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Hello,
I found an interesting thread on Twitter explaining that when the Apple II early documentation was being written, they had to tell people to differentiate between how they type using typewriters and how they’ll type in the Apple II computer.
I don’t remember the typewriters I used missing the 0(zero) or 1(one) key, but I see how it was possible to use O(oh) and l(el) to replace 0 and 1 respectively. Or if you made a mistake typing -(dash) when you wanted to type = you could move your carriage back and put a _(underscore) under it :). I thought you might find it interesting.
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Hello,
Sorry for the delay this week with the newsletter, I got stuck in an airport for longer than I expected. So this week’s newsletter is going to be quick.
When I’m travelling, I always enjoy the time off in the airports. I enjoy visiting bookstores, getting some coffee and listening to podcasts. There are some podcasts that I enjoy for the storytelling and some for their content. Twenty thousand Hertz is the perfect example of storytelling and content. It’s a podcast about “The stories behind the world’s most recognisable and interesting sounds”. I’m not much of a graphics type of person, as you can tell I prefer to design beautiful command-line tools than beautiful GUI’s. But one thing I enjoy is sounds. For example, the sounds of different accents. Or the sounds on video games and even the sound when my computer boots up. Anyways, If you like to hear about the history of some of the sounds you know, you’ll probably enjoy the Twenty thousand hertz Podcast. Give it a go and let me know what you think.
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Hello,
Happy Thanksgiving, for the ones who celebrate it. It’s always important to be grateful for everything we have, so no matter if you don’t directly celebrate Thanksgiving. Maybe use it as an excuse and think of all the things that you have to be grateful for :).
Alright, in this week’s newsletter I want to share with you a podcast I’ve been enjoying a lot.
The name of the podcast is The History of Computing, you can add it to your favourite podcast player. I use Overcast, so here is the link to the latest episode.
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Hello,
Have you ever wondered why the home directory is mapped to ~? Or if you use vi, why use the letters H, J, K, and L to move?
These types of questions are the ones that keep me up at night. Not really :D, but I find them interesting.
I found answers to many of these questions in this article:
https://dave.cheney.net/2017/08/21/the-here-is-key
The author explains how the “Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal” influenced so much of our current computing. Check the keyboard for the terminal. See how most of the keys match some of the “conventions” we have today. It’s a fun read about computing history.
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Hello,
Are you excited for the new 16" MacBook Pro? For me, it’s much more than I would use. I’m happy with my 13" MBP, and I haven’t had any problems with the keyboard, so I’ll keep my current machine. But if I were to get one for free, I wouldn’t be mad at all.
Also, some people are excited about the return of the Esc key. It seems to be missed by many people. So much so that it even made it to the promotional video.
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Hello,
So glad that the weekend is here, time to relax. I found this post that you might find interesting. It is about the reason that 80x25 became the standard display.
There are many things we do out of habit and end up forgetting why we started doing them in the first place. One example in my case is that I try to always keep my commit messages in under 72 characters per line. I don’t claim to be 70 years old and got used to it by using IBM’s 3270. What happened is that I read this Tpope’s article on writing good git commit messages, where he explains the reason why 72 characters per line is the ideal. The relevant reason is this:
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Hello,
This year Unix turns 50! You can check the website thatBell Labs created for the commemoration. I’ve always found these stories fascinating. I can only imagine how cool it would be to be part of the team that built something as impactful as Unix. I’ve always wanted to be part of a team of “scientists” that changes the futures. I remember reading Nerds 2.0.1 and getting sad that those times have already passed, but also enjoying the storytelling.
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Hi,
How was your week? I hope it was a good one. It was a busy week for me. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to publish an article this week. But I made it.
I enjoy writing these articles. I wish I had more time to dedicate to research and writing, but I’m happy that I can dedicate at least a small amount of time every week.
Anyways, it’s the weekend, so it’s time to relax. I’m a fan of AudioBooks and podcasts. So on Saturdays, I take some time to get a coffee and listen to an interesting story. If you are a fan of audio content, here is one of my favourite podcasts:
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Hello,
The weekend is here, so before we go get some rest here is this week’s newsletter.
Did you see that Ken Thompson’s BSD Password was finally cracked? If you don’t know who he is, he was one of the creators of the UNIX operating system. Someone found an old(39 years old) /etc/passwd file containing some users and password from the source tree of BSD version 3. And they finally cracked the last password. The article is a fun read. I think you might enjoy it.
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Hello,
New OS version this week! I hope you had an easy upgrade to macOS(10.15) Catalina. I’m glad that everything went smoothly on my laptop. A couple of friends reported that their installation got stuck at the “Setting Up Your Mac” screen. The solution was to force restart and after everything completed as expected.
It’s crazy how far we’ve come. Many people complained about the upgrade being buggy, but I think upgrading now is smooth. I remember having to recompile everything after a kernel update on my Linux box, that’s when things got interesting. Different times.
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