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Some of this is rose-tinted nostalgia. The bit about "five nines" reliability... big expensive servers and workstations got there but computers the average schmo could afford never did. Frequent BSODs and system freezes were the norm. Now that we've moved on to proper multitasking OSes - which I admit are more complex and resource-intensive than their predecessors - crashes like that have become far rarer.

On the other hand, this is clearly gesturing at something real. Computers and network connections are so much faster than they used to be, and yet webpages feel like they load just as slowly as they did in the dial-up days. Oh but we have so much better ad-tech and telemetry now! Because that's what I go on the internet for, the ads. Sure you gotta pay the bills, but how much of those bills are just for maintaining the advertising bloat versus the actual content?

Well it's not like things were any better in the past. They were just a different kind of crummy.

I've dabbled in APL, and a couple of jobs ago I worked extensively in kdb/q. I found it to be an immensely powerful tool in its natural environment of time-series processing, and extraordinarily painful to use outside that domain. Typically I'd write the core logic in q with a small wrapper in Java or Python to do string formatting and other tasks that kdb falls down on.

Which is fine. Not every language needs to do everything. Horses for courses.

There is little chance of FSF changing the GPL as long as RMS continues to run it, given his monomaniacal, pathological obsession with software freedom at the expense of literally everything else, including basic human decency.

But he's not going to live forever (thank god) and his successors might try to use GPL4 as a political wedge within the FOSS community. Put in restrictions on project governance and codes of conduct, make a violation unrelated to the software itself terminate the license, something like that. "Ethical source" didn't get anywhere but something backed with the heft of FSF might. (Given how RMS has stacked FSF with loyalists, it's probably more likely that they'd do something to punish "ethical source" than enshrine it. Both are equally corrosive in my view.)

Or it might make FSF even less relevant. We'll see.

Only slightly. System V/386 was 1987, first release of GAS was 1989 (and GCC got 386 support in 1988)

Replying to my own comment since I was curious - it was certainly Microsoft MASM, and cc was the Microsoft C Compiler as well. [1] So probably Intel syntax.

There was also something called "SCO UNIX" which was apparently more of a straight adaptation of AT&T System V and might have used a pcc compiler and AT&T syntax. It's hard to figure out what happened when because there are a zillion different versions of Xenix/SCO Unix/OpenServer out there.

[1] https://www.scosales.com/ta/kb/100187.html

I think there's a bit more to the story. It was before my time, but as I understand it the most widely used Unix for the 8086 was XENIX (initially a Microsoft product, later sold to SCO), which used Intel-syntax MASM as its assembler.

XENIX for 386 was based on AT&T System V/386, which introduced the AT&T syntax to 32-bit x86. I've found some references to 32-bit XENIX still using an assembler called "masm" but I don't know if it was still based on Microsoft's MASM or just called that for compatibility, or whether it was AT&T or Intel syntax. Also by that point compilers and assemblers weren't included in the base OS anymore, but a "development kit" sold separately.

The Minix compiler and assembler also used Intel syntax.

Ghostscript used to have the most recent version under a non-commercial license (AFPL) and older versions relicensed to GPL, before they switched to AGPL only.

I never saw what the Bell Labs folks had against Berkeley sockets, aside from them being from Berkeley and not Bell Labs. It's a crufty interface either way, because you can't shove all the complexity under the rug.

They're optimizing for as few syscalls as possible, I suppose, but in Plan 9 you still create pipes with pipe(), not by writing to a special file. And if you already have pipe(), why not socket()?

The lack of a business model is why any attempt to revive Usenet or run a new federated protocol like Mastodon is probably not going to get anywhere. Somebody's got to pay for it, and the quality of discussion isn't nearly good enough to attract paying customers. (The binaries may be, but isn't it silly to pay for piracy?) Ad-supported services have bad incentives all around, but nobody's ever come up with an alternative way to pay for it, aside from being small enough that voluntary donations will do.

Doctorow is gesturing at something significant, but he's still stuck in the '90s era copyright wars. I agree that the DMCA is awful, but it's irrelevant to the problem.

Today's tech corps don't need to sic the cops on you if you use their products outside their prescribed boundaries. They can just ban you, and that's punishment enough. We're already hearing Kafkaesque stories of people accidentally tripping automated abuse-detection and getting locked out of their GooFaceTwit accounts with no recourse. If you're considering actually violating the TOS... well who'd want to risk that? Better to just stay in line like a good little drone.

> Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for petrol and diesel fuels, leading to a complete phase-out possibly as early as 2040. As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is goin to have impacts far beyond the obvious.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels. Solar and wind have increased in recent years but still have a very long way to go. We may just be relocating the engines rather than decarbonizing.

(See also, New York City banning gas lines to new construction, requiring the use of electricity for heating and cooking, just after the metro area's sole nuclear plant was decommissioned and new gas plants were built to replace it... so the ban is not going to reduce the amount of gas burned at all, is it?)

They still make playing cards, though.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/others/playing_cards/index.html

Imagine if we were stuck in a world with a large bloc of users running MSIE6 regularly accessed web servers running 40-bit SSL2. Neither clients nor servers ever bother updating, because it still works for them.

That's essentially where every other protocol is. HTTP gets all the energy, active development, updates regularly rolled out. Meanwhile if you tried to make, say, FTP more rational by transmitting data over the control connection, nobody would be able to use it since all the servers are still running 25 year old wuftpd with the minimal patches to not get pwned and they have no interest in updating (if they even remember the servers exist).

Personally I think we've lost something valuable when only one protocol exists, but I'm one of those Luddites who still reads email with Thunderbird so what do I know.

I was thinking preempted by Section 230 is the easier call (and Volokh agrees, though he sees an opening that I don't).

The exemption would also apply to Comcast, as owner of Universal Studios. It'd be funny to watch Facebook and Twitter get into a bidding war for SeaWorld... or, alternatively, buy their own patches of swampland and build some roller-coasters.

Not that this has any chance of being upheld, of course.

They'd need to do something about the hour-long stop at the border for CBP and its Canadian equivalent to go through the train checking everyone's passports. Decades ago I ran into it on the now-defunct Chicago-Toronto line and I'm pretty sure it's why they don't run those trains anymore. The New York-Toronto and New York-Montreal trains still do it.

Seattle-Vancouver avoids it by not making any stops between Vancouver and the border, so the immigration checks take place at the station. This might be feasible for Montreal, probably not for Toronto, and a train that runs from Buffalo to Detroit without stopping in Canada at all seems implausible.

The logo for Disney Animation before their movies is a clip of a few seconds of Steamboat Willie. I expect them to lean even more heavily on trademark protection once the copyright expires.

Besides, it's not like the copyright on the old theatrical shorts is that valuable. The real interesting stuff will be in the 2030s when the feature-length films start entering the public domain...of course by that point you probably won't be able to find any non-DRM video, if current trends continue.

The Gershwin estate was the other big force lobbying for the 1998 copyright extension, besides Disney of course.

I guess United Airlines doesn't have to pay royalties for its theme song anymore.

Wilbur Ross is even less trustworthy than ICANN. Which is saying something.

In 1998 Jon Postel briefly "hijacked" the DNS root zone. Formal control over DNS had always belonged to the US government, but Postel commanded such universal respect from the internet community that they were willing to follow him, as head of IANA, over the government contractor that "officially" ran the root at the time.

This of course is why ICANN was created, to bring governance of the Internet closer to the community that developed and maintained it. But now ICANN has become just as remote and unaccountable as the bureaucrats and contractors it replaced. And Postel is long gone, and the Internet community has grown so big and fragmented that no one person will ever have anywhere near the towering position he once did.

So now what do we do?

In the last year or so I've grown increasingly cynical about "genius." Maybe it's all bus tickets. (I know my obsessions certainly are.)

Great people are almost never good people and I'd rather be good than great.

This was all well before my time, but I find it fascinating.

One thing I've noticed in going over the early Unix versions is that the Bell Labs people didn't care for VT100s at all and Research Unix has practically no support for video terminals. They probably didn't jump straight from the Teletype to the Blit, but their software sure did. On the other hand, BSD took full advantage of the ADM-3A from day one, and termcap/curses expanded to support each of the VT series as they were released.

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history has the details... there's some Gosling code (notably display.c with the skull-and-bones warning) in Emacs 13, but none that I can find in 15 and later.

To this day, the Configure script for Perl still outputs "Congratulations. You aren't running Eunice."

https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/Configure#L4614

You know the term "opinionated software"? IMAP is an opinionated protocol, designed for clients and servers that work exactly the same way that Mark Crispin's PINE and UW-IMAPd did. Disagree with Crispin about anything, and the protocol will fight you every step of the way.

Mind you, I think PINE may have been the greatest email program ever written, but Crispin was not the easiest person to get along with.

Certainly bizarre. Among other things, almost none of the archived distros can read the RAR format.

It's weird, come to think of it, that RAR has existed for a quarter of a century, and yet the format has never been documented or reverse-engineered and no FOSS implementations exist. The only way to make a RAR file is the official program, which is binary-only shareware; there is public source code for extracting RARs but under a license that explicitly forbids using it to reverse-engineer the format.

But I guess the overlap between people who care about all that and people interested in the kind of stuff RAR is used for is next to minimal.

The intent of Amtrak was to take the burden of passenger rail off the private railroads, lose money for a few years, and then quietly shut down. It's long been in a political gray area, just popular enough that the government wouldn't dare close it, but not popular enough to be funded and managed like "real" modes of transportation. So it's stuck in the '70s and probably always will be.

Big if true, but I don't know whether to trust these figures. The Rail Passengers Association has accused Amtrak of cooking its books - https://www.railpassengers.org/happening-now/news/releases/a... - but of course the RPA isn't an unbiased source either.

It used to be that every ISP ran a Usenet server. The reason why they stopped is a crackdown on illegal content (piracy and obscenity) on binary groups. The reason why almost nobody complained is that text groups were already in terminal decline.

Mutually reinforcing cycles that led to the current state of Usenet as a seedy backwater where it was once an essential part of the Internet (and the UUCP network before it).

I knew that the decentralized structure of Usenet was born from necessity, but I didn't realize how hard it was just to get a modem back then.

Can decentralized services work on the modern Internet? Even setting aside how spam and illegal content destroyed Usenet as a discussion medium, in its late stages it became a playground for kooks and trolls at the expense of legitimate posting. Killfiles didn't work as the bad actors could easily change names and email addresses; get them thrown off one server and they'd just sign up on another one. The only way to ban someone from a newsgroup and make it stick is with a court order - and that happened at least once.

Another post from the same blog details why the troll problem was technologically impossible to solve: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2018-02/2018-02-23.htm...