103 points by todsacerdoti 4 days ago | 24 comments
lysace 4 days ago
The CD-ROM had this whole SNOBOL directory iirc. This CD-ROM was my entire world for like two years (until I got Internet access in 1995). I miss having oodles of time with zero pressure to do something that pays the bills.
It was like having this gigantic curated dump of collected, sometimes quite old information from a connected world I had no access to. It felt so weird. Like discovering ancient alien civilizations, with no information on how to decipher it all.
I think so many of us were so starved for information back then.
mindcrime 4 days ago
https://discmaster.textfiles.com/browse/10852/Simtel20_Sept9...
I was always partial to the CMU AI archive back in the day, and that stuff is still out there too:
lysace 4 days ago
Directory MSDOS/SNOBOL4/
Filename Type Length Date Description
==============================================
AISNOBOL.ARC B 286049 871217 SNOBOL language for MSDOS
AISNOBOL.TXT A 5750 871217 Description of files in AISNOBOL.ARC
VSNBL220.ZIP B 250971 920312 Vanilla SNOBOL4, PD vers. 2.20 of the language
VSNOBOL4.ARC B 258956 871217 Vanilla SNOBOL4, PD version of the language
VSNOBOL4.TXT A 5984 871217 Description of VSNOBOL4.ARC - Vanilla SNOBOL4
anthk 4 days ago
Debian used to ship tons of geeky lore, fun manuals, serious manuals, oddities here and there, weird languages, compilers and manuals...
sedatk 4 days ago
syndicatedjelly 4 days ago
8bitsrule 4 days ago
syndicatedjelly 4 days ago
I am not sure if I agree with this sentiment (the way forward in computing has arguably never been entirely clear), but I still am excited for the future
gustavopezzi 4 days ago
masto 3 days ago
One of the things I loved about that experience was that I got to try a ton of programming languages. They'd use anything under the sun if it had a useful feature. A lot of it was compiled BASIC, but it was also my first exposure to C, Lisp, APL, and... SPITBOL. Which was the boss's favorite.
It was a SNOBOL variant that they had a compiler for that ran on the 286 PCs of the day. I didn't write much, if anything, in it, but I remember the reason they liked it so much was because it had pattern matching features, kind of like how AWK and Perl made working with regexes trivial. The other memorable aspect as I recall was that every line of code could also contain not just one, but two GOTOs (I think one for success and one for failure), which made it a bit.. interesting.. to try to follow the flow.