[TUHS] C from 1980 binaries

[Jeffrey Joshua Rollin via TUHS]

I have never heard of Teraks.

Sounds like an alien species from Star Trek!

(I'm of a similar vintage to Dan Cross and am familiar with such things as
the separate ports to the 32-bit Interdata machines, although the closest I
have gotten to a minicomputer is, depending on your perspective, either
using the University library computer terminals which, I later found out,
were connected to a VAX of some sort, or occasionally entertaining the idea
of buying a PiDP.)

Jeff

On Sun, 1 Nov 2026, 14:55 Larry McVoy via TUHS, <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> 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
>