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Computers section

Miscellaneous - Computers - Personalities - Science!

Map of this section:

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) - Software Patents - CoCo
Miscellaneous - Folklore - Hacking
The Internet - Free Software - GNU/Linux
Programming

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)

Montréal BBS List for November 25th, 1988
(September 1, 2002)

This list was maintained by the Montreal BBS Juxtaposition, which started maintaining such lists in 1985. (Thanks to Paul Guertin for preserving and contributing this list.)

ZIP Beep
(July 28, 2002)

ZIP Beep was probably the first on-line humor magazine. It lasted from 1984 to 1989 and was distributed to more than 150 BBSes.

Zonker's Friends
(July 7, 2002)

Zonker was a sysop of Montreal BBS "The Crypt,", which existed at least in 1989-90.

Montréal BBS List for July 21st, 1989
(July 7, 2002)

This list was maintained by the Montreal BBS Juxtaposition, which started maintaining such lists in 1985.

When 300 baud was the bomb
(June 26, 2002)

A Salon article on the BBS world.

A Documentary About Bulletin Board Systems
(October 6, 2001)

Jason Scott wants to film a documentary on Bulletin Board Systems in order to preserve their history. The Web has kept very few traces of this very dynamic world.

In my case, I was a member of several BBSes mostly from 1988 to 1991. The main ones were Alpha-Byte, Cheers!, InfoDoc-Montréal, Infolie and C-PC.

Bulletin Boards are online world's good old days
(December 21, 2000)

A Montréal Gazette article about the Montréal BBS scene as it was in 1997. The original link was this one, but the page disappeared. Fortunately, I kept a copy of the text.

The History of BBS's
(December 6, 2000)

This is a 1986 article by Thomas Ark that talked about how stupid users were polluting bulletin board systems. I translated this article in French in 1989. I have searched the Web with the name Thomas Ark but failed to find any mention of him. I would be curious to know more about what made him write this article.

textfiles.com
(February 27, 1999)

A collection of text files that used to circulate on the BBSes of the seventies and eighties.

The Santa Barbara BBS Nostalgia Page
(November 2, 1998)

The Santa Barbara BBS Nostalgia Page serves as an exposé of the thriving pre-internet culture in Santa Barbara cyberspace.

"People with no lives reminiscing about when they had - no lives
-- Useless Pages

"Batman" strikes again
(January 26, 1998)

I was a member of several Bulletin Board Systems from 1988 to 1991 (first with a 1200 bps modem on a CoCo, then with a 2400 bps on a PC...). One of them was called Alpha-Byte, and its sysop was known under the alias of S.T. Garp; I was a co-sysop for that BBS for about eight months.

There was on Alpha-Byte a section where a few users would write a "never ending story": each user write a message that adds something to the story. I kept an example of one of the worst contributions (in French) made by one of the idiots that unfortunately polluted that fine BBS.

Software Patents

Excerpt from Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Unites States Constitution:

[The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Copyrights and patents are authorized by the American constitution only towards the goal of advancing science and the useful arts, and not to protect the interests of private businesses...

The documentary Triumph of the Nerds on the beginnings of micro-computers shows very well that the nerds that created major programs like Visicalc for example had no need for legal or financial incentives. They did it because computer programming is a fascinating activity that can also improve the human condition. The software industry was and is still doing very well and does not need to have a patent system that implies the privatization of ideas to the great pleasure of the large companies that have the means to buy them.

The worst effect of software patents is that they endanger the free software movement. But since this movement helps the promotion of liberty and science in general, it is obvious that patents on algorithms violate the Constitution.

Against Software Patents
(October 31, 1998)

An article by the League for Programming Freedom that explains the whole problem. I have been maintaining the LPF site from time to time since October 1998.

The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets
(August 9, 1998)

En 1950, the United States Supreme Court deplored that the U.S. Patent Office granted patents for gadgets as simple as a rubber tip put on wood pencils to serve as erasers. Such patents have nothing to do with the advancement of science are the arts, which is the only justification authorized by the Consitution for patents and copyrights.

CoCo

My first computer was the CoCo 2 (a Color Computer, from Tandy) in 1984. I learned to program in Basic and in assembler on this machine, which I found fascinating and remember fondly. It is thanks to my CoCo if I am a programmer today.

I happen to still have my CoCo 2 at home as well as the CoCo 3 that followed it. They are unfortunately in their boxes at this time because of my chronic lack of free time and/or of room to install them, but from time to time, I enjoy playing with the CoCo 3 emulator that is available for the PC.

___
(February 11, 2006)

An experimental community-maintained site about the CoCo. It uses the same server software as Wikipedia.

MESS CoCo 3 emulation
(August 23, 2001)

MESS, of which a Linux version exists, is able to emulate a CoCo 3. One must have the right files that represent the machine's ROMs. I had to guess how to produce a ';' (with the numerid keypad '+' key) and a '+' (with the same key, but shifted). The joystick's button can be emulated by pressing the AltGr key (the one that produces the X11 "Mode_switch" keysym).

CoCo Game List
(July 5, 2001)

This site lists hundreds of video games for the CoCo.

The Rainbow's On-Line Store
(November 14, 1999)

The Rainbow was the main magazine for the CoCo. It was published by Falsoft, the company started by editor Lonnie C. Falk. This site sells back issues of this magazine that were still in the basement of the Falsoft building. One can see images of the covers of some issues and a bit of history associated with them.

WHILE for the CoCo 3 BASIC
(April 26, 1998)

In 1988 approximately, I added a WHILE command to the CoCo 3 BASIC interpreter. I told about that in the newsgroup bit.listserv.coco in a 1998 discussion about that BASIC interpreter's DLOAD command.

Miscellaneous

Hardware to give away
(January 8, 2008)

A list of old PC hardware that I want to get rid of. (I live in Montréal.)

Problem with the Viewsonic VP930b monitor
(June 6, 2006)

I had to bring back this monitor to the store because its main menu quickly became inaccessible.

Tenth Anniversary of Wired
(April 3, 2003)

This article compares the climate of 1993 to the similar climate of 2003. Hope appears when one remembers all the effervescence that followed the recession of the early nineties.

The origin of Spacewar
(December 9, 1998)

This article describes the creation of the legendary game Spacewar, in the sixties.

Folklore

I am in possession of a working 5.25" diskette drive (tested on August 29th, 2006). If you are desperate to extract files from such diskettes, I may be able to help you.

Octopuce (Bits and Bytes)
(March 4, 2007)

Octopuce was an educational television series about computers. It was the French version of Bits and Bytes. These series of twelve half-hour episodes were produced in 1983 and aired respectively by the Radio-Québec and TV Ontario educational channels. They taught computer science to the general public and even dared to teach programming.

NCSA Mosaic, the first graphical browser
(April 3, 2003)

This page continues to offer the source code for the oldest browser with a graphical interface, NCSA Mosaic. It is still possible de compiler this proprietary program under GNU/Linux today, by using the free library LessTif as a replacement for Motif. (I was able to create an RPM package that adds an entry to the GNOME menu.) Ironically, Mosaic is not able to correctly display the page that it automatically loads on start-up and ends up displaying lots of Javascript code...

Beyond the Tesseract
(October 28, 2002)

"A highly conceptual game in which you interact with abstract concepts and mathematical entities as if they were tangible." I reconstitued this .tar.gz archive from two shell archives and two patches that I found in old comp.sources.games posts from December 1988, thanks to Google Groups. If you compile this on a modern GNU/Linux system, the linker will rightly complain that the `gets' function is dangerous and should not be used...

SEA vs PKWare
(April 22, 2002)

The court decision where PKWare was forced to stop using the .arc format, created by SEA, followed by some comments on the affair.

Hacking

Q&A with Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600: The Hacker's Quarterly
(November 21, 1999)

In this CNN interview with "Emmanuel Goldstein," the editor of the hacker magazine 2600 and host of the radio program Off the Hook explains the true meaning of hacking and the distinction between it and criminal activity.

Should hackers spend years in prison?
(June 14, 1999)

An article in Salon that questions the appropriateness of requesting long sentences for people who have cracked the security of information systems.

Computers and the Internet continue to frighten people, but prosecuting hackers runs the danger of setting nasty precedents that will begin to snare regular people, not programmers.

Text-mode Quake
(November 12, 1998)

A sick pervert adapted Quake to have it display its "graphics" on a text screen.

2600 - The Hacker Quarterly
(November 28, 1997)

This magazine is a fascinating source of information on major issues concerning computers and communications. It promotes freedom of speech, curiosity and experimentation.

See for example The Secret Service Wall Of Shame, which gives namely in its More Info section a list of frequencies used by the United States Secret Service and codenames for people, places, and things...

But most of all, do not miss the opportuniy to see a secret service agent who picks his nose.

There are 2600 meetings in Montréal: see the official website.

The Internet

Flash is Evil
(December 4, 2000)

Flash is a proprietary language allowing the creation of unusable and irritating Web sites. This site described the fundamental problems posed by this language. One can also read hostile replies from unbelievably stupid and/or superficial Flash fans.

HTML Validation Service
(June 28, 2000)

This service checks HTML documents for conformance to W3C HTML and XHTML Recommendations and other HTML standards.

Correct Moronic Microsoft HTML
(March 25, 2000)

This page describes, in Unix manual page style, a Perl program available for downloading from this site which corrects numerous errors and incompatibilities in HTML generated by, or edited with, Microsoft applications. The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.

The Ecology of Computer Viruses
(April 7, 1999)

An article in Salon Magazine that points out that the organizations that were the most vulnerable to the recent Melissa virus were those that standardized on a software "monoculture" like Microsoft's. This article is interesting because few journalists in the media have mentioned that after all, viruses are possible because some systems and applications are simply ill-designed. The Great Worm of 1988 was due to bugs in some systems, while Melissa only takes advantage of the bad design of a few applications.

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
(September 27, 1997)

a group of Internet users that have had enough with spam have decided to form a coalition whose goal is to obtain legislation in the United States to ban junk email on the same grounds as junk faxing. The site has many sections and offers a mailing list.

Free Software

I think I have invented a slogan in French on March 18th, 1999: GNU vaincrons!

Freedom or Power?
(November 23, 2001)

This essay by Bradley M. Kuhn and Richard M. Stallman says that the choice of license for a program is not a freedom, but a power.

Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you. Power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than you.

Thus they conclude that the ethical way to exercise that power is to choose a free license, such as the GNU GPL.

What's Wrong With Content Protection
(January 22, 2001)

A very important text by John Gilmore, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the threat to free speech posed by the extension of copyrights.

The Right to Read
(March 22, 1998)

A work of fiction on where the copyright system could lead us if we let it out of control... I wrote a french translation which appears on gnu.org.

Brush With Greatness: Dennis Ritchie answers me
(November 29, 1997)

An article by Dennis M. Ritchie in response to a question that I asked in the newsgroup alt.folklore.computers about the attitude of AT&T towards the Unix versions created by the University of Berkeley.

GNU/Linux

MS paper touts Unix in Hotmail's Win2k switch
(November 22, 2002)

An interesting Register article for anyone who wonders if it's true that Unix is simpler to manage: An older MS internal whitepaper from August 2000 on switching Hotmail, which MS acquired in 1997, from front-end servers running FreeBSD and back-end database servers running Solaris to a whole farm running Win2K, reads like a veritable sales brochure for UNIX

Programming

IntelliWiki
(January 18, 2009)

A wiki on the Intellivision, a video game console from the early eighties. This site teaches how to program this console and how to run the programs in a emulator (jzIntv, of which I use the GNU/Linux version).

The Daily WTF
(August 5, 2005)

This site regularly presents examples of very moronic code, with comments from the readers.

Csh Programming Considered Harmful
(April 12, 2005)

The C shell, and even tcsh, are irreversibly handicapped. It's hopeless.

Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves
(December 12, 2003)

This article attempts to dispel many illusions about the software development process that some open source developers keep propagating. I particularly like the part that insists of the importance of providing precompiled packages to facilitate the installation of a program by a non-technical user.

Several projects neglect this aspect and tell their users to lobby their GNU/Linux distributor to have them produce those packages. But what if the distributor does not fulfill this demand? One cannot expect the user to go through the hassle of compiling the sources. This then means fewer users, less feedback and above all, fewer users who renounce proprietary software.

Verbiste: a French conjugation system
(May 30, 2003)

This GPL C++ library that I wrote can conjugate and deconjugate French verbs. It comes with two command-line utilities.

BoolStuff, a library for the Boolean Disjunctive Normal Form
(November 7, 2002)

BoolStuff is a small C++ library that I wrote and that supports a few operations on boolean expression binary trees, like parsing, and computing the Disjunctive Normal Form.

Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
(October 21, 2002)

This document explores methods for squeezing excess bytes out of simple programs. "If you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find herein the perfect antidote."

Sagasu - a GNOME tool to find strings in multiple files
(March 29, 2002)

Sagasu is a GNOME tool to find strings in multiple files. The user specifies the search directory and the set of files to be searched. Double-clicking on a search result launches a user command that can for example load the file in an editor at the appropriate line. The search can optionally ignore CVS directories. Sagasu is a Japanese word that means "to search."

Learning Standard C++ as a New Language
(March 16, 2002)

This article (PDF - 40k) from Bjarne Stroustrup shows how one can teach C++. It namely compares examples in C and in C++ to illustrate some Standard C++ library features that help to reduce the number of concepts that have to be taught from the start.

Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix
(October 22, 2001)

Dennis Ritchie explains some legendary comments and error messages, including You are not expected to understand this.

Maximum RPM: a book on building RPM packages
(January 4, 2001)

This book explains how to create binary and source RPMs. By following the given example, I was able to easily create a package from one of my libraries.

However, I use the command

    ./configure --prefix=/usr && make

instead of just make to ensure that the binary RPM would install its files in /usr/include and /usr/lib instead of /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib.

GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool
(January 4, 2001)

This books teaches the complex subject of automatic source code configuration, in the GNU manner. I tried a few times to learn autoconf and co. by hacking it, namely by reading the manual, but in vain.

It is only when I brought myself to read this book that I finally has access to the Revelation. I am quite satisfied to now know this tool suite. Now I can distribute my source code in a familiar form (the well-known ./configure, make, make install sequence).

The Rise of "Worse is Better"
(October 19, 2000)

This is an article by Richard Gabriel, a designer of Common Lisp and CLOS. It claims that striving for perfection may not always be the best approach:

I have intentionally caricatured the worse-is-better philosophy to convince you that it is obviously a bad philosophy and that the New Jersey approach is a bad approach.

However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.

Duff's device
(October 13, 2000)

The most dramatic use yet seen of fall through in C switches, invented by Tom Duff en 1983. He was trying to bum all the instructions he could out of an inner loop that copied data serially onto an output port.

A History of Unix
(July 26, 2000)

After three decades of use, the UNIX* computer operating system from Bell Labs is still regarded as one of the most powerful, versatile, and flexible operating systems (OS) in the computer world. Its popularity is due to many factors, including its ability to run a wide variety of machines, from micros to supercomputers, and its portability -- all of which led to its adoption by many manufacturers.

How To Write Unmaintainable Code
(December 22, 1999)

A guide to insure your job security by writing code that nobody else will want to maintain.

The Development of the C Language
(September 23, 1998)

An article by Dennis M. Ritchie on the history of C.

The dumbing-down of programming
(September 12, 1998)

An article by Ellen Ullman that tells how installing GNU/Linux on a PC that had heretofore been equipped with Windows made her discover the archeological marvels of PC history. She deplores that systems like Windows try too much to protect us from ourselves and even tend to use insulting childish language...

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