Maizure

From what was their victim software derived? How much time did it take to write the letter?

Is this the one with Noah Wylie?

XEROX Alto (PARC ), 86DOS, CPM DOS, BASIC,

Xerox Alto (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

The Altair 8800 has an Intel 8080 CPU:

Altair 8800: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

Intel 8080 -> Intel 8088

CP/M (1974) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M

DOS > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS#History

86-DOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS :

> 86-DOS shared a few of its commands with other operating systems such as OS/8 and CP/M, which made it easy to port programs from the latter. Its application programming interface was very similar to that of CP/M. The system was licensed and then purchased by Microsoft and developed further as MS-DOS and PC DOS. [2]

BASIC > History:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_interpreter#History

HP had BASIC on mainframes in the 1960s.

This paper (ScholarlyArticle) was published in 1974:

"A BASIC Language Interpreter for the Intel 8008 Microprocessor". ACM. (1974) from UIUC: University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana .. archive.org: https://archive.org/details/basiclanguageint658weav/page/n8/mode/1up .. scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=A+BASIC+Language+Interpreter+for+the+Intel+8008+Microprocessor&btnG=

"What Bill Gates’ first commercial code (Altair BASIC) looks like under the hood" https://maizure.org/projects/decoded-altair-basic/index.html ..…

Code Reading Club: https://codereading.club

The idea of this project is to make a small, cozy kind of “book club for code” that enables club members to study and discuss the architecture/structure of open source code. I wanted it to be both a way to study others’ work as a means of developing more intuition about how to structure software, as well as a creative exploration and discussion of code as art.

I know the UI is quite poor right now, and the information about the time of the first session needs to be updated. I’ve pivoted to working on another project (a CLI reader for HN that lets you navigate with a UI like that generated by pager utilities such as “more”) while I flesh out the idea for this one more, as I’m not sure if I can reconcile the two aims for the club I cited above. I have to think more carefully about what I want it to be, and who I want to reach/how I want to reach them.

I really like the idea of doing this, but I just don’t have the mental/emotional bandwidth for it at the moment, which is why I’m working on other, more solitary projects instead. I think it’s important to have discipline and “grind” through things at times, but when I’m doing something in my free time for my own enjoyment and already feel a bit burned out from my other existing roles/responsibilities, I prefer not to add to it by actively building something that might create even more expectations from others. Instead, I try to get back to my first passion, which is just the joy of…

Your argument seems to imply that GNU was the progenitor of the utilities. A quick sample of the first 10 utilities from the first column of http://maizure.org/projects/decoded-gnu-coreutils/ on my machine showed 80% of the utilities were copied from existing sh utilities. Sure, GNU has added features, but there is nothing unseemly about creating new utilities using a different licence that are largely compatible - that is exactly how GNU coreutils came to life in the 90s.

arch - GNU

chgrp - Descended from chgrp introduced in Version 6 UNIX (1975)

comm - Descended from comm in Version 2 UNIX (1972)

dd - Descended from dd introduced in Version 5 UNIX (1974)

du - Descended from du introduced in Version 1 UNIX (1971)

factor - Descended from sort in Version 4 UNIX (1973)

head - Descended from head included in System V (1985)

join - Descended from join introduced in Version 7 UNIX (1979)

ls - Spiritually linked with LISTF from CTSS (1963)

mktemp - GNU

> It's quite a complex feature and yet I'm not sure any OS ever used it.

They did.

Linux used x86 hardware task switching and TR (task register) for years. See "struct tss_struct" and "switch_to" in older kernels.

Linux also allowed userspace processes to get hardware-managed access to individual I/O ports using the per-task x86 I/O port bitmap, and to local segments using the x86 LDT which were useful for running 16-bit code in a 32-bit task.

The hardware task switching was eventually changed to software task switching. By that time, software switching was faster, and it was always more versatile. This change removed the hardware-imposed limit on the number of processes and threads Linux could support.

Here's a nice article about the evolution of task switching in Linux. https://www.maizure.org/projects/evolution_x86_context_switch_linux/

Thanks for sharing this perspective. A few years ago, I started learning C with the aim of contributing to GNU coreutils and other utilities that come with a GNU/Linux system. I read most of the K&R book and thought I had a decent grasp of the C language but when I cloned the coreutils source code, I couldn’t figure it out and gave up, thinking I’d need a lot more experience before I could understand production-quality code. It’s reassuring to find out it wasn’t just me that struggled with the complexity of the code base.

Since then, I’ve discovered (thanks to Hacker News) Decoded: GNU coreutils¹, a “resource for novice programmers exploring the design of command-line utilities” but unfortunately, I no longer have the capacity or free time to spend on coding.

¹ https://www.maizure.org/projects/decoded-gnu-coreutils/index.html

I wrote a book focusing only on text processing commands (includes exercises as well): https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli_text_processing_coreutils/

You can practice some of the exercises using this interactive TUI app: https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps/tree/main/CLI-Exercises

See also: https://ratfactor.com/slackware/pkgblog/coreutils, https://maizure.org/projects/decoded-gnu-coreutils/ and https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-testing.html