this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Programmer Humor

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I'm trying out Obsidian for taking notes, and this made me laugh.

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[–] [email protected] 413 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Funny, but unironically a pretty good idea.

[–] [email protected] 124 points 10 months ago (3 children)

One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.

We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.

So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.

The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

My god that brought back memories. The first commands when sitting at a new terminal was always, always:

stty sane

stty erase '^H'

It was well into the 2000s before Unix had useable defaults.

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