From that paper:
Lines of code
16K PL/I (part on IBM mainframe, rest on UNIX)
10K C
15K Shell (mostly awk, for data transforms & reports)
6K Misc
33K documentation
This was done to move fast, adapt to real needs in the field(1st Field Trial Boston, 2nd in Southwest Bell, who told us on 1st meeting they did things different than Yankees.)

@amoroso
2 of 4/After CRAS was running in telco, I printed the shell scripts/awk code, left a copy on Brian's desk, at that time the largest collection of awk in production use. He was surprised, said "We built awk for little programs!" I Said: "It works, it was fast to write, easy to change." And later, I had someone write C functiosnthat made it easy to recode performance-sensitive cases in C.
A bit later, A, W & K invited me over to give input on features for a revised implementation.

@jwildeboer
Recall that BWK coined name Unix (and not as AT&T said, to be one where Multics was many, but as Multics without b*lls), so joking was early.
Another joke: BWK was an associate editor for Prentice-Hall and once bugged me to write a book, saying you don't make money, but people think you know something. I suspect "the C Programming Language" has done $OK.
Finally, here's BWK's oral history I got for #computerhistorymuseum https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102740170

@jwildeboer And as another Kernighan story, related to AWK, try short thread about a real telco application built with awk scripts, whos printout surprised Brian:
https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/110103301307131222

@Gurre @EvelineSulman @guyjantic @mekkaokereke
LIA was certainly noticable around N Atlantic, but not globally synchronous. The CO2 drop certainly contributed to temperature drop (~0.1C), but there were also an unusual number of big volcanoes. From IPCC AR6 WG I, for example.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

@guyjantic @mekkaokereke
Bill Ruddiman, “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum” (2005).
Then: Koch, et al(2019), 90% die-off 1500-1610, contributing to unique in last 2000 years 7-10PPM drop in CO2, due to reforestration.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261

@arstechnica
Reminder of Ken Thompson’s 1984 Turing lecture, Reflections in Trusting Trust, about a1975 hack:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
It’s even more relevant now given the greatly-increased layers of software used by programmers.
Tidbit: AFAIK, out group was the only one to notice this hack, which occurred a few weeks after I’d read John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider & laughed prematurely at idea of worms with infinitely-replicating tails.

@mattblaze
Of course, at this point, removing fluroidation is dumb ...
but strangely, some UCSF friends of mine found that among the biggest pushers of fluoridation were NOT communists, but Big Sugar... to deflect from the awful possibility of reducing tooth decay by reducing sugar intake.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001798

@robpike
I’ve heard this business plan before.

@chrisgeidner
Anyone who uses products/services based on VLSI semiconductors, especially those with ARM microprocessors (i.e., ~all smartphones) should know major contributions were made by trans folks, both Fellows of #ComputerHistoryMuseum, among many other honors.
Lynn COnway (VLSI design, crucial 1979 book, I still own one)):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
Sophie Wilson, ARM:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson