Oh wow, really? I didn't look because I assumed mail over FTP was transferred over a separate data connection, just like other files. Thank you!
And yes, in August 01972 probably nobody at MIT had ever used ed(1) at Bell Labs. Not impossible, but unlikely; in June, Ritchie had written, "[T]he number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected." But nothing about it had been published outside Bell Labs.
The rationale is interesting:
> The 'MLFL' command for network mail, though a useful and essential addition to the FTP command repertoire, does not allow TIP users to send mail conveniently without using third hosts. It would be more convenient for TIP users to send mail over the TELNET connection instead of the data connection as provided by the 'MLFL' command.
So that's why they added the MAIL command to FTP, later moved to MTP and then in SMTP split into MAIL, RCPT, and DATA, which still retains the terminating "CRLF.CRLF".
> A Terminal Interface Processor (TIP, for short) was a customized IMP variant added to the ARPANET not too long after it was initially deployed. In addition to all the usual IMP functionality (including connection of host computers to the ARPANET), they also provided groups of serial lines to which could be attached terminals, which allowed users at the terminals access to the hosts attached to the ARPANET.
> They were built on Honeywell 316 minicomputers, a later and un-ruggedized variant of the Honeywell 516 minicomputers used in the original IMPs. They used the TELNET protocol, running on top of NCP.
The revenue cut for use of public streets is known as the "franchise fee." For the legacy cable companies, this was fixed by federal law in the 1980s at 5% of total revenue from cable television. For legacy phone companies, it varies by locality, but it's based on landline phone revenue.
There's a federal law from the 1990s banning any such taxes or fees from being charged on internet service, so cities don't collect anything based on that.
That overblamed decision was (a) specific to Michigan corporate law, and a reason why Ford reincorporated in Delaware shortly afterwards and (b) a finding that Ford had to pay dividends to its shareholders rather than reinvesting profits in expansion, which no modern court would require. Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs both cancelled dividends and nobody objected.
The story behind the lawsuit was that the Dodge brothers had just left Ford (then a private company) and they planned to use their dividends to start a competitor - which Ford suspected and which is the reason why the dividend was canceled.
At one point I stumbled onto a document from circa 1990 laying out a fairly coherent rationale - / was always a filesystem on the local machine while /usr could be a site-wide NFS share across many machines. Thus you got things like splitting off architecture-independent /usr/share from binary /usr/lib (because if you have a few different kinds of workstations, you'd want one /usr per architecture but /usr/share could be site-wide) and creating /sbin from binaries that had been in /etc from day one. Oh and they came up with /var (also possibly a network share) so /usr could be mounted read-only.
An interesting idea, but I have to figure the majority of Unix sites kept /usr on the local machine like always.
An LTO-9 tape cartridge can store 18 terabytes (they advertise 45 TB but that's with the built-in compression scheme and we want to compare raw bits to raw bits). One of these new 1.6 petabit discs would be just over 11 tapes, well under a station wagon.
Yeah I remember as a kid saving a file with Word 97, then opening it on a different computer with Word 95, and there was a box between every pair of characters. Looking back, it's clear that the internal representation had changed from an 8-bit encoding to UTF-16 but I learned to be careful to "save as Word 95" every time from then on.
A while back I read a piece by, I think, Joel Spolsky on the "design" of the XLS format. It was mostly a dump of Excel's internal memory structures to disk, with some optimizations to speed up saving and loading on the slow disks of the time. He seemed quite satisfied with how well the software performed but all I was thinking is "any other program trying to deal with those files is screwed." And "any other program" includes later versions of Excel.
It'd be nice to have some documentation of the internals of old DOC and XLS formats, just for the sake of recovering old files for archival purposes, but it's likely that Microsoft never bothered documenting them, even internally.
This is also true of DOC. It was just a dump of the internal representation of Word.
Hence why they had to completely overhaul it with DOCX/XLSX when we had the open standards requirements come in. There was no possible way for Microsoft to document it. Although it doesn't help that DOCX/XLSX have tags for "Internal binary dump of Word/Excel" so they also fall into the same trap.
We had a bunch of riots a couple of years ago, don't you remember? The match was lit, the fires (metaphorical and literal) burnt for a while, and then gradually everyone got bored and things went back to normal.
We need less of Richard Stallman and more of Matthew Garrett. Free software is good. Monomaniacal obsession with free software at the expense of literally everything else is why Stallman's allies are few and far between.
During our last extended (3 day) power outage, I was surprised to learn that even though I have all of my gear on a very large UPS, the cable network also ceases to function after a few hours. Local nodes apparently only have backup power for a short time. To their credit, I saw Comcast deploying small gas generators to nearby street poles the next day.
The cell network, on the other hand, continued working without a hiccup. This might have been because the nearest cell tower still had power, but even if it didn't, I'd assume that I'd just be able to connect to the nearest in-range tower that _did_ have power.
We had the same thing for a couple days recently as well. I actually went and topped off the generator in the morning as the cable company had let it run out of gas. I believe it is a regulation in being they provide phone service over their coax internet, and there are 911 requirements.
All of this, plus the lower noise floor during an outage means you can probably get usable signal from towers that would ordinarily be useless.
The cable network _should_ have many hours of backup, but they don't take it as seriously as the telephone network. Was built for entertainment, after all, so it doesn't have reliability in its core engineering.
