Code Open Source Programming

Thinking about Algol 68

I took my first computer science course in my second year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The course was a full year, starting in September 1974, and we programmed in Waterloo FORTRAN IV, which if memory serves was called Watfor or maybe Watfiv at the time. We also had a brief session with IBM 360 / 370 Assembler language. Both languages were available to us in the form of batch timeshare services where we wrote our programs on IBM 029 key punches and submitted the card decks to be run, generating printouts which were almost entirely compilation or execution failures interspersed with the occasional output of a program that generated the hoped-for results.

Chris Hermansen
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Linux Linux Philosophy

The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 22—Mentor the young SysAdmins

When I first started, I was a young and innocent SysAdmin. I was fortunate because I worked at a couple different jobs where other, seasoned SysAdmins were willing to mentor me and encourage me. None of them laughed at me when I asked what must have seemed to them to have answers that were blindingly obvious. None of these patient SysAdmins ever told me to RTFM.

David Both
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