{"id":27292,"date":"2017-02-05T10:13:11","date_gmt":"2017-02-05T08:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/?p=27292"},"modified":"2017-02-05T10:13:11","modified_gmt":"2017-02-05T08:13:11","slug":"things-every-hacker-once-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2017\/02\/05\/things-every-hacker-once-knew\/","title":{"rendered":"Things Every Hacker Once Knew"},"content":{"rendered":"<!-- google_ad_section_start -->\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/esr\/\">Eric Raymond<\/a> goes over a few <a href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/esr\/faqs\/things-every-hacker-once-knew\/\">things every hacker once knew<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don\u2019t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.<\/p>\n<p>This is knowledge every fledgling hacker used to absorb through their pores. It\u2019s nobody\u2019s fault this changed; the obsolescence of hardware terminals and the near-obsolescence of the RS-232 protocol is what did it. Tools generate culture; sometimes, when a tool becomes obsolete, a bit of cultural commonality quietly evaporates. It can be difficult to notice that this has happened.<\/p>\n<p>This document is a collection of facts about ASCII and related technologies, notably hardware terminals and RS-232 and modems. This is lore that was at one time near-universal and is no longer. It\u2019s not likely to be directly useful today &#8211; until you trip over some piece of still-functioning technology where it\u2019s relevant (like a GPS puck), or it makes sense of some old-fart war story. Even so, it\u2019s good to know anyway, for cultural-literacy reasons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The article goes over:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Hardware context<\/li>\n<li>The strange afterlife of the outboard modem<\/li>\n<li>36-bit machines and the persistence of octal<\/li>\n<li>RS232 and its discontents<\/li>\n<li>UUCP, the forgotten pre-Internet<\/li>\n<li>Terminal confusion<\/li>\n<li>ASCII<\/li>\n<li>Key dates<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Found via a couple of other interesting bits &#8211;<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/utcc.utoronto.ca\/~cks\/space\/blog\/unix\/CarriageReturnWhatFor\">What we still use ASCII CR for today (on Unix)<\/a> and<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/utcc.utoronto.ca\/~cks\/space\/blog\/unix\/HowUnixBackspaces\">How Unix erases things when you type a backspace while entering text<\/a>.<\/p>\n<!-- google_ad_section_end -->\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<!-- google_ad_section_start -->\n<p>Eric Raymond goes over a few things every hacker once knew. One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don\u2019t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it. This is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2017\/02\/05\/things-every-hacker-once-knew\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Things Every Hacker Once Knew<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<!-- google_ad_section_end -->\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Things Every Hacker Once Knew #UNIX #Linux #history","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,6,18,133,62],"tags":[3079,1228,286,253],"keyring_services":[],"class_list":["post-27292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-linux","category-programming","category-sysadmin","category-technology","tag-eric-raymond","tag-geek-culture","tag-history","tag-unix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":26861,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2016\/11\/08\/ascii-vs-ansi\/","url_meta":{"origin":27292,"position":0},"title":"ASCII vs. ANSI","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"November 8, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Browserling does it again: For those of you not old enough, here are the ASCII and ANSI Wikipedia pages. \u00a0Back in a day we used these for cool art, fancy user interfaces, email signatures, games and more. \u00a0Have a look at some cool examples of ASCII art. \u00a0Now imagine those\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/ascii-ansi.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":13408,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2010\/09\/17\/typewriter-an-ascii-art-parent\/","url_meta":{"origin":27292,"position":1},"title":"Typewriter &#8211; an ASCII art parent","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"September 17, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I've known about ASCII art forever. \u00a0I came across it even before I first connected to the Internet. \u00a0And while I new it was an old concept, I never knew how old it was. \u00a0Apparently, ASCII art\u00a0predecessor was typewriter art. \u00a0Wikipedia has this to say: Since 1867 typewriters have been\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/ascii_house-375x500.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":26983,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2016\/11\/27\/top-29-books-on-amazon-from-hacker-news-comments\/","url_meta":{"origin":27292,"position":2},"title":"Top 29 books on Amazon from Hacker News comments","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"November 27, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I came across this nice visualization of \"Top 29 books ranked by unique users linking to Amazon in Hacker News comments\". Amazon product links were extracted and counted from 8.3M comments posted on Hacker News from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015. Most of these are, not surprisingly, on programming and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"hacker-news-books","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/hacker-news-books-500x169.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7936,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2004\/09\/21\/ascii-generator\/","url_meta":{"origin":27292,"position":3},"title":"ASCII Generator","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"September 21, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"The times of ASCII as a widely used text format are mostly gone by now. Web is all multimedia. Emails are pretty often HTMLed. Books are in MS Word format or some ebook crap. Documentation is PDFed. Some people do use ASCII (plain text), but they are getting less and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":28579,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2018\/05\/14\/hacker-news-what-are-your-favorite-terminal-programs\/","url_meta":{"origin":27292,"position":4},"title":"Hacker News : What are your favorite terminal programs?","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"May 14, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"This Hacker News thread is full of useful and cool command line applications.\u00a0 Check them out, if you want to challenge or change your fingertip memory.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":27386,"url":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2017\/03\/05\/terminals-are-sexy\/","url_meta":{"origin":27292,"position":5},"title":"Terminals Are Sexy","author":"Leonid Mamchenkov","date":"March 5, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Terminals are sexy is a\u00a0curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins & resources for CLI lovers. \u00a0There is plenty of links to applications, plugins and configurations. \u00a0For me personally, the most useful one was the link to sensible Bash configuration.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;All&quot;","block_context":{"text":"All","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/terminals-are-sexy-500x216.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27292"},{"taxonomy":"keyring_services","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/keyring_services?post=27292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}