[TUHS] C from 1980 binaries

[Larry McVoy via TUHS]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2026 at 10:30:22PM -0500, John Foust via TUHS wrote:
> At 12:36 PM 10/31/2026, James Frew via TUHS wrote:
> >Back in The Day? I was responsible for a CS student lab full of Teraks, 
> 
> Yes, that was the situation when I was an undergrad at UW-Madison in '81
> and that's why I baby-duck imprinted on it and still have ten or so Teraks.

I was there too but not in CS yet.  I was undergrad '80-85, grad '86-87.
It took me a while to get to CS, I started as an accounting major because
my high school coach was also my accounting teacher, so I excelled in high
school accounting because, well, coach.  College accounting without my
coach quickly taught me I hated accounting, still do.  I then, much to my
culture vulture father's surprise, drifted into Art History.  Got good
enough in Greek pottery that I pointed out a dating error in Janson.
My dad was a physics prof there, he started taking art history classes
with me.  I became friends with the dean, we'd go out drinking together.
He eventually told me "Larry, you are one of the best students I've had,
but unless you are willing to do a PhD, there are no jobs, and even then,
you'll be in a long line of people for every job".

So I went to my dad and said "what do I do?"  He gave me some very good
advice.  He said "It doesn't matter.  Well, you can't pick something
that goes against your grain like accounting, you have to pick something
you like.  When you do, learning becomes its own reward".  So while I
had been drifting around, I had taken a bunch of STEM classes, calc,
diffie q, physics (all the easy stuff, I got to quantum mechanics and
bowed out, just couldn't wrap my head around probability being the basis).
And some CS classes.  The data structures course in Pascal resonated with
me and I got an A in that.  So I picked that.  It worked out well for me.

All that is to say, John, I don't remember Teraks.  I definately remember
the terminal room with ~40 terminals hooked up to a VAX 780 (and I
fondly remember slovax that had the BSD source on it, I got an account
on there eventually and spent a lot of time reading.  Ever since then,
my main machine has been slovax.  slovax is mcvoy.com).

So where were the Teraks?  I probably got serious in CS around
1982 or 83.  Were they still somewhere?

--lm