[Sluglug] 10 reasons I hate U(nix)

[cerise at armory.com]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 10:47:15PM -0800, Peter Belew wrote:
> The first Unix versions were run on the PDP-7, which has a quite
> different architecture from the later PDP-11 - 18-bit words,
> no byte addressing (in fact, Digital hadn't started to use the word
> 'byte' yet - an IBM coinage somewhat disparaged by the
> anti-IBM users of DEC machines of the day - note that
> networking folks dating back to that time tend to say 'octet'
> rather than 'byte'). 

   It's my experience that the current crop of networking folk still
have that term -- they don't talk about IPv4 addresses as 4 bytes long.

> (Another aside, further afield - speaking of the 36-bit big-endian
> IBM machines like the 704 - their instruction set and registers
> inspired the CAR and CDR keywords of LISP, first implemented
> by John McCarthy on a 704 - 'Contents of Address Register'
> and 'Contents of Decrement Register'.)

   It should be noted that in Scheme, Steele and Sussman paid homage by
using car and cdr.  However cadr, cddr, cdar, and other constructions
matching the regex 'c[ad][ad]*r' were not influenced by hardware.

-Phil/CERisE