Talk:1755: Old Days

2016-11-04T14:22:04Z

162.158.74.70:

[https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf Reflections on Trusting Trust] (pdf), Ken Thompson's acceptance speech for the 1984 Turing Award, in which he discusses creating a backdoor in the C compiler (yes, there was only 1 when he invented the language) that itself creates a second backdoor in the login program when it is compiled. Additionally, it reproduces itself when compiling the C compiler from un-tampered-with source code, so that anyone using the binary (compiled) compiler would be unable to avoid reproducing the backdoor in all its forms. This is the sort of thing that gives security programmers nightmares. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.168|108.162.221.168]] 04:52, 4 November 2016 (UTC) (bonsaiviking)

The "4-6 weeks" thing might be a reference to high-performance computing, in particular scientific calculations, a few decades back. From what I've heard from older people in my scientific field (I'm too young to have experienced it myself), you'd prepare your program on punch cards, mail these to an institution owning a fast computer (because your group or university didn't have one), and they'd run the program and mail the result back to you. This, I've been told, took a few weeks. Maybe someone with first-hand experience can give more information. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.98|141.101.104.98]] 10:34, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Source Code on Punched Cards: As an undergrad at Durham Uni I remember punching PL1 source code onto cards to be inserted into a batch queue to be compiled and run on an IBM360 at the nearby city of Newcastle, overnight.
[[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.160|141.101.98.160]] 11:57, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

At the risk of emulating Dilbert's "Topper", I remember at school writing programs on coding sheets (effectively squared paper; one character in each box), which would get sent to the local university, where they would be punched onto cards and run on the mainframe. The following week, you'd get your coding sheets back, plus the cards and the printout from your batch job. Then you'd make your corrections, also on coding sheets... [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.143|141.101.98.143]] 13:35, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm reminded of Frank Hayes' song, "When I Was a Boy": "And we programmed in ones and in zeroes / And sometimes we ran out of ones!" On a more serious note, C came out in the late seventies, and I was using punch cards as late as 1975. That's not "long" before, and I wouldn't be too surprised if there were C compilers that accepted punched card input. [[User:Gmcgath|Gmcgath]] ([[User talk:Gmcgath|talk]]) 12:27, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

I think the punched cards explanation is missing the point that C (or any language, that I know) didn't _require_ that it be on punched cards. I.e. there was nothing in the language specification that prohibited the program from being on paper tape, mag tape, disk, etc. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.70|162.158.74.70]] 14:22, 4 November 2016 (UTC)Pat

910: Permanence

2016-09-19T15:58:54Z

162.158.74.70: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 910
| date = June 10, 2011
| title = Permanence
| image = permanence.png
| titletext = This hostname is going in dozens of remote config files. Changing a kid's name is comparatively easy!
}}

==Explanation==

Choosing a name for a server is both an important and non-trivial task.
It is non-trivial enough that there are official communications on how to choose a good name and why many ideas are bad, for example [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1178.txt RFC 1178 Name Your Computer].
It is important to pick a good name because changing it is costly once many reference to the existing name are widespread. For example, RFC 1178 states:

<blockquote>
if you later decide to change a name (to something
sensible like you should have chosen in the first place), you
are going to be amazed at the amount of pain awaiting you. No
matter how easy the manuals suggest it is to change a name, you
will find that lots of obscure software has rapidly accumulated
which refers to that computer using that now-ugly name. It all
has to be found and changed. (...)
</blockquote>

So [[Cueball]] wants to make sure that he chooses a great ''permanent'' name, that he can give to the server he is running.

When [[Megan]] quips on how quickly Cueball named their daughter Caroline (a living being - that is, the type of entity that would give the server purpose), Cueball retorts that he was under pressure at the time: Megan tried to name said daughter "Epidural" in honor of {{w|epidural|the painkiller drugs that were being injected into her spine at the time}}. Megan tries to justify this by explaining that those were very good drugs, but thus also confirms Cueball in that she was drugged, not in her right mind, and thus not making good decisions (despite epidurals working by stopping nerves in the spinal cord from transmitting signals, and would not have an affect on the brain seen in someone given an opiate or narcotic. She may, however, have been motivated purely by the fact that the drug stopped the pain of labor or a cesarean section).

In the title text Cueball mentions that he thinks that it is easier to change a person's name than to change the hostname of a server because of the number of changes that would need to be made to each of the machines that would have saved the old name of the server. It seems, however, that Cueball has never had to wait in line at the Social Security Administration office or at the Department of Motor Vehicles, as both of those events typically take excruciatingly long amounts of time.

==Transcript==
:[A large panel the combined width of the four panels below it.]
:[A blue Linux terminal installer screen with a grey box that is labeled "[!]CONFIGURE THE NETWORK" in red. Below, in black, it reads "Please enter the hostname for the system." Below is an empty blue entry box with a cursor and dashed underscore, and below this it says "<GO BACK>".]

:[Cueball sits at his computer, Megan stands behind him.]
:Megan: You've been staring at that screen a while.
:Cueball: Picking a good server name is important.

:[Megan stares at him.]

:[She continues to stare.]

:[Cueball pushes his chair back, puts one elbow on the back of the chair and points with his other hand at the screen.]
:Megan: And yet you settled on "Caroline" for our daughter in like 15 seconds.
:Cueball: But this is a ''server!''
:Besides, I had to—you were trying to name her "epidural."
:Megan: Those ''were'' good drugs.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Linux]]

explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:1755: Old Days

910: Permanence