PDP-11/69

2023 needs to be the last year linux shells let you print 'try using "<command> -h" for more information' and instead everything going forward just, by default, prints -h

and only as a stopgap measure. all of -h should just be listed when I hit tab after a -. even if my completions dir is fucked up to hell and back.

and also we should have this information encoded in the binary in a machine-readable way so the shell can get it out in structured form. but that may not be a 2023 thing

It was a 1976 thing!

heck yea tops-20!!

There are some old DECisms that I really wish had caught on more, help systems included

Thanks to Technology Connections for finding this incredible 16mm short from 1975 about code style.

Man have I worked with people who could have used this one

the image above is not a serious attempt, i gave up at several points (visibly,) it's just meant to contextualize this a bit

thinking about my replychost / LadyLandshark's replychost about preserving old computers, the problem that one inevitably runs into after descending past the tip of the iceberg is always the same: you are probably not trying to LARP a 1986 businessman.

I actually wanted to do this when I started youtubing. I wanted to make videos where I used machines as intended. I wanted to finally do something different than what everyone else does.

It's always frustrating to see a youtube video or reddit post or whatever about an old PC. Someone fires up a 486 with Windows 95, gets to the desktop, and... does what? Opens all the apps and goes "Yep There They Are." it's the same demo, every time. it's always the same apps, and you don't want to use them.

Maybe you want to need to use them. That's fine. Nostalgia, borrowed or firsthand, is nothing to be ashamed of. but at some point you gotta go "what am I actually doing here?" and I feel like a lot of people never really ask themselves, "am I done with this 1991 Mac I picked up four years ago? am I done with Macs entirely?" most people with a 1991 Mac turn it on once in a while and, I wager, just kind of let it sit at the desktop for a bit, maybe open some folders, but eventually just turn it off.

maybe you'll play a videogame, but there really aren't that many, and they aren't very deep. a few people can get replayability out of them but i'd guess most can't. certainly, it's not enough to justify keeping the whole machine around.

much like how mainframes existed in order to print invoices, 95% of what PCs were used for before the 2000s was office software. what you're supposed to do for an authentic Mac experience is to open Appleworks and make a spreadsheet. but you don't want to do that.

oh, you might open it and dink around with the cell borders, but are you going to find data and type it in? are you going to write formulas? i have never seen anyone do this, and even with my own earnest attempts to get myself to do it For The Vine as it were, I couldn't muster the effort.

I want to show people "here's what using this machine looked like, here's what the actual lived experience would have been," but god, the difference between the thought and the reality is just... exhausting. the reality is that the machine was built as a tool, and tools don't really do much of interest in themselves. the interesting thing is the output. but when the output is a tax return, it's hard to want to create it or view it, and it takes so long.

it's not interesting to put bogus data into a spreadsheet, or to type gibberish into a word processor. the only really meaningful way to interact with this stuff would be to LARP it - to actually do your taxes on a 1991 mac. but that intrudes into your life - it would be like trying to repair your car with tools from 1860. not long in, you're going to be sobbing and begging for a socket wrench. it's interesting to think about the objective badness of past eras; it's not fun or practical to inject that badness into your modern life, with its very real problems.

the reality is that doing your taxes on a 1991 Mac was about a hundred times slower. you couldn't copy and paste all your bill payment receipts out of your email because nobody was emailing receipts back then, and you couldn't IM your girlfriend and ask her to find your W2, scan it, and send it to you.

it would be ludicrous to slow down the process of solving your real, actual problems like this. even if you park your modern laptop next to your old machine to fill in those gaps, you're still going to be copying over all this data manually and looking at a lower resolution display on which you can see less info. you're just going to make your life worse, and no amount of huffing vibes is going to make that worthwhile. and to wit - nobody does this.

the financial software is Just Like Now, But Much Worse. the graphics software is Just Like Now, But Worse. there's nothing to see, or experience. This bad version of photoshop has The Old Window Borders, sure, but those don't make any difference once you've actually started working. Assuming, of course, that you have a use for the app in question at all. If you aren't an artist, then you can't even do anything with Photoshop but scribble, and I can tell you from experience: that's the same in everything, no matter how old.

A word processor is really the only thing that isn't an egregious waste of your time (as long as you're on a graphical system - WordPerfect is a hellish piece of shit) but that's because word processing hasn't changed in over 30 years, which just makes it even more pointless

assuming you can stand the keyboard you'll be forced to use, and assuming you don't mind having to get your finished file off the machine via floppy... you're not doing what you're doing any differently than you'd do it now. it's just on a lower resolution screen, with fewer keyboard shortcuts, etc.

and, of course, there's no way to make a retrocomputing demo more interesting this way. you wouldn't want to record this for the public to watch. assuming you wanted the public to see the whole process of writing or spreadsheeting, who would watch that? it just looks like work. it is work.

Personal computers prior to the late 90s were only built to solve a handful of problems, and they all tried to solve them the exact same way we do now, just stopping at the limits of technology. Likewise, a crescent wrench from 1930 might be made of different alloy than one from 2022, but it still just turns bolts. You have to go really far back to find one that's interesting at all to look at, one that's actually shaped differently, but even then, it's just going to turn a bolt, and the only interesting aspect will be that it sucks. "Yep, here I am, putting it on a bolt. Alright, I turned it. My hand hurts."

This all gets worse the further down the iceberg you go. This is just for the 1991 Mac. The 8086 PC is really hard to do anything remotely interesting with. The Unix workstation is mind numbing. the mainframe doesn't do anything at all.

it's a bummer, and I wish I knew a solution. like, this is just me being sad and disillusioned. sorry if you were looking for a point

This is part of why I'm more interested in old DEC stuff than any old PC stuff. Any time I've played with VMS or RSTS/e I've had a great time. In some ways they feel more modern than other old systems I've played with, even old *nixes. But that's probably because they were meant for things closer to what we use modern computers for - development, communication, etc. Early PCs were basically glorified calculators, in most cases

In this "fun"-filled article, we get to see a retrocomputing enthusiast:

1. Try to find a UNIX workstation that doesn't cost a huge sum of money, and get lucky.
2. Then try to find HP-UX install media, which HP doesn't have, so they have to ask on Fediverse to find people with the correct install media.
3. Then try to run period correct software that was written for an earlier version of HP-UX (which runs thanks to backwards compatibility) because they can't find a version online tailored to later versions of HP-UX.

They failed to run a lot of software they specifically got for their shiny new HP-UX. This is because a lot of UNIX workstation software is/was proprietary, and required licenses to use. Even the demo licenses have expired long ago. And the still-existing vendors aren't interested in helping out enthusiasts and/or don't even have the tools generate licenses for their old versions anymore. Don't take my work for it; the author of the linked article tried to get licenses, and all the conversations fizzled out.

This article is a harsh lesson in how FlexLM and DRM are cancers, and companies treat their own old software like trash to be swept away. Software is being destroyed at an alarming rate due to negligence. Even if the software isn't commercially viable anymore and the hardware platforms are niche, I argue that hard work and energy put into creating the software is only truly lost when people can't¹ run those old versions anymore.

I personally don't have nostalgia for UNIX workstations, and if I had one (too damn expensive :/), I'd run one of the FOSS BSDs on it b/c I enjoy running period-incorrect software on old machines. But I feel horrible for those UNIX workstation enthusiasts who don't share my aesthetic. They're having significant trouble getting their old machines to run the way they want, to enjoy computing on their own terms.

I got pretty angry reading this. Which I take as: the article is doing a good job. I don't usually see problems like this in the DOS world. I wonder why...

1. As opposed to don't run those old versions anymore; I'm not certain don't happens before can't. If the software is available to play with, people will use it.

unfortunately, all deeply accurate. and it pains me to see--it's my belief that if you're going to collect old unix workstations, it's important to remember the context. these machines were very rarely expected to run on their own. they boot up with the expectation that they're going to be pulling resources from the network to get themselves going. but, okay, let's assume you've got a computer lying around that can feed it whatever it needs to get going.

now what? i ran into this when i picked up an old VAXstation on the cheap... DEC was acquired by Compaq, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, which split itself up into HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and we're now at the point where anyone who cared about DEC's products has, with a high degree of probability, left the company. probably to retire so they don't have to think about computers in a professional capacity ever again. (fates bless them for achieving freedom.) since basically nobody's left who cares, there's no interest in trying to make software and patches and documentation findable. HP's support sites were legendarily fragmented and bad even before the corporate split. good luck if you want anything from the pre-Oracle days at Sun.

i met someone recently who affectionately refers to his collection of vintage computing as e-waste. he's gone to great lengths to ensure that everything remains functional, and that they can boot up in something resembling the environment they expect to thrive in. but this requires effort, and frankly it requires knowing the right people to be able to get yr hands on software. the retrocomputing community makes it easier, of course, but some things are still only whispered about because the patents are still active, or even more improbably, the software's still in development. HP sold VMS, the old DEC operating system, off to a third-party company who's still developing and supporting it. but only for x86. the old hobbyist-license program that people were using to keep old VAXen running? dead, as far as i can tell. HPE shut their hobbyist program down when they transferred the rights to VMS, and the new company isn't offering them. it says it right there on the new sign-up page:

Please note that in accordance with the license agreement between VMS Software Inc. and HPE, VMS Software Inc. are not able to distribute VAX licenses.

so go fuck yrself, i guess. it breaks my heart a little that these elements of computing history are so thoroughly abandoned and lost. partly out of nostalgia, to be sure, whomst among us doesn't yearn for when things... at least, we thought they sucked less. in some objective ways, they did. but goddamn, it sucks to see old ideas get implemented in worse ways--or, even more annoyingly, old ideas get completely ignored in favour of some shiny bullshit that isn't even half-baked.

sic transit gloria, and all that shit. keep circulating the tapes.

To expand on what Liz is talking about, I think: One of the even bigger (literally) tragedies of retrocomputing is that it is mostly constrained to individual-scale machines.

The Living Computer Museum in Seattle closed during the pandemic. It seems unlikely that it will ever open again. While I had some Doubts about many of their curation choices, they did have an entire floor of interactive exhibits. Most of them were microcomputers, and it was very cool that you could use a Lisa, a Sun, a TI 99, a Tandy CoCo, and a NeXT in short order, with your own two hands, at your own pace. I know the preeminent collector of Xerox graphical workstations, and yet the first time I ever used one was at the LCM, not at his house.

However, what was even cooler was the Mainframe Room. A door at one end of the second floor led into a loud, cold room with raised flooring, in which a variety of machines from CDC, IBM, and others lived. There were terminals along one wall which would let you log into these systems, and in fact, you could even telnet into some of them from home.

You couldn't touch the hardware, there were big signs to this effect everywhere - but it didn't make sense to touch these machines, and this is germane to my point.

An IBM System/360 is not a "device," unless you also think we should apply that term to, say, a steel mill. Yes, iron comes in one end and steel I-beams come out the other, and it all works together, but undeniably it is a collection of many devices, gadgets, and machines that collectively accomplish a goal.

I don't know which is more complex: the infrastructure behind a steel mill, or that behind a mainframe computer, but I know that neither one can be casually reconstructed.

If you find a Sun anything lurking in a disused office at your university, there's a good chance you can bring it home, plug in an IEC cable, possibly a monitor you already own (or one you can get on eBay for $400 shipped), and boot it right up. Perhaps the hard drive dies, but you can see the firmware go, and maybe replace the HDD.

You won't find a System/360, and if you do, you will not be able to get it working. I have only ever heard of maybe a half dozen people under 60 who would even know where to start. They are extremely complex, extremely specific, and extremely big. They also did not get casually discarded or forgotten in offices - most of them were deliberately sent to the trash, because they were simply too massive to keep around once they weren't needed anymore.

There were countless incompatible revisions of everything. If you want a working mainframe, you will need to scour high and low, far and wide to bring together hundreds of parts, largely unlabeled except for line noise like "10-1058A." Even the cables are so obscure that you will have to build them, not buy them. Some of the connectors were custom.

Nothing will work. You will need to read schematics in manuals that are not on the internet, then do board repairs at the component level. You will need to test single transistors and know how to tell if one is "injured," because they will not necessarily be entirely dead, nor will it be practical to bulk-replace them. You will make hours-long repairs that do not fix the problem. You simply cannot tinker one of these back to life; you will need to become a genuine expert.

You will end up with at least one full 19" rack; probably several. I know someone whose entire garage is currently occupied by a single computer. I do not believe anyone else has one of these. There is no room to move around it. It does not work, and if it did, it would require a 480V AC supply at an amperage that would be challenging to obtain at most warehouses.

Once you've done all this work and you get the thing to boot up, congratulations: it's very, very boring. Even the people who are into these things struggle to make them do anything. I was going to add some adjectives to that sentence, but that's really it.

Among one of my retrocomputing friend groups, the joke is that mainframes were for printing invoices. This is basically accurate. Generally, you can't sit down at a mainframe and "open a program," and if you can, it's going to be unspeakably austere: a blank terminal with a blinking cursor and a couple meaningless numbers at the top and bottom of the screen, considered a UI masterpiece for its time.

Most of the programs are also gone - 99% of the software that ever existed for these systems was bespoke, never left the company that developed it, and even if you get it, you'll probably be in the "Disk 5 of 10" situation, where it depends on external systems that no longer exist. You might manage to get a hold of the tape labeled "LITECORP ACCNTNG 1980 V1.6", but you aren't going to get the blank database that was handcrafted when the thing was first written, without which it can't run.

And even if you got all that... it probably just prints invoices. That's what these were for. All your bank branches or insurance agencies send a tape once a month with the output from the minicomputer that runs the terminals at everyone's desks, and then a clerk reads each one into the machine, it slurps up all the customer records, and then a "chain printer" begins spewing (literally) bills that will later be stuffed into envelopes and mailed out.

Very probably, this system had no UI other than "INSERT TAPE TO READ." If the software barfed, it probably dropped a physical trouble ticket* and a "Systems Analyst" (midcentury term for "devops thought lord") would either stare at the raw database or launch a debugger for some horrifying sludge language like PL360.

* This is artistic license - I don't know that the physical "ticket drop" ever occurred outside of the phone company.

I have very little firsthand experience with these, I admit, and I'm conflating stories from other people. But this seems to be the consensus among everyone I've known who used this kind of gear.

Likewise, supercomputers - a word that has inspired awe in nerds for decades - are absolutely mind-numbingly uninteresting. A supercomputer is basically a device which accepts 10GB of integers, sits spinning its fans for two days, and then spits out "10.582338." Scientists hoot and holler; this means something to them, but to nobody else.

Basically: retrocomputing mostly orbits devices that are easy, convenient, and immediately satisfying to collect and restore. In much the same way that people collect cars, but not so much semi trucks or locomotives, which have to be preserved by Organizations, I don't really see much discussion of what is to become of Big Iron. And then there's stuff even further beyond that.

There's that whole Youtube series about restoring the Apollo computer - which I think tailed off in viewership massively after one or two eps, because it turns out that, yeah, you talk to it in line noise and it just spits out a bunch of red LED digits. you can't, exactly, "play" with it, or even "use" it for anything other than landing a spaceship.

It's good someone's fixing that up. But let's go even further: Who's preserving the bowling alley computers?

I've been thinking about this for literally decades. Something drives all those monitors over the lanes that show the scores, and then the skiier wiping out when you whiff it. Nowadays they might be dedicated devices, but we can be absolutely certain that in 1995, there wasn't a video playback unit in every single one - and in 1990, there wasn't even a computer in every one.

They had to be terminals. But what kind? Obviously they were graphical, and they had those little custom keyboards. There almost certainly wasn't one dedicated computer per lane to talk to those things. My guess is that the screens were "graphical dumb terminals", if you will, and in the back room there was a minicomputer with 50 serial ports, half to talk to the keyboards, half to send proprietary drawing commands to the displays.

And then the video clips? Where did those come from? My guess is: Bank of five or six laserdisc players that get switched through to a display via some obnoxious serial-controlled matrix switcher whenever a clip needs to play.

The input from the lane sensors has to be some nightmarish spiderweb of 22 gauge wires tied into gigantic bundles that run from the mechanics into the backroom and terminate into some horrific 256-lane GPIO module.

And nobody knows anything about all of this, as far as I can tell. I'm making shit up from whole cloth because there are zero webpages about it. And as old lanes go out of business and get demolished, or upgrade to newer gear, you can be sure the old stuff is just being goldscrapped.

So what's the point of this rambling post? This: We are losing more than we are saving. How should we feel about this? What should we do?

Well, you can try to Paul Allen (founder of the living computer museum) the problem away. Become rich, or inveigle yourself with people who are rich, and begin traveling the world, collecting every scrap of every single machine that has ever been made and packing it all into a series of warehouses.

But then, where should you stop? If your warehouse contains System/360s, shouldn't it contain bowling alley computers? Why not traffic light controllers? Avionics from mid-80s Boeing jets? What computer isn't worth preserving? You can either keep absolutely everything, or set an arbitrary line somewhere.

Keeping absolutely everything is problematic. I've been to the warehouses of people who did this. The machines sit. Nobody is using them. They are inconvenient to dig out, and in uncertain condition. No one has the energy, time, and resources to get them all working (not to mention the fact that much of "fixing" old machines is really borrowing from peter to pay paul; eventually we will run out of machines with donor parts.)

If you do pick an arbitrary cutoff for what to keep, well, you're probably going to have to go with "is it interesting / unique / relevant." Can anyone alive now relate to it? Can it inform us in some way about the past, or give us ideas about how to improve the present? And can nothing else provide the same stimulus?

The problem is that once you do this... you're probably going to throw out a lot of those Unix workstations. What makes them special? Often, not very much. They're mostly "crappy linux." They mostly had very similar commands and similar UI, and mostly ran software that was either very austere, or "version 1 of a program that was ported near-identically to Windows NT in version 3." I have used several of them - SGIs, Suns, HP Apollos, AT&T Unix PCs, to name a few - and even the people who knew these machines intimately shrugged when I asked "what can I actually do on here, what makes this special." They admitted readily that the answer was "nothing, it kind of sucks."

Of course, one option is to simply accept all this in a "cosmic truth" sense. Yes, we are only preserving a fraction of what was made - but in 50 years, it will very probably all be dead. Why waste our lives struggling to preserve a past that is simply decaying? Do we really get that much out of it?

I think this touches on one of the big things that I struggle with when working on retrocomputing projects - what do you do with it once you've gotten it working? Sometimes you have something specific in mind, but otherwise you can end up staring at a terminal stumped.

It doesn't help that for most of these systems everything is just harder. You have to use ancient versions of software that may or may not work anything like their modern counterparts, or have manuals forgotten to time. Or you have to write everything yourself, on an interface that assumes you're working on a teletype in an archaic language and with all the constraints of a machine that is underpowered by orders of magnitude compared to what you're used to working on. That stuff all takes time, and energy, and research. And sometimes there's something you need that you don't have and can't get.

I have the advantage of having a father who worked with a lot of this stuff for decades to help, and even then his memory is only so good. I have an Alphaserver I'd love to bang around with, but even though it has somewhat usable specs and can run BSD (and OpenVMS, but that's a can of worms in and of itself), it's still a heavy, cranky old bastard with a shaky SCSI connection and sounds like death. I have an Intel SDK-86 I'd love to get running but it needs some replacement chips. Some of them are easy to come by. Some of them are not. And even if I get the damn thing running perfectly, what should I even do with it?

There's more to the preservation of computers than just the physical machines, running or not. There's the context of what they were meant for, what they did, and what they can do. Unfortunately, that's far and away the hardest thing to keep going.