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July 11, 2006
Usenet Gems
Before there was an 'internet' there was Usenet. Access was, I think, limited to members of the academic and professional scientific community. The content to noise ration was 1. It was, apparently, glorious. For those of us who were born too late, there are archives that preserve the best posts for... presented below is an excerpt from one of those:
The Story of Mel
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather (
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming
made the bald and unvarnished statement:
Read on...
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and “user-friendly” software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term “software” sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.
Posted by ashusta at July 11, 2006 01:14 PM