Hacker News Reader

Comment by jle17 | Hacker News Reader

According to the jargon file, ITS called daemons dragons and SAIL (whatever this is ?) called them phantoms. Add to that zombie processes on Unix and user rights angels from FreeBSD's capsicum and the fact that processes come from executable files in ELF format and have debug infos in DWARF and it is quite the fantasy menagerie.

I suggest Kobold for whatever kind of process we need to name next.

View on HN

Read a few articles and even novels from the 80s and poeple constantly refer very good programmers as "wizards". Also the sub culture of DND sticks hard. I guess most likely the reason was computer programming back in 80s was mostly low level considering one had to use assembly/C/Pascal for serious PC programming.

“Do you want to play a game?”

Text based games on main frames.

The influence could be the parallel time lines of the rise of swords and sorcery and computing in the 1970s and 80s.

And what makes a good hostname anyway? Obscure (not to be confused) unique, memorable?

- Adventure

- Dungeon/Zork

- Rogue/Hack/Nethack

I wonder why no one develops a graphics library for mainframe and makes hobby games out of it.

And of course: the Scary Devil Monastery.

"This is not a rabble of mindless interfaces. These are uruk-hai. Their scans are deep, and their firewalls broad."

SAIL was the Stanford AI Lab. Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy founded the MIT AI lab; John was recruited by Stanford and started a lab there. It was in the lovely DC Powers building in the foothills -- despite what you would think "DC Powers" was actually someone's name!

It also had a PDP-10 and a TV system but of course it's own implementation of both the TV hardware and the PDP-10 O/S (WAITS)

I can't find a picture of the building unfortunately -- it was really cool.

Are these some pictures You were looking for?

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/AIlab/

Search the directory for DCPowers.

I wasn't looking for a specific photo, but yes, those are a good find

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab

Older than Stanford Computer Science department

We also have GNOME and ORCs [0], and there’s GobLin [1].

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/728339/

[1] https://distro.misiones.gob.ar/goblin/bienvenida/en-index.ht...

> processes come from executable files in ELF format and have debug infos in DWARF and it is quite the fantasy menagerie

We don’t call new processes spawn for nothing!

> SAIL (whatever this is ?)

Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Wrong: it's the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (founded 1962 by John McCarthy -- who co-authored the document that first defined AI as a field, invented LISP, time sharing, and garbage collection, heavily influenced the design of ALGOL, and so on: one of the pioneers of computer science):

https://ai.stanford.edu/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scient...

LISP even has its own song.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.en.html

Heh. I have a recording of that by Kathy Mar which is somewhat distinguished as a filk song by being sung by someone who actually sings well.

Neat

Filk- like folk, but for IT people.

Nope, the term came out of SF fandom decades ago.

Interesting, only in the anecdotal sense, that in today's world of incessant "AI" hype, a top commenter on HN would not have encountered the SAIL acronym.

Maybe Stanford is not as important as it thinks.

I was at Stanford for nearly 10 years. Not formally in CS or AI, granted, but SAIL doesn't ring a bell for me. Maybe it's just not that well known.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com