He regularly attends BSD conferences like BSDCan and EuroBSD.
He's one of the nicest guys I've ever met. Its always nice when you meet your heroes and they are amazing people.
pengaru 3 hours ago [-]
If you're a McKusick fan, there's a series of recordings from his classroom lectures about operating systems. I saw some on VHS ages ago in a group setting. They were quite amusing from what I recall, for such an otherwise dry subject.
Looks nice, too bad though it doesn't expose any sort of RSS/Atom feed, if I can't add it to my feed reader I'll soon forget about it.
benrutter 10 hours ago [-]
Ah, that's a shame! I was about to look for the RSS feed too - especially since the cross-over of people who'd be into this comic series and rss/atom is probably pretty large.
pbronez 6 hours ago [-]
Sent a PR for this. Vibecoded, we'll see if the author finds that helpful or insulting...
One of these days I need to write up my non-mythology version of the BSD story and dispel some of the popular retcons.
meekins 3 hours ago [-]
Mind sharing some dispel magic here?
happosai 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of people in fediverse would enjoy these. Consider creating an account on techub.social or any of the other tech/foss oriented mastodon instances.
lioeters 13 hours ago [-]
Love this. The human touch of illustration, and classic stories from computer history. I'm going through the entire series up to now, it's great.
Neat. Found an issue in chapter 3, first sentence says electronic computers were during WWII, but they were electro-mechanical… they used relays. Vac tubes came later, ENIAC was finished after the war finished, for example.
rjsw 12 hours ago [-]
Colossus used valves.
defrost 12 hours ago [-]
They're likely thinking of Zuse's Z3 of 1938 rather than the somewhat later Max Newman / Tommy Flowers build of 1941-1943.
lproven 7 hours ago [-]
It's cute, but why is it a comic? The comic adds nothing to the narrative. It's a tweet-length text history with illustrations, not a comic in the sense of comic strip as medium.
embedding-shape 7 hours ago [-]
The website is fosscomics.com, they're all comics? They're comics because the author(s) wanted to create comics, not sure how this would be hard to grasp.
Most documentaries could be blog posts people can read in 10-15 minutes, yet the medium persists. A mystery? Probably not.
Gud 10 hours ago [-]
Bill Joy, the unsung hero of the computer revolution.
jolmg 17 hours ago [-]
> bundling the Pascal system with ex, a line editor developed from em.
> By the way, 'em' stands for 'editor for mortals' - I christened it that after Ken Thompson visited our lab at QMC while I was developing it and said something like: "yeah, I've seen editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them, I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing".
Literally an insane opinion.
tosti 15 hours ago [-]
To be fair, I sometimes edit files with ed. Especially the ones I've seen hundreds of times (eg /etc/ssh/sshd_config).
Nowadays we're dealing with orders of magnitude more code. Back in the day it would've been fine for the programs you wrote yourself.
stackghost 13 hours ago [-]
>Back in the day it would've been fine for the programs you wrote yourself.
I mean, maybe if your code was simple enough that you could keep the entire state in your head at once, but we're talking about guys writing memory management routines and OS kernels. In C. With no LSP, no syntax highlighting, no linting, etc.
It's one thing to say "my hardware is too limited, I can't fit all that extra context into memory", but to be working with that tech stack and to say "I actively choose not to see the context around the line of code I am editing at this instant in time" is just obtuse, no matter how many programming languages you've invented.
tcnevin 8 hours ago [-]
I like this. Not sure if it matters too much but reverse order made me pause.
BikiniPrince 17 hours ago [-]
It absolutely needs like 52 panels. I hope they integrate some politics by panel 1025.
analog8374 4 hours ago [-]
Good comic. Good drawing etc.
BiscuitEater546 11 hours ago [-]
Good I like it
Rendered at 20:09:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Coding in visual mode would be no fun at all on a Tek 4014¹. It's a vector storage tube and can't selectively remove characters from the screen.
Should have drawn an ADM-3A².
¹ https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/4014
² https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:Lear_Siegler_...
* https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/sbin/restore?id=2cefae4c...
https://github.com/joone/fossbook/pull/8
My favorite panel so far: What is a real programmer? https://fosscomics.com/posts/6.%20The%20Origin%20of%20the%20...
Most documentaries could be blog posts people can read in 10-15 minutes, yet the medium persists. A mystery? Probably not.
What's em? I thought it was developed from ed.
Literally an insane opinion.
Nowadays we're dealing with orders of magnitude more code. Back in the day it would've been fine for the programs you wrote yourself.
I mean, maybe if your code was simple enough that you could keep the entire state in your head at once, but we're talking about guys writing memory management routines and OS kernels. In C. With no LSP, no syntax highlighting, no linting, etc.
It's one thing to say "my hardware is too limited, I can't fit all that extra context into memory", but to be working with that tech stack and to say "I actively choose not to see the context around the line of code I am editing at this instant in time" is just obtuse, no matter how many programming languages you've invented.