2 Nov
2022
2 Nov
'22
2:36 a.m.
I’m re-reading Brian Kernighan’s book on Early Unix (‘Unix: A History & Memoir’)
and he mentions the (on disk) documentation that came with Unix - something that made it
stand out, even for some decades.
Doug McIlroy has commented on v2-v3 (1972-73?) being an extremely productive year for Ken
& Dennis.
But as well, they wrote papers and man pages, probably more.
I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of the CSRC - doesn’t
anyone know?
There’s at least one Internet meme that highly productive coders necessarily have good
keyboard skills,
which leads to also producing documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as
often happens commercially.
Underlying this is something I once caught as a random comment:
The commonality of skills between Writing & Coding.
Does anyone has any good refs for this crossover?
Is it a real effect or a biased view.
That great programmers are also “good writers”:
takes time & focus, clarity of vision, deliberate intent and many revisions,
chopping away the cruft that’s isn’t “the thing” and “polishing”, not rushing it out the
door.
Ken is famous for his brevity and succinct statements.
Not sure if that’s a personal preference, a mastered skill or “economy in everything”.
steve j
=========
A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971-1986
M.D. McIlroy
<https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf>
<https://archive.org/details/a_research_unix_reader/page/n13/mode/2up>
pg 10
3.4. Languages
CC (v2 page 52)
V2 saw a burst of languages:
a new TMG,
a B that worked in both core-resident and software-paged versions,
the completion of Fortran IV (Thompson and Ritchie), and
Ritchie's first C, conceived as B with data types.
In that furiously productive year Thompson and Ritchie together
wrote and debugged about
100,000 lines of production code.
=========
Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
<http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html>
It's just simple arithmetic. If you spend more time hammering out code, then in
order to keep up, you need to spend less time doing something else.
But when it comes to programming, there are only so many things you can sacrifice!
You can cut down on your documentation.
You can cut down on commenting your code.
You can cut down on email conversations and
participation in online discussions, preferring group discussions and hallway
conversations.
And... well, that's about it.
So guess what non-touch-typists sacrifice?
All of it, man.
They sacrifice all of it.
Touch typists can spot an illtyperate programmer from a mile away.
They don't even have to be in the same room.
For starters, non-typists are almost invisible.
They don't leave a footprint in our online community.
=========
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
2 Nov
2 Nov
6:53 a.m.
On 2 Nov 2022 13:36 +1100, from sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au (steve jenkin):
There’s at least one Internet meme that highly
productive coders
necessarily have good keyboard skills, which leads to also producing
documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as often
happens commercially.
I wouldn't be so sure that this necessarily follows. Good keyboard
skills definitely help with the mechanics of typing code as well as
text, I'll certainly grant that; but someone can be a good typist yet
write complete gibberish, or be a poor/slow typist and _by necessity_
need to consider each word that they use because typing an extra
sentence takes them so long. If it takes you ten seconds to type out a
normal sentence, revising becomes less of an issue than if typing out
the same sentence takes a minute or a minute and a half.
Also, certainly in my case and I doubt that I'm alone, a lot of my
time "coding" isn't spent doing the mechanics of "writing code",
but
rather considering possible solutions to a problem, and what the
consequences would be of different choices. That part of the software
development process is essentially unaffected by how good one is as a
typist, and I expect that the effect would be even more pronounced for
someone using something like an ASR-33 and edlin, than a modern
computer and visual editor. Again, the longer it takes to revise
something, the more it makes sense to get it right on the first
attempt, even if that means some preparatory work up-front.
Writing documentation is probably more an issue of mindset and being
allowed the time, than it is a question of how good one is as a
typist.
--
🪶 Michael Kjörling 🏡 https://michael.kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
7:11 a.m.
Neither ken nor dmr were impressive typists. In fact few programmers were
then, at least of my acquaintance.
In the 1970s Bell Labs created the Getset - think of it as an early wired
smartphone, or a Minitel, with a little screen and keyboard. It cost quite
a bit but was a cool gadget so the executives all got one. But, in
fascinating contrast to the Blackberry a generation later, no one would
touch it - literally - because it had a keyboard, and keyboards were for
(female) secretaries, not (male) executives. The product, although well
ahead of its time, was a complete failure due to the cultural bias then.
There may be a good sociology paper in there somewhere.
I'm not saying K&D shared this blinkered view, not at all, just that typing
skills were not de facto back then. Some of the folks were even two-finger
jabbers. I was a little younger and a faster typist than most of the
others, and I am not a good typist by any modern standard.
bwk was one who could smash out the text faster than many. His having
learned on a teletype, the keyboard would resound with the impact of his
forceful keystrokes.
-rob
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 5:53 PM Michael Kjörling <e5655f30a07f(a)ewoof.net>
wrote:
On 2 Nov 2022 13:36 +1100, from
sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au (steve jenkin):
There’s at least one Internet meme that highly
productive coders
necessarily have good keyboard skills, which leads to also producing
documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as often
happens commercially.
I wouldn't be so sure that this necessarily follows. Good keyboard
skills definitely help with the mechanics of typing code as well as
text, I'll certainly grant that; but someone can be a good typist yet
write complete gibberish, or be a poor/slow typist and _by necessity_
need to consider each word that they use because typing an extra
sentence takes them so long. If it takes you ten seconds to type out a
normal sentence, revising becomes less of an issue than if typing out
the same sentence takes a minute or a minute and a half.
Also, certainly in my case and I doubt that I'm alone, a lot of my
time "coding" isn't spent doing the mechanics of "writing code",
but
rather considering possible solutions to a problem, and what the
consequences would be of different choices. That part of the software
development process is essentially unaffected by how good one is as a
typist, and I expect that the effect would be even more pronounced for
someone using something like an ASR-33 and edlin, than a modern
computer and visual editor. Again, the longer it takes to revise
something, the more it makes sense to get it right on the first
attempt, even if that means some preparatory work up-front.
Writing documentation is probably more an issue of mindset and being
allowed the time, than it is a question of how good one is as a
typist.
--
🪶 Michael Kjörling 🏡 https://michael.kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
1:28 p.m.
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 3:13 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote
bwk was one who could smash out the text faster than
many. His having
learned on a teletype, the keyboard would resound with the impact of his
forceful keystrokes.
Funny, I remember the first time I got to use something other than an ASR33
or an ASR28 sometime time in the early 1970s I think. IIRC It was a Tek
4010, but the memory at the time of being amazed that I did not need so
much energy to push the keys and how quiet it was. Before then I had
equated computing with the feel, sounds, and machine oil smells of Teletype
products. That said, when the VT52 came out in the mid-70s the DEC keyboard
on it was far from the feel of the IBM Selectric III - which was considered
the 'touch typist standard'
ᐧ
3 Nov
3 Nov
9:51 p.m.
On 2022-11-02 03:11, Rob Pike wrote:
Neither ken nor dmr were impressive typists. In fact
few programmers
were then, at least of my acquaintance.
In the 1970s Bell Labs created the Getset - think of it as an early
wired smartphone, or a Minitel, with a little screen and keyboard. It
cost quite a bit but was a cool gadget so the executives all got one.
But, in fascinating contrast to the Blackberry a generation later, no
one would touch it - literally - because it had a keyboard, and
keyboards were for (female) secretaries, not (male) executives. The
product, although well ahead of its time, was a complete failure due
to the cultural bias then.
There may be a good sociology paper in there somewhere.
I remember the dep't administrators having colour terminals connected to
the mainframe, and all they did was look up the occasional telephone
number, whilst the "secretaries" (as they were called then) being given
b&w terminals for work.
I'm not saying K&D shared this blinkered
view, not at all, just that
typing skills were not de facto back then. Some of the folks were even
two-finger jabbers. I was a little younger and a faster typist than
most of the others, and I am not a good typist by any modern standard.
bwk was one who could smash out the text faster than many. His having
learned on a teletype, the keyboard would resound with the impact of
his forceful keystrokes.
I learnt in high school on a manual typewriter so I can appreciate
that. (Learning on a manual really builds up the muscles on one's
little fingers. #6-)
N.
-rob
[...]
5 Aug
5 Aug
11:53 p.m.
I took typing in Summer School. My parents bought me a typewriter with
mathematical symbols on it, which was almost worthless, and I had to
improvise to get some of the standard characters (for example, the
semicolon was comma/backspace/colon). By the time I was talking to
computers ( Model 33 tty) I was happy that I couldn't type faster
because it was impossible on that thing.
Steve
---
On 2022-11-02 00:11, Rob Pike wrote:
Neither ken nor dmr were impressive typists. In fact
few programmers were then, at least of my acquaintance.
In the 1970s Bell Labs created the Getset - think of it as an early wired smartphone, or
a Minitel, with a little screen and keyboard. It cost quite a bit but was a cool gadget so
the executives all got one. But, in fascinating contrast to the Blackberry a generation
later, no one would touch it - literally - because it had a keyboard, and keyboards were
for (female) secretaries, not (male) executives. The product, although well ahead of its
time, was a complete failure due to the cultural bias then.
There may be a good sociology paper in there somewhere.
I'm not saying K&D shared this blinkered view, not at all, just that typing
skills were not de facto back then. Some of the folks were even two-finger jabbers. I was
a little younger and a faster typist than most of the others, and I am not a good typist
by any modern standard.
bwk was one who could smash out the text faster than many. His having learned on a
teletype, the keyboard would resound with the impact of his forceful keystrokes.
-rob
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 5:53 PM Michael Kjörling <e5655f30a07f(a)ewoof.net> wrote:
> On 2 Nov 2022 13:36 +1100, from sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au (steve jenkin):
>> There's at least one Internet meme that highly productive coders
>> necessarily have good keyboard skills, which leads to also producing
>> documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as often
>> happens commercially.
>
> I wouldn't be so sure that this necessarily follows. Good keyboard
> skills definitely help with the mechanics of typing code as well as
> text, I'll certainly grant that; but someone can be a good typist yet
> write complete gibberish, or be a poor/slow typist and _by necessity_
> need to consider each word that they use because typing an extra
> sentence takes them so long. If it takes you ten seconds to type out a
> normal sentence, revising becomes less of an issue than if typing out
> the same sentence takes a minute or a minute and a half.
>
> Also, certainly in my case and I doubt that I'm alone, a lot of my
> time "coding" isn't spent doing the mechanics of "writing
code", but
> rather considering possible solutions to a problem, and what the
> consequences would be of different choices. That part of the software
> development process is essentially unaffected by how good one is as a
> typist, and I expect that the effect would be even more pronounced for
> someone using something like an ASR-33 and edlin, than a modern
> computer and visual editor. Again, the longer it takes to revise
> something, the more it makes sense to get it right on the first
> attempt, even if that means some preparatory work up-front.
>
> Writing documentation is probably more an issue of mindset and being
> allowed the time, than it is a question of how good one is as a
> typist.
>
> --
> 🪶 Michael Kjörling 🏡 https://michael.kjorling.se
> "Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?"
6 Aug
6 Aug
12:22 a.m.
The thing I like is VI because it is almost universal. Windows, Linux, BSD
and Unix.
In a pinch I use "ed".
Sad to hear today that its creator has passed away.
--Ken
On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 7:53 PM <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
I took typing in Summer School. My parents bought me
a typewriter with
mathematical symbols on it, which was almost worthless, and I had to
improvise to get some of the standard characters (for example, the
semicolon was comma/backspace/colon). By the time I was talking to
computers ( Model 33 tty) I was happy that I couldn't type faster because
it was impossible on that thing.
Steve
---
On 2022-11-02 00:11, Rob Pike wrote:
Neither ken nor dmr were impressive typists. In fact few programmers were
then, at least of my acquaintance.
In the 1970s Bell Labs created the Getset - think of it as an early wired
smartphone, or a Minitel, with a little screen and keyboard. It cost quite
a bit but was a cool gadget so the executives all got one. But, in
fascinating contrast to the Blackberry a generation later, no one would
touch it - literally - because it had a keyboard, and keyboards were for
(female) secretaries, not (male) executives. The product, although well
ahead of its time, was a complete failure due to the cultural bias then.
There may be a good sociology paper in there somewhere.
I'm not saying K&D shared this blinkered view, not at all, just that
typing skills were not de facto back then. Some of the folks were even
two-finger jabbers. I was a little younger and a faster typist than most of
the others, and I am not a good typist by any modern standard.
bwk was one who could smash out the text faster than many. His having
learned on a teletype, the keyboard would resound with the impact of his
forceful keystrokes.
-rob
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 5:53 PM Michael Kjörling <e5655f30a07f(a)ewoof.net>
wrote:
On 2 Nov 2022 13:36 +1100, from sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au (steve jenkin):
--
End of line
JOB TERMINATED
There's at least one Internet meme that
highly productive coders
necessarily have good keyboard skills, which leads to also producing
documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as often
happens commercially.
I wouldn't be so sure that this necessarily follows. Good keyboard
skills definitely help with the mechanics of typing code as well as
text, I'll certainly grant that; but someone can be a good typist yet
write complete gibberish, or be a poor/slow typist and _by necessity_
need to consider each word that they use because typing an extra
sentence takes them so long. If it takes you ten seconds to type out a
normal sentence, revising becomes less of an issue than if typing out
the same sentence takes a minute or a minute and a half.
Also, certainly in my case and I doubt that I'm alone, a lot of my
time "coding" isn't spent doing the mechanics of "writing code",
but
rather considering possible solutions to a problem, and what the
consequences would be of different choices. That part of the software
development process is essentially unaffected by how good one is as a
typist, and I expect that the effect would be even more pronounced for
someone using something like an ASR-33 and edlin, than a modern
computer and visual editor. Again, the longer it takes to revise
something, the more it makes sense to get it right on the first
attempt, even if that means some preparatory work up-front.
Writing documentation is probably more an issue of mindset and being
allowed the time, than it is a question of how good one is as a
typist.
--
🪶 Michael Kjörling 🏡 https://michael.kjorling.se
"Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?"
12:43 a.m.
Just in case there is confusion, vi was Bill Joy, Bostic did nvi (which was
open source and bug for bug compat), Bram did vim, which I think was a
clean room version of vi with a huge bunch of added goodness.
On Sat, Aug 05, 2023 at 08:22:17PM -0400, KenUnix wrote:
The thing I like is VI because it is almost universal.
Windows, Linux, BSD
and Unix.
In a pinch I use "ed".
Sad to hear today that its creator has passed away.
--Ken
On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 7:53???PM <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
I took typing in Summer School. My parents
bought me a typewriter with
mathematical symbols on it, which was almost worthless, and I had to
improvise to get some of the standard characters (for example, the
semicolon was comma/backspace/colon). By the time I was talking to
computers ( Model 33 tty) I was happy that I couldn't type faster because
it was impossible on that thing.
Steve
---
On 2022-11-02 00:11, Rob Pike wrote:
Neither ken nor dmr were impressive typists. In fact few programmers were
then, at least of my acquaintance.
In the 1970s Bell Labs created the Getset - think of it as an early wired
smartphone, or a Minitel, with a little screen and keyboard. It cost quite
a bit but was a cool gadget so the executives all got one. But, in
fascinating contrast to the Blackberry a generation later, no one would
touch it - literally - because it had a keyboard, and keyboards were for
(female) secretaries, not (male) executives. The product, although well
ahead of its time, was a complete failure due to the cultural bias then.
There may be a good sociology paper in there somewhere.
I'm not saying K&D shared this blinkered view, not at all, just that
typing skills were not de facto back then. Some of the folks were even
two-finger jabbers. I was a little younger and a faster typist than most of
the others, and I am not a good typist by any modern standard.
bwk was one who could smash out the text faster than many. His having
learned on a teletype, the keyboard would resound with the impact of his
forceful keystrokes.
-rob
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 5:53 PM Michael Kj??rling <e5655f30a07f(a)ewoof.net>
wrote:
On 2 Nov 2022 13:36 +1100, from sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au (steve jenkin):
--
End of line
JOB TERMINATED There's at least one Internet meme that
highly productive coders
necessarily have good keyboard skills, which leads to also producing
documentation or, at least, not avoiding it entirely, as often
happens commercially.
I wouldn't be so sure that this necessarily follows. Good keyboard
skills definitely help with the mechanics of typing code as well as
text, I'll certainly grant that; but someone can be a good typist yet
write complete gibberish, or be a poor/slow typist and _by necessity_
need to consider each word that they use because typing an extra
sentence takes them so long. If it takes you ten seconds to type out a
normal sentence, revising becomes less of an issue than if typing out
the same sentence takes a minute or a minute and a half.
Also, certainly in my case and I doubt that I'm alone, a lot of my
time "coding" isn't spent doing the mechanics of "writing code",
but
rather considering possible solutions to a problem, and what the
consequences would be of different choices. That part of the software
development process is essentially unaffected by how good one is as a
typist, and I expect that the effect would be even more pronounced for
someone using something like an ASR-33 and edlin, than a modern
computer and visual editor. Again, the longer it takes to revise
something, the more it makes sense to get it right on the first
attempt, even if that means some preparatory work up-front.
Writing documentation is probably more an issue of mindset and being
allowed the time, than it is a question of how good one is as a
typist.
--
???? Michael Kj??rling ???? https://michael.kjorling.se
"Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?"
2:51 p.m.
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> writes:
Just in case there is confusion, vi was Bill Joy,
Bostic did nvi (which was
open source and bug for bug compat), Bram did vim, which I think was a
clean room version of vi with a huge bunch of added goodness.
Vim was based on Stevie, an Atari ST vi clone he ported to the Amiga 2000.
--
Leah Neukirchen <leah(a)vuxu.org> https://leahneukirchen.org/
3:01 p.m.
On Sun, Aug 06, 2023 at 04:51:04PM +0200, Leah Neukirchen wrote:
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> writes:
I remember Stevie. In my early days at Sun, on 4MB machines, I was
working on log files about the size of memory so the machine swapped like
crazy just to take a look. I looked at Stevie but then settled on xvi.
I changed the libc string functions to treat \n as well as \0 as a
string terminator, changed how xvi read in a file to use mmap() instead.
It wasn't really that hard but then I had a vi clone that could work on
files twice as large with no swapping.
The read only path was super easy to do, I made the write path work
as well, that took a little tinkering because you couldn't modify the
lines in place (think changing case on a line which xvi was happy to
do in place but I couldn't because I'd be changing the file data which
means :q! wouldn't do what you wanted).
It's of little interest now but at the time, it was a huge win for me,
I was working on performance and looking at log files was a big part
of that. Most of us remember what it was like to work on a working set
that was bigger than memory, it sucked.
Just in case there is confusion, vi was Bill Joy,
Bostic did nvi (which was
open source and bug for bug compat), Bram did vim, which I think was a
clean room version of vi with a huge bunch of added goodness.
Vim was based on Stevie, an Atari ST vi clone he ported to the Amiga 2000.
4:31 p.m.
On Sun, Aug 6, 2023 at 10:51 AM Leah Neukirchen <leah(a)vuxu.org> wrote:
Vim was based on Stevie, an Atari ST vi clone he
ported to the Amiga 2000.
Thank you. I also remember stevie and that stevie beget vim make so much
sense. It was one of the clones I ran back in the day.
The point is that there were (are) a number of vi clones. Which is why I
started to switch to it. It ran on everything from small 8-bit systems on
up. Particularly on the micros, they all had something akin to what
Microsoft called edlin, often just called edit. If you knew UNIX ed(1) or
any other editor from the old GED family from the 1960s, chances were you
could make it do something -- but it was PITA as each was a bit different
So copies of the editors from the larger [often DEC based systems] started
to appear on the smaller and smaller machines.
And vi seemed to be a pretty popular as a starting point[I always suspect
Webb Miller's book had something to do with that since 's' was so small
and
using it to add missing vi features was not terrible]. That said, there
was an IBM PC/386 "MS-DOS" version of vi that required ANSI.SYS that was on
the market for about $50-$100. It was 'bug for bug' compatible with Joy's
version. I always suspected that unlike Keith, they just took the Vax
code, stripped out termcap so it did not need an external terminal
database, hard coded it for ANSI.SYS, then ran it through the PHARLAP C/386
subsystem. Unlike any of the other 'clones' until nvi -- it was the only
one that had some of the same wonkiness.
As I understand it from him, Keith did nvi(1) because Joy's original work
was based on the v6 ed(1). As part of Keith's effort to try to remove any
core code in the BSD releases that had any AT&T source taint, it was just
easier to start over. The Berkeley Shell [in 1BSD] beget the C Shell, was
derived from Ken's sh in v5 and v6. I think Keith/Kirk et al felt
that any of Ken's original code had long been removed - whereas ex(1) (vi
is the actually the VIsual command for ex) probably had a lot of core ed(1).
Clem
ᐧ
6:20 p.m.
On 8/6/2023 9:31 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
And vi seemed to be a pretty popular as a starting
point[I always
suspect Webb Miller's book had something to do with that since 's'
was so small and using it to add missing vi features was not
terrible].
Every time this book is mentioned on TUHS I announce that I have
a copy of it for sale. Contact me off-list if you're interested.
Jon
7 Aug
7 Aug
4:56 a.m.
Webb Miller's book is also available through Inter-Library Loan, which is
how I got my hands on it and made my own copy through the decidedly
low-tech solution of "abusing the office copier when everyone else had gone
home."
On Sun, Aug 6, 2023 at 11:20 AM Jon Forrest <nobozo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 8/6/2023 9:31 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
And vi seemed to be a pretty popular as a
starting point[I always
suspect Webb Miller's book had something to do with that since 's'
was so small and using it to add missing vi features was not
terrible].
Every time this book is mentioned on TUHS I announce that I have
a copy of it for sale. Contact me off-list if you're interested.
Jon
6 Aug
6 Aug
8:37 a.m.
When my mother asked my fifth grade teacher what she should do about my
bad handwriting, she was told to get me a typewriter.
I spent one summer school session taking typing. Little did we know
thet in a few years, being able to type 60 WPM would be very valuable to
my career.
Sometimes my employees were pretty impressed when we couldn’t get data
moved any other way that I’d sit down with the printout and just retype
it.
2 Nov
2 Nov
12:13 p.m.
steve jenkin wrote in
<E212D205-B786-4441-A95B-B5F5546B5C6C(a)canb.auug.org.au>au>:
...
|I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of \
|the CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
What i personally find more fascinating (given that -- in the
right condition -- i type pretty fast even in total darkness but
darkest possible monitor brightness) is the multitaskability some
show, in respect to combination of mouse and keyboard (or even
dual-mouse if i remember a message of Rob Pike right). I once
watched a video on the google tube of Russ Cox dancing acme doing
go testing, could be it is [1]. When he starts to actually work
a bit (late on iirc), that is thrilling, i could never select /
paste (kill snarf yank what do i know) that fast.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
12:24 p.m.
Steffen Nurpmeso wrote in
<20221102121352.MhcLw%steffen(a)sdaoden.eu>eu>:
|steve jenkin wrote in
| <E212D205-B786-4441-A95B-B5F5546B5C6C(a)canb.auug.org.au>au>:
| ...
||I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of \
||the CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
|
|What i personally find more fascinating (given that -- in the
|right condition -- i type pretty fast even in total darkness but
|darkest possible monitor brightness) is the multitaskability some
|show, in respect to combination of mouse and keyboard (or even
|dual-mouse if i remember a message of Rob Pike right). I once
...
I once had a very small infrared / PS/2 keyboard with a track ball
at the upper right corner, and the buttons on the upper left)
where middle finger and forefinger only had to be moved a bit, but
the heel of hand(s) could remain (only twisted a bit). That
allowed for pretty good precision and speed. But i think it was
still not that of Russ Cox and acme and external mouse/mice.
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
8:35 p.m.
My elementary school teacher recommended to my mother that she buy me a typewriter and I
took typing in summer school. Little did we know being able to type 60wpm would end up
being.
On Nov 2, 2022, at 05:24, Steffen Nurpmeso
<steffen(a)sdaoden.eu> wrote:
Steffen Nurpmeso wrote in
<20221102121352.MhcLw%steffen(a)sdaoden.eu>eu>:
|steve jenkin wrote in
| <E212D205-B786-4441-A95B-B5F5546B5C6C(a)canb.auug.org.au>au>:
| ...
||I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of \
||the CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
|
|What i personally find more fascinating (given that -- in the
|right condition -- i type pretty fast even in total darkness but
|darkest possible monitor brightness) is the multitaskability some
|show, in respect to combination of mouse and keyboard (or even
|dual-mouse if i remember a message of Rob Pike right). I once
...
I once had a very small infrared / PS/2 keyboard with a track ball
at the upper right corner, and the buttons on the upper left)
where middle finger and forefinger only had to be moved a bit, but
the heel of hand(s) could remain (only twisted a bit). That
allowed for pretty good precision and speed. But i think it was
still not that of Russ Cox and acme and external mouse/mice.
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
12:26 p.m.
When I was in high school (in the early sixties) I tried to sign up for
typing, which was taught on manual typewriters. I was told that the class
was for girls only, and I was turned away. I never did develop good typing
skills. I'm pretty much a two-fingered typist. Ironically, I have probably
done more typing than 90% of the female classmates who were allowed to take
the class.
Precision figured mightily in those days, which may also have pre-dated
white-out. Eliminating an error was a big deal. Now it's dead easy, and
auto-correct has already fixed several errors in this message.
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 8:14 AM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen(a)sdaoden.eu> wrote:
steve jenkin wrote in
<E212D205-B786-4441-A95B-B5F5546B5C6C(a)canb.auug.org.au>au>:
...
|I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of \
|the CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
What i personally find more fascinating (given that -- in the
right condition -- i type pretty fast even in total darkness but
darkest possible monitor brightness) is the multitaskability some
show, in respect to combination of mouse and keyboard (or even
dual-mouse if i remember a message of Rob Pike right). I once
watched a video on the google tube of Russ Cox dancing acme doing
go testing, could be it is [1]. When he starts to actually work
a bit (late on iirc), that is thrilling, i could never select /
paste (kill snarf yank what do i know) that fast.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
1:07 p.m.
In 1969 at the end of 9 th grade I got a foot injury that kept me on crutches for the
summer so I took summer school typing. very worthwhile. I think 90% of the class were
young women. My parents encouraged it mostly because it would make writing term papers
much easier, which it did, but of course it had many computing benefits as well.
the ancient typewriters had really heavy keys with long strokes. Much like teletypes.
On Nov 2, 2022, at 8:27 AM, John P. Linderman
<jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com> wrote:
When I was in high school (in the early sixties) I tried to sign up for typing, which was
taught on manual typewriters. I was told that the class was for girls only, and I was
turned away. I never did develop good typing skills. I'm pretty much a two-fingered
typist. Ironically, I have probably done more typing than 90% of the female classmates who
were allowed to take the class.
Precision figured mightily in those days, which may also have pre-dated white-out.
Eliminating an error was a big deal. Now it's dead easy, and auto-correct has already
fixed several errors in this message.
> On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 8:14 AM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen(a)sdaoden.eu> wrote:
> steve jenkin wrote in
> <E212D205-B786-4441-A95B-B5F5546B5C6C(a)canb.auug.org.au>au>:
> ...
> |I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of \
> |the CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
>
> What i personally find more fascinating (given that -- in the
> right condition -- i type pretty fast even in total darkness but
> darkest possible monitor brightness) is the multitaskability some
> show, in respect to combination of mouse and keyboard (or even
> dual-mouse if i remember a message of Rob Pike right). I once
> watched a video on the google tube of Russ Cox dancing acme doing
> go testing, could be it is [1]. When he starts to actually work
> a bit (late on iirc), that is thrilling, i could never select /
> paste (kill snarf yank what do i know) that fast.
>
> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M
>
> --steffen
> |
> |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
> |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
> |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
> |(By Robert Gernhardt)
1:16 p.m.
Self taught touch typer here. I frequently compare typing to running
my excavator. If I don't think about what I'm doing, everything works,
I can type in the dark (doing that right now) but as soon as I start
thinking about where the keys are (or what the joysticks on the excavator
do) it all goes to shit.
And getting back to writing, I personally feel like if you write the
man page first, it settles my messy brain into a good space, the code
comes easier after writing docs. I view writing docs as sort of the
first pass of thinking about how to write the code. Doesn't always
work but it is pleasant when it does.
On Wed, Nov 02, 2022 at 09:07:31AM -0400, Larry Stewart wrote:
In 1969 at the end of 9 th grade I got a foot injury
that kept me on crutches for the summer so I took summer school typing. very worthwhile. I
think 90% of the class were young women. My parents encouraged it mostly because it would
make writing term papers much easier, which it did, but of course it had many computing
benefits as well.
the ancient typewriters had really heavy keys with long strokes. Much like teletypes.
> On Nov 2, 2022, at 8:27 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ???
> When I was in high school (in the early sixties) I tried to sign up for typing,
which was taught on manual typewriters. I was told that the class was for girls only, and
I was turned away. I never did develop good typing skills. I'm pretty much a
two-fingered typist. Ironically, I have probably done more typing than 90% of the female
classmates who were allowed to take the class.
>
> Precision figured mightily in those days, which may also have pre-dated white-out.
Eliminating an error was a big deal. Now it's dead easy, and auto-correct has already
fixed several errors in this message.
>
>> On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 8:14 AM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen(a)sdaoden.eu>
wrote:
>> steve jenkin wrote in
>> <E212D205-B786-4441-A95B-B5F5546B5C6C(a)canb.auug.org.au>au>:
>> ...
>> |I???ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with the people of \
>> |the CSRC - doesn???t anyone know?
>>
>> What i personally find more fascinating (given that -- in the
>> right condition -- i type pretty fast even in total darkness but
>> darkest possible monitor brightness) is the multitaskability some
>> show, in respect to combination of mouse and keyboard (or even
>> dual-mouse if i remember a message of Rob Pike right). I once
>> watched a video on the google tube of Russ Cox dancing acme doing
>> go testing, could be it is [1]. When he starts to actually work
>> a bit (late on iirc), that is thrilling, i could never select /
>> paste (kill snarf yank what do i know) that fast.
>>
>> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP1xVpMPn8M
>>
>> --steffen
>> |
>> |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
>> |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
>> |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
>> |(By Robert Gernhardt)
--
---
Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
1:27 p.m.
John P. Linderman wrote in
<CAC0cEp9v1ZhTgEFMNGMGH1GhXo9V87QiOPfbbCuMG1y6D9Esaw(a)mail.gmail.com>om>:
|When I was in high school (in the early sixties) I tried to sign up for
|typing, which was taught on manual typewriters. I was told that the class
|was for girls only, and I was turned away. I never did develop good typing
|skills. I'm pretty much a two-fingered typist. Ironically, I have probably
This can be a winner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4nX0Xrn-wo
(The classic.)
|done more typing than 90% of the female classmates who were allowed to take
|the class.
These machine-gunners are in another league per se from my modest
point of view. Ten finger thunderstorms.
|Precision figured mightily in those days, which may also have pre-dated
|white-out. Eliminating an error was a big deal. Now it's dead easy, and
|auto-correct has already fixed several errors in this message.
Since i now own a (used!!) smartphone i unfortunately have to live
with such things when doing my little bit of SMS messaging. It is
terrible. Ooften do i have to delete the word entirely to unlock
the screen. Ach! for the Asians who commit suicide because they
messed up a calligraphical painting.
It seems to me TUHS has lost its Sender: message header btw, which
longs for fixing as it is SHOULD in RFC 5322 in this ML case
(except for Warren himself, maybe).
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
7:01 p.m.
I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills with
the people of the
CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V05.4.pdf (p23)
History tells us that the guys who designed [UNIX] did
their own typing
into the machine. It seems to me that because of this, the main reason
that UNIX enjoys/suffers from terse input and output is not through any
intellectual design decisions made at some early stage but because the
UNIX designers were just bad typists working on slow peripherals.
-Jason
7:20 p.m.
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 3:02 PM <jason-tuhs(a)shalott.net> wrote:
Mostly rampant speculation on my part, but with 110 baud modems, 10
characters per second right?,
and added delays for carriage returns, it was the peripherals that
encouraged brevity. Code would be
viewed multiple times, but entered roughly once.
I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills
with the people of the
CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V05.4.pdf (p23)
History tells us that the guys who designed
[UNIX] did their own typing
into the machine. It seems to me that because of this, the main reason
that UNIX enjoys/suffers from terse input and output is not through any
intellectual design decisions made at some early stage but because the
UNIX designers were just bad typists working on slow peripherals.
-Jason
3 Nov
3 Nov
1:47 a.m.
I’m not sure the model 33 required a carriage return delay. At 110
baud it had plenty of time to move the carriage. back.
Other printers (especially faster ones) weren’t so lucky, but the LA36
decwriter had a catchup mode to print the backlog after a return.
The LA120 was boustrophedonic so returns weren’t as much of an issue.
------ Original Message ------
From "John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com>
To jason-tuhs(a)shalott.net
Cc "steve jenkin" <sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au>au>; "TUHS"
<tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Date 11/2/2022 12:20:12 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: Early Unix and Keyboard Skills
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 3:02 PM <jason-tuhs(a)shalott.net> wrote:
Mostly rampant speculation on my part, but with 110 baud modems, 10
characters per second right?,
and added delays for carriage returns, it was the peripherals that
encouraged brevity. Code would be
viewed multiple times, but entered roughly once.
I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills
with the people of
the
CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V05.4.pdf (p23)
History tells us that the guys who designed
[UNIX] did their own
typing
into the machine. It seems to me that because of
this, the main
reason
that UNIX enjoys/suffers from terse input and
output is not through
any
intellectual design decisions made at some early
stage but because
the
UNIX designers were just bad typists working on
slow peripherals.
-Jason 
1:59 a.m.
On Thu, 3 Nov 2022, Ronald Natalie wrote:
[...]
Other printers (especially faster ones) weren’t so
lucky, but the LA36
decwriter had a catchup mode to print the backlog after a return.
Yep; the head went twice as fast to catch up. Wasn't there a method of
locking it into that mode, but then requiring flow control?
The LA120 was boustrophedonic so returns weren’t as
much of an issue.
ISTR that it required a driver to utilise that mode.
-- Dave
3:01 a.m.
The 33 and 28 needed at least two null chars after the <CR> or it would
lose chars as there was no buffering. The Unix driver has the CR delay
modes to support it. It’s UART as it were was mechanical and a real work
of art. I remember spending a few hours trying to figure out how it
worked.
As for the LA120 yeah you really needed to use real flow control which
could be a problem on DL11s and DZs ports. SW flow was less than
prefect. However, the Able version of the DH supported flow in hardware
(RTS/CTS style) so you could set them to interface with the host at 960cps
and then print as fast as possible swiping back and forth on the paper as
the local microprocessor in the decwritter buffered everything.
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 9:48 PM Ronald Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
I’m not sure the model 33 required a carriage return
delay. At 110 baud
it had plenty of time to move the carriage. back.
Other printers (especially faster ones) weren’t so lucky, but the LA36
decwriter had a catchup mode to print the backlog after a return.
The LA120 was boustrophedonic so returns weren’t as much of an issue.
------ Original Message ------
From "John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com>
To jason-tuhs(a)shalott.net
Cc "steve jenkin" <sjenkin(a)canb.auug.org.au>au>; "TUHS"
<tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Date 11/2/2022 12:20:12 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: Early Unix and Keyboard Skills
On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 3:02 PM <jason-tuhs(a)shalott.net> wrote:
Mostly rampant speculation on my part, but with 110 baud modems, 10
characters per second right?,
and added delays for carriage returns, it was the peripherals that
encouraged brevity. Code would be
viewed multiple times, but entered roughly once.
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
I’ve never heard anyone mention keyboard skills
with the people of the
CSRC - doesn’t anyone know?
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V05.4.pdf (p23)
History tells us that the guys who designed
[UNIX] did their own typing
into the machine. It seems to me that because of this, the main reason
that UNIX enjoys/suffers from terse input and output is not through any
intellectual design decisions made at some early stage but because the
UNIX designers were just bad typists working on slow peripherals.
-Jason
3:17 p.m.
On 11/2/22, Ronald Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
I’m not sure the model 33 required a carriage return
delay. At 110
baud it had plenty of time to move the carriage. back.
Other printers (especially faster ones) weren’t so lucky, but the LA36
decwriter had a catchup mode to print the backlog after a return.
The LA120 was boustrophedonic so returns weren’t as much of an issue.
The model 33 had a very fast and powerful carriage return mechanism,
good for cracking walnuts, but it took up to two character times to
complete a CR. If you didn't send two non-printing characters (such
as NUL), you risked having your character struck somewhere in the
middle of the line.
The LA36 DECwriter had a rather slow carriage return. It would buffer
characters while a return was in progress and then print the buffered
characters at 60 characters/second, slowing down to the normal 30 cps
when caught up. There was a company that sold modified LA36
controller boards that were hacked so that the LA36 always thought it
was in catch-up mode and could thus be run at double speed, provided
that you inserted NUL padding after a CR. But that greatly reduced
the longevity of the print mechanism.
-Paul W.
4:18 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 11:19 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
The LA36 DECwriter had a rather slow carriage return.
It would buffer
characters while a return was in progress and then print the buffered
characters at 60 characters/second, slowing down to the normal 30 cps
when caught up.
The key point here is that with the DEC Writer (LA36) DEC started to split
the print speed (*in cps*) from the line interface speed (*in baud* as it
was larger than an often character as it would have at least one start bit,
one or more stop bits, and maybe a parity bit too). Herein also lies
another problem, the mechanical interface, be it how fast the carriage
moved, or the head was positioned, etc, could be much longer than the
single character transfer time. As Paul mentioned on some
mechanical devices without any buffering, the print might be random as the
carriage moved the head.
Teletype made an amazing mechanical device that had a minimum amount of
electronics in it. By the time of the LA36, you start to see the
microprocessor revolution and the use of cheap transistors to replace
mechanical things to make faster/better devices with new features (like
buffering and being able to have different speeds for data transfer and
printing). But you also start to see the distinction between the
mechanics (the keyboard/printer) and things like the communications scheme
become even more obvious and terminology starts to be used to address the
specific part of the problem.
ᐧ
5:02 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 11:19 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
The model 33 had a very fast and powerful carriage
return mechanism,
good for cracking walnuts, but it took up to two character times to
complete a CR. If you didn't send two non-printing characters (such
as NUL), you risked having your character struck somewhere in the
middle of the line.
That was not my experience. I cut my teeth on a PDP-8/M running OS/8 with
an ASR-33 attached and directly programming the KE8E controller without any
additional time-delay loops. Outputting additional NULs would have screwed
up binary paper tape output, so that can't have been how it was done.
7:36 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 3, 2022 at 11:19 AM Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The model 33 had a very fast and powerful carriage return mechanism,
good for cracking walnuts ...
In 1968, San Francisco State College (now yclept "University") set up a
"computer lab", based on a few IBM 2741 terminals. These were hooked by leased
lines to Stanford's Wylbur system and allowed us to do line-based editing,
interactive Lisp, etc.
Anyway, the terminals were based on the I/O Selectric, and the ball impacts were powered
by a spinning bar with pretty much infinite torque. One day, an insufficiently cautious
TA got her long, straight hair wound onto the bar. Each character that was printed pulled
her head closer to the terminal.
Fortunately, someone hit the OFF switch in time to avoid bloodshed. Then, we were able to
carefully unwind her hair and free her from the terminal. IIRC, we didn't even have
to cut any of her hair in the process...
-r
8:01 p.m.
On 11/3/2022 2:36 PM, Rich Morin wrote:
I was nominally a music major at S.F. State at that time, in the midst
of my self-imposed avoidance of computers, that started with disdain
from my initial exposure to Fortran on IBM 1620 at U of MO-Columbia in
1964 and ended with semi-abandoning my rock and roll pursuits in early
1971 and starting C.S. studies at UT-Austin. I also took math courses at
S.F. State in 1968 but was unaware of the above cited "lab".
Regarding keyboarding skills, I took touch-typing in summer school after
9th grade, got a SCM portable electric typewriter that I might still
have, and am still grateful for QWERTY facility that has served me ever
since, on card punch, 2741, 3270, Displaywriter, and more obscure and
more modern keyboards.
CHS
--
voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/Twitter: CharlesHSauer
On Thu, Nov 3,
2022 at 11:19 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The model 33 had a very fast and powerful carriage return mechanism,
good for cracking walnuts ...
In 1968, San Francisco State College (now yclept "University") set up a
"computer lab", based on a few IBM 2741 terminals. These were hooked by leased
lines to Stanford's Wylbur system and allowed us to do line-based editing,
interactive Lisp, etc.
Anyway, the terminals were based on the I/O Selectric, and the ball impacts were powered
by a spinning bar with pretty much infinite torque. One day, an insufficiently cautious
TA got her long, straight hair wound onto the bar. Each character that was printed pulled
her head closer to the terminal.
Fortunately, someone hit the OFF switch in time to avoid bloodshed. Then, we were able
to carefully unwind her hair and free her from the terminal. IIRC, we didn't even
have to cut any of her hair in the process...
261
days inactive
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days old
30 comments
22 participants
participants (22)
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Jon Forrest -
KenUnix -
Larry McVoy -
Larry Stewart -
Leah Neukirchen -
Michael Kjörling -
Paul Winalski -
Rich Morin -
Rob Pike -
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Ronald Natalie
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