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The programmer's keyboard (0, 1 and Enter) reminded me of the levels of sophistication of Unix users that did the rounds back in the 80's or 90's. I'm sure a few oldies round here will remember it, perhaps more than I do. I just remember a couple of the top levels were something like:

• Writes Unix device drivers with cat >
• Refers to Ken, Dennis and Brian by their first names

I forget what the lowest level was.

Philip said:

The programmer's keyboard (0, 1 and Enter) reminded me of the levels of sophistication of Unix users that did the rounds back in the 80's or 90's. I'm sure a few oldies round here will remember it, perhaps more than I do. I just remember a couple of the top levels were something like:

• Writes Unix device drivers with cat >
• Refers to Ken, Dennis and Brian by their first names

I forget what the lowest level was.

Click to expand...

I will never admit to having written assembly code in the debugger and squirting it out to a file to execute.

Manual? ... What Manual ?!? This Is Unix, My Son, You Just GOTTA Know!!!

Philip said:

...

• Refers to Ken, Dennis and Brian by their first names

...
I forget what the lowest level was.

Click to expand...

I still have my copy of Software Tools by Brian and PJ.

In one of my (um undisclosed) roles I had to write a patch for a live system in hex... while the "customer" watched. You never want this level of pressure if you can manage to avoid it.

Just before Y2K we had a system which needed updating for Y2K, but did not have the spare resources in house to do it. I got a contractor in. When I interviewed him, and said the system was CICS Assembler, his reply was " Yes I do high level languages like Assembler, my last job was programming high speed printers in machine code".

AlanD said:

I do high level languages like Assembler,

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Perspective is everything I guess. Developers who've never worked on embedded code (or possibly on GPU code where you may not be able to see a debugger if you have one) may think debugging is no big deal... but when the system cannot stop under ANY circumstances and all you have is a tiny log file to write key data to, your perspective changes in a hurry. Luckily I've only ever coded in Assembly for pay a couple of times, and did binary patching a few times--it's not that it's necessarily hard, just kinda slow compared to C or a higher level language.

Not done patching at the binary level, but I can remember having to recover a corrupted directory on a word processing system back in the early eighties. It was coded in Octal and somehow all the filenames had got corrupted into characters that you could not input on the keyboard. The files were highly confidential, and the (5.25" floppy) disks could not leave the office.

AlanD said:

remember having to recover a corrupted directory

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"I fixed it... you now have files a.doc through z.doc... enjoy!"

Real programmers use https://xkcd.com/378/

I worked with a guy back in the day who wrote a text-based Towers of Hanoi game in Unix SystemV kernel debugger macros...

PHolder said:

In one of my (um undisclosed) roles I had to write a patch for a live system in hex... while the "customer" watched. You never want this level of pressure if you can manage to avoid it.

Click to expand...

It's worse when your customer (or in my case my boss) tries to help. He was in the root directory of my VMS system and deleted everything. I got back at him though. I presented it as a case study at a DECUS (DEC Users Society) annual conference in front of 3,000+ people. I was called "Why you should never let a manager into the computer room."

One of my first ever managers was like "Bad Luck Shleprock"... you could sit him in front of your system that you spent months perfecting and he would press one or two keys and immediately it would all fall apart. I had a later manager who would try to micro-manage you standing in your doorway demanding action. My usual approach with her was to suggest that we needed a meeting to discuss the next action, and could she pull that together. Although her meetings were always a waste of time, it kept her busy long enough for me to understand the problem and come up with a plan to present in the meeting.

Barry Wallis said:

root directory of my VMS system

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I really enjoyed the Vax. I got asked to do a system upgrade on a weekend, in the time frame of the first Beverley Hills Cop movie. I listened to the soundtrack on my cassette Walkman while I waited to load each reel to reel tape. The command interpreter in VMS was very nice, and the embedded networking was very slick. Having the system automatically make backups of your files with the semicolon naming was also quite handy.

I was privileged to work for DEC in the late '80s through early '90s.

@PHolder Axel F was one of the most remixed and redone-on-computer songs around. My first university email account was obtained on and accessed via a vax/vms terminal.

On my bookshelf is a paperback copy of the very expensive (at the time), 832-page book [RELEASE 4.2] UNIX SYSTEM V: A PRACTICAL GUIDE (third edition) by MARK G SOBELL. ©1995.

Page 7, I just noticed, contains a grayscale image of a HDD without its case, described with the text New 3.5-inch hard disk drives store 2 Gigabytes of information in a 1" high design, and 4GB in a 1.6" design. The SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface) drives are targeted at high-end PCs, workstations, servers, and disk arrays. (Courtesy of Conner Peripherals, Inc.) The displayed disk has 6 platters.

Barry Wallis said:

I still have my copy of Software Tools by Brian and PJ.

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Hehe, not only have the book, but also worked on the ratfor pre-processor.

Another VMS fan here (and ex-DEC employee late 80's to early 90's). Linux is my second love

mdSeuss said:

Another VMS fan here (and ex-DEC employee late 80's to early 90's). Linux is my second love

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What part of DEC did you work in? I was a Western Region Database Consultant and part of the Transaction Processing team. I taught DEC database classes, did pre-sales and post-sales consulting. I also went to, taught at and presented at several annual DECUS meetings. I have a Datatrieve Wombat magnet on my refrigerator.

Not a DEC employee, but I learned my computing on a PDP11/44 running RSX11-M+with RL02 disks ( all 10MB of them). Then I was involved with some microVaxes running Allin1. Very useful back door for us "users", you could get to a DCL prompt through the DBMS application.

Barry Wallis said:

Datatrieve Wombat

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I remember both of these names, but not in the same context. I remember there being some key sequence on the colour VT240 that could cause it to render the wombat.

I was in a corporate network consulting group ... part of the flock of seagulls fired upon poor unsuspecting customers Based out of PKO2. It was a fun place to work and I really enjoyed being onsite with customers and helping them.

I remember the PLOT WOMBAT command.

Ha! I didn't expect to find you guys here.

I started with DEC working on OpenVMS compilers in 1983. I'm still working with compilers for OpenVMS. From DEC to Compaq to HP and then licensed to VMS Software Inc., we're still around. We've ported it to x86-64. It is in beta now. And yes, Datatrieve too. www.vmssoftware.com

And of course, as a compiler developer, I have to know the assembly so I'm fluent in VAX, Alpha, Itanium, and x86. I've pretty good with MIPS, PDP-11, and even the KL-10 (who doesn't love an instruction JUMP that doesn't jump!)

Let the VMS flashbacks continue. I think the editor that will remain my favorite was EDT. You gotta have the VTxxx keyboard to do it right 'cause without the keypad with the correct layout my right hand would just flounder around like a fish out of water.

Dang it, now I gotta go dig out the mVax 3100 and see if it still boots.

PHolder said:

I really enjoyed the Vax. I got asked to do a system upgrade on a weekend, in the time frame of the first Beverley Hills Cop movie. I listened to the soundtrack on my cassette Walkman while I waited to load each reel to reel tape. The command interpreter in VMS was very nice, and the embedded networking was very slick. Having the system automatically make backups of your files with the semicolon naming was also quite handy.

Click to expand...

As a fledgling VAX/VMS sysadmin back before time began I remember the parting gift I got from the outgoing "buddy" from the company I used to work at - he removed the mount command. He was probably perturbed 'cause I'd added an extra file folder to his filing cabinet labeled "Spare Panties" along with a pair of unmentionables that I'd found on a bike trail and not being one to pass up on a potential prank I snagged them and brought them to work. It was a different time where HR wasn't so involved.

Anyway, I figured no big deal, I'll just restore from tape... er. wait. My solution? I was still in school where the same version of VMS was in use so I fired up Kermit and sucked it over.

Ah, those were the days....

ggerke said:

Let the VMS flashbacks continue. I think the editor that will remain my favorite was EDT. You gotta have the VTxxx keyboard to do it right 'cause without the keypad with the correct layout my right hand would just flounder around like a fish out of water.

Click to expand...

Being a hardcore programmer, I was a TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) guy and then EMACS (which was originally written in TECO).

ggerke said:

my favorite was EDT

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EDT was great on a VT terminal. Eventually it got rebuilt as a configuration of TPU. I remember writing some TPU plugins for my EDT config. I loved TPU/EDT so much I eventual paid too much for a DOS version of it to replace my aged copy of the Norton Editor (was that BRIEF?)

TPU/EVE has a SET KEYPAD EDT that gets you most of EDT. I switch between LSE and emacs on VMS depending on what I'm doing. There is also work for a new TECO written in C. The VAX version is written in Macro-32. Unfortunately, it uses some code constructs that the Macro compiler (reads Macro-32 source, generates Alpha/Itanium/x86 instructions) cannot handle. So for Alpha and itanium, we used the binary translator. It isn't clear if we'll do a binary translator for x86 so we're looking at a C version. I have got ADVENTURE running (for the most part) on x86 VMS.

Dave said:

I will never admit to having written assembly code in the debugger and squirting it out to a file to execute.

Manual? ... What Manual ?!? This Is Unix, My Son, You Just GOTTA Know!!!

Click to expand...

I remember when 'edlin' replaced 'copy con'
I also remember using 'debug' to low-level format a hard drive by calling a hidden BIOS routine: `debug -g c800:0005`

Since no one answered the original question: https://www.levenez.com/unix/guru.html


OBTW: I was also at DEC from 1982 - 1984. I worked on two manufacturing automation projects. The first was on RSTS/E on a PDP-11/70. The second was in VAX FORTRAN on an 11/780, if I remember correctly. This one should have been written in VAX BASIC because of all the string manipulation for communication with the user. I worked around FORTRAN's limitation by calling the BASIC run time library. Gotta love the multi-language calling standards! This 2nd project helped automate the production of the Rainbow, DECmate, and Professional (Pro) personal computers.

I worked with RSX and VMS from about 1975 to 2017. The company for which I worked had 11/725s, an 11/730, an 11/780, an 11/782, an 8400, an 8500, an a couple of 8600s, and ended with a 7000 series before transitioning to CHARON-VAX. We also had VAXstations of various models.

Barry Wallis said:

Dungeon Map for ADVENT

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That looks more iike the map for Zork I instead of Adventure to me.

Zork 1 was based on Adventure. This map was from 1979 and Zork 1 was released in 1980.

I remember first HS computer class was done on a shared old teletype terminal with a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem that dialed into UD's timeshare system. How far we've come.