Lomcevak

As I age, I find that I’ve developed an appreciation for tech history. I was delighted this morning to run across a short piece by Dan Murphy, the creator of TECO, entitled The Beginnings of TECO.

You see, TECO was the editor for which Richard Stallman created a macro package called Emacs (for Editor MACroS). A flavor of Emacs is usually the first program I launch and the last to quit. It’s been that way since the mid eighties, which is around when it became very useful to me to be able to edit text on a variety of different platforms. For Emacs has been ported to just about every computing platform there is. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this piece in an Emacs buffer right now! (Before you ask, the implementation I use these days is from Lugaru Software, LTD. Theirs is a commercial product, but go visit them for a fully capable free trial.)

But I digress – go read The Beginnings of TECO for a fascinating glimpse into the past, when things were more… well, interesting… in some ways than they are today.

[...] TECO was nothing if not terse. Fairly complex loops and other command sequences could be written in TECO, and mostly looked like line noise. TECO was one of the first languages to spawn the practice of handing someone a one-line string of near gibberish and asking with a grin, “tell me what it does.”

It seems like only yesterday that Joe and me would while away the wee hours on the printer-terminals in the basement at Hill Center, ‘playing’ on the ARPANET after shooting pool and drinking beers… That was actually in the ’70s. The ‘net has come quite a way from those days, hasn’t it?

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090830/D9ADCOL00.html

Here’s what the ARPANET looked like in 1982.

Kinda different today. Say, I’m a little curious. Does anyone remember the pain of using bangist-style email addresses in the ancient, pre-DNS days? Stuff that looked like this:

fishpond!mcdphx!asuvax!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!portal!cup.portal.com!plav

Yeah, that’s actually an email address. It used to reach me, in fact – well, from some networks, anyway. Getting it all to work together used to be really, really hard work!

I was clearing out some space downstairs. I’ve mentioned before that I’m a bit of a pack rat. I was in the ‘machine room’ – the space that’s set aside for servers, media, office supplies and so on. Officially I was there to do some work on a server, work that couldn’t be done remotely, involving periods of busy interrupted by periods of not busy. There was nothing better than fill those not busy periods with some cleanup.

I couldn’t believe some of the stuff that I was finding. Some materials were from machines that haven’t been around in any form for decades! That’s about twenty minutes less than forever, in terms of technology. Much went into the shredder, and much more went into the recycling!

But there were some things that might make you smile if you’re a dinosaur like me. Or maybe they’re interesting to a historian. I haven’t got the foggiest, but they seemed too good to throw away. And honestly, these are just the tip of the iceberg; sometimes I feel like I live in a museum.

First up is a third edition copy of Getting the Most Out of the Internet, which was what Earthlink handed out to new subscribers. The think that caught my eye when I saw it was that it was authored by Sky Dayton himself.

Getting the Most Out of the Internet

Fascinating. But the next one is even better. There was a printed newsletter called Inside the Internet. I’m not sure when they started and stopped publishing the self-proclaimed ‘rocket science for the rest of us’. Nobody does things like this anymore, it’s far easier to simply publish on the Web. But this is January 1995 we’re talking about, and things were way different back then.

Inside the Internet

Notice the holes for storing issues in your binder – they’re stock, I didn’t put them there! There are articles about Gopher and Veronica. And a bit about TIA – remember that beast? With it you could run SLIP over your shell account, enabling you to run things like a graphical browser. I think I used it back around 1993 or so to run the some of the first non-console Internet apps seen within sacred walls of D&B, where I worked at the time. It goes without saying that this long predated D&B’s online presence, which was initally created by my friend Tom Thornbury. In fact, there wasn’t much commercial presence on the Internet back in those days at all, believe it or not! Finally, did you notice the price? $5.95 for a few pages? Hardly buys much more than a gallon of gas these days.

I hoped you liked that little trip down memory lane. Did you smile?