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The Story of Unix - Chapter Ω: The Captains All Jumped Ship

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There used to be this philosophy, that some people called an Operating System, ... The people who came up with the idea weren't so besotted with it as those who followed and they set out to do it better. That was called Plan-9 from Bell Labs . Ever since the Unix ship has just been sailing around, who knows where? Don't ask any of the crew. And Plan-9 ? Unix came with a new programming language and a new way to write programs, by composing them together using shell scripts. Plan-9 didn't . The Viewpoints Research Institute STEPS project was the sort of thing Plan-9 needed, but Viewpoints was terminated in 2018.  See Condensing Programs for more on functional components. See also these parts of the STEPS project: KScript and KSWorld: A Time-Aware and Mostly Declarative Language and Interactive GUI Framework by Yoshiki Ohshima, Aran Lunzer, Bert Freudenberg and Ted Kaehler and Open, extensible composition models (extended abstract) by Ian Piumarta. Douglas Hofstadter gave...
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CuriousMarc - Taking Apart an HP 16702 Logic Analyzer

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These things ran HP/UX : 7:05 Lamenting the software issues. It's because we never figured out how to write programs. People were too busy building fancy hardware to run garbage code. Eventually they gave up and now they build fancy hardware to run garbage LLMs that generate shit-loads of garbage code. It's good for business! [See Robot Languages and Robot Languages - Another Part ]. Part 2: Applying HP sauce to the PS/2 Model 77: Part 3:  Part 4: See https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker-mca   The full series of videos on this is here .  Subscribe to CuriousMarc . IBM's Micro Channel was their last-ditch attempt to regain a monopoly on PCs ( 30:43 ):  There was also the RS/6000 though: Subscribe to Asianometry .
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Lindsey Kuper - Interpreters Everywhere!

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My comment : This sounds a bit crazy to me. Why do you want distributed computing to depend on particular endpoints? I don't want my messages to be delivered to some particular machine, I want them to be delivered to me. So why do I have to maintain particular machines to receive messages? And the same goes for companies that are accepting orders from customers etc. etc. It just seems like people are stuck in a rut thinking about programming as something you do to make a machine do some particular thing, but it doesn't have to be like that. [Aha, that's what this bit is about: 45:55 .] Subscribe to ACM SIGPLAN .  See also  Ian McKellar on Fuchsia .
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Daniel Tubbenhauer on More Interesting things about Representations of Lie Groups

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It  turned out the whole theory of Fourier Series is one particular instance of a general theorem about Representations of Compact Groups. See Peter-Weyl Theorem  and Pontryagin duality . See also  Dual Spaces, Lie Groups and Conservation Laws .  Subscribe to Daniel Tubbenhauer .  Sam Ritchie on a computer algebra system https://emmy.mentat.org/ inspired by Functional Differential Geometry by Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom.  Subscribe to Strange Loop . Owen Lynch with some ideas on how to do computer algebra that get at this idea of generic operations that Gerald Sussman likes so much, and I think they are also why he doesn't have much time for statically typed languages. In a sense types are least fixed points and generic operations and general algebras are greatest fixed points. See How Could One Unify CMU and MIT  and David Jaz Maiers - Compositionality via 2-algebra . See his blog post  Algebraic geometry for the working progra...
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Daniel Strübig on Pipewire Audio

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This was from ADC2024 but only posted on YouTube in August last year: Somebody made a whole operating system and a GUI for Pipewire: https://github.com/dimtpap/coppwr . See  Using Pipewire to Make A Music Synthesizer  and the greatly expanded examples https://docs.pipewire.org/examples.html . A talk at FOSDEM in 2025 by Wim Taymans: PipeWire state of the union .  I came here after seeing a bit of Ian McKellar on Fuchsia  and Chris Ford on Birdsong . Subscribe to ADC . 
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Chris Ford on Birdsong

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He has some interesting remarks to make about birdsong as culture. For example that the birds need to hear other birds in order to learn how to sing.  Subscribe to Strange Loop . Hunter Adams on a birdsong synthesizer and Jack Chaney and Arielle Huang on a tuning system with spectrum analyser: See their project web site: https://ece4760.github.io/Projects/Fall2025/aph74_jbc282/index.html . Subscribe to V. Hunter Adams .  Also, the Cornell Merlin project has a neural network for birdsong recognition that you can use on a Raspberry pi to recognise birds in the field: See this Hackaday post  Track Bird Visitors With A Raspberry Pi And A USB Mic . Subscribe to Teddy Warner . Back at Cornell, Ann Xu, Amy Wang, and Minjung Kwon made a fiendishly complicated spatial audio murder mystery game on a Rasperry Pi Pico: See the project page here .  Subscribe to V. Hunter Adams .
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Ian McKellar on Fuchsia

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Aspects of this sound weirdly familiar , ... See https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/software_model . I was in a jail in Louisiana watching awful Halloween movies while this conference was going on. Subscribe to Strange Loop .
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Desert Living in Arizona and Texas

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Subscribe to  Dustups . My comment : I was just looking at Shaun's latest video today and you can see he has so much land upstream that he can't break the flow before it gets into a wash then it's unstoppable. He needs a dozen people doing what Brandon does to stop the sheet flow before it gets into the wash. Subscribe to Grow Tree Organics . Brad's books in English and in Spanish: https://www.harvestingrainwater.com/shop/ . Subscribe to Brad Lancaster . 
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Janet Axelrud with a Message from Her Grandmother Vita

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She's also starting up her creative writing coaching again: Subscribe to Curious Wandering Souls .
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Symbolics-ology

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It's what big tech might have been,...   Give or take an infinity of REPLs. See  Nada Amin - Metacircular Interpretation ad infinitum .  Subscribe to Laurie Wired . Subscribe to Kalman Reti .  There's some of the fraught MIT origin story of this company in the Epilogue to Steven Levy's book Hackers . See  How to Write An Emulator .  42:24 A 1988 Apple Macintosh that sold for $15,000, ...  44:30 See transcript at:  AI: Expert Systems Pioneer Meeting Session 1: Purpose, Structure, and Introductions and  CHM Releases New Recordings and Personal Stories with AI Expert Systems Pioneers.   Subscribe to Asianometry .
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