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How we're perceived elsewhere...

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Terri Kennedy

Terri Kennedy

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Al Kossow said the following about us, after someone posted a "poking the bear" post (but that which in no way was directed at him):

Al Kossow (SIMH mailing list) said:
Join https://forum.vcfed.org/

which is filled with marginally informed people who love to argue about this and your previous ranting point.
Click to expand...

The exact link (which may have been removed by the list moderator by now) is here.

We seem to have everyone here, from people who have just discovered old computers to the people who designed and programmed them back in the day.

We can have a somewhat intense difference of opinion about why bit 3 in some CSR behaves the way it does, but eventually someone who designed the controller and someone else who wrote the operating system driver will drop by to explain things.
 

Why I Stopped Arguing With People

I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected...
wangcong.org

I didn't write it.
 
He's not wrong. We're all here as post-life support and development folks and there is absolutely a lot more of us who are messing with both hardware and code without a sliver of formal training, either because we don't need it for tinkering or because we know enough to be dangerous. This isn't nekochan.net where 20 years ago most of the userbase was still active Irix administrators and developers. A lot of stupid code things came up and were quickly knocked down by people who knew how it worked. I remember the time someone found a bug in fsck that would hard lock a system and SGI actively reached out and made a patch.

Now you are post-support and the SGI community has determined the way forward is to replace swmgr and INST with a debian-like package manager because they paid $700 for an Octane and don't know how to use a command line. Like I said: passionate, know enough to be dangerous and lacking proper ethics.

These forums are still sane enough that I trust it a lot more than any of the other vintage computing communities and respect it enough to only occasionally have to deal with moderator intervention. ;)

I was not aware simh was still being faithfully maintained. I recall something happened between the lead supporters and the lead dev, there was a mutiny, they used the ability to fork code because I find Github reeks of that passive-aggressive Millennial "Well I'll write the code how I think it should be....and it will have blackjack and hookers!" and it split off in two different ways that are not entirely compatible.
 
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There's a lot of really bright people here who were actually there in the past, and built the foundations on which we stand!

...but I've also seen the advice, "just stuff a pack in it and hit LOAD" here.

n00bs can't improve if they're shut out.
 
Well, I used "franken-PDPs" in grad school (box by one 3rd party, CPU from DEC, memory from another, DLV-11J from someone else, and a whole bunch of other stuff like A/D, IEEE488, parallel, counter/timer, etc), and learned enough about RT-11 to get it all working together. Saved most of it from the dumpster. I guess I'm "marginally informed", and I'd like to think I know enough to be dangerous!
 
glitch said:
n00bs can't improve if they're shut out.
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I think this is one of the most important points. We don't immediately go from being completely new to this hobby to experts in a day.

The meta-hobby as a whole, as it's spread out across the globe and the web is full of various overlapping realms of hard-won experience, book knowledge, first hand sources, enthusiastic hobbyists, software crackers, demosceners, various hackers (both the new and old definitions), former sysadmins, and younger folks who just got their hands on their first 8-bit machine. We gotta do our best to share what we know, and try not to be condescending with folks, but also be direct when someone is about to jump into an ocean riptide when they're only just getting used to the kiddie pool.

I don't know everything, you don't know everything, but together we might just fix a few old computers, preserve some software, and maybe teach an old CPU new tricks.
 
When I started collecting computers people looked at me like I was nuts.

Being marginally informed these days is like being in the top 10% I would think.
 
I have a lot of patience for people who are taking the time to learn something new. I have a lot less patience for people whose reaction to being offered advice (after asking for advice!) is to come up with a long justification for why they won't follow the advice, or whose reaction to being gently corrected is to start a fight, and I'm not always perfect at guessing beforehand who fits into which category. I'm definitely over those guys, though probably not as much as Al is. I have days where it's easier or harder to just roll my eyes when confronted with a forum jerk loudly and at great length defending a vacuous opinion, as opposed to letting it get under my skin.
 
Terri Kennedy said:
Al Kossow said the following about us, after someone posted a "poking the bear" post (but that which in no way was directed at him):
Click to expand...
I think it's a bit unfair to post this without the complete context. A rather immature user was derailing the list with rants about AI and the market value of a PDP-11. These types of threads would not be out of place here.
 
The Monty Python argument sketch is often applicable in these situations!
 
cbscpe said:
You should understand that Dr. Forbin has some reservations against AI, as the designer of Colossus he is perfectly aware of the risks of AI.
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Do you mean Al or AI? As in, Al Kossow, or Artificial Intelligence?
I can't tell if we're making a joke about the ambiguous font here, or if there is a genuine mix-up in progress.
 
This thread should be in "Off Topic" or "Humor". Doesn't have anything to do with DEC computers, does it?
 
syzygy said:

Why I Stopped Arguing With People

I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected...
wangcong.org

I didn't write it.
Click to expand...
no but you brought it to our attention and I'm very glad you did, thank you. I have this very problem and this will help me a lot.
 
"Dr. Forbin" was the fictional inventor of the, what we might now call true AI, Colossus, a doomsday failsafe system to manage the US cold war nuclear arsenal. Of course there was the Soviet equivalent, who's name escapes me at the moment, and they link up to control the world.
 
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