Ole Fossils [ was Re: [CentOS] ls and rm: "argument list too long"]

[P.R.Schaffner at IEEE.org (Phil Schaffner)]

On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 14:19 -0400, Ed Westphal wrote:
> Forgive my senility, but I'm continually amazed how many of us ole 
> fossils are still around, and running Linux! Not to use up too much 
> bandwidth, but the switch from Fortran 2 to 2D, for disk, was a big 
> event way back when. Then Fortran 4 came around! Be still my old
> heart!

WAY OT, but since the thread has already been hijacked, can't resist a
trip down memory lane...

Ah yes, how fondly I remember running FORTRAN from punched tape on the
Data General Nova "minicomputer".  At least it was not prone to dropping
the 80-column card deck and having to re-sort it.  Then we got the 8"
hard-sector floppy drive.  Luxury!  Still had to boot it up with the
correct sequence of flips of the front panel switches, but actually had
somewhere to save output data as well as load programs - up to 256KB.
Did real-time data acquisition using an 8-bit A/D and ran fast Fourier
transforms to get frequency domain responses using ASCII graphics on a
printer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Nova

Seem to remember an "old farts" thread on this list a while back, so I
guess "ole fossils" sounds a bit better. :-)

Phil