[NCLUG] 3 quick items to get our brains moving again...

[Brian Sturgill]

1) A "new" open source operating system, "Plan 9". It's actually been
around for quite a while.
This was a creation of Rob Pike, et. al. at Bell Labs. It was a research
project trying to take UNIX
in new directions. It has been very influential. For example, Linux's /proc
comes from there.
Plan 9 comes from the movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space".
I was fortunate enough to have access to the source code when I was an
undergraduate.
Nokia has released the source code into a Plan 9 Foundation as open source.
https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/plan-9-bell-labs-cyberspace/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=topic%20optin&utm_campaign=awareness&utm_content=20210410%20prog%20nl&mkt_tok=MTA3LUZNUy0wNzAAAAF8W7QIT-zcRA8jCVRj9bqfboZlYvJflAiUYTW-mgYa3pppkS9BiUf99z_oap6b5uMq-ranUiakj1lFSHLq8ZE0wjK8IhV4LaoO-oxpvZLaEZOsQQ

2) So Rust is starting to be used in Linux source code. Linus hasn't bought
in fully yet.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-on-where-rust-will-fit-into-linux/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=topic+optin&utm_campaign=awareness&utm_content=20210410+prog+nl&mkt_tok=MTA3LUZNUy0wNzAAAAF8W7QIT8Uhc026uMoZjPJiMQkikBjUN8jTVWUPVQt847OCY29aSSVYsmsmGpJrPaee_g6yiEMArh72z1NFh4Nm-D5D0OjFb_6CF9T1a-Mrp2-teA

3) In case some of you don't know. Donald Knuth is a famous Computer
Scientist.
He is writing here about John Von Neumann's first computer program.
JVN (also a famous mathematician) was the principal architect of the EDVAC,
the first computer where the program as well as the data was stored in
"memory". That is essentially the only architecture around today and is
frequently referred to as the Von Neumann Model of Computing.
The EDVAC was released to the government in 1949 and was finally
decommissioned in 1962.
The interesting thing in the article is that it is recognizable as what we
now call a computer.
There are oddities though. Memory is not random access. The processor
spends much of its time
idling waiting for the data to become available, much like modern
processors do when there are cache misses (which is frequent).
Anyway, if you've ever programmed at the assembly language level, you might
find this interesting.
http://public.callutheran.edu/~reinhart/CSC521/Week3/KnuthVonNeumann.pdf

-- 

Brian