Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.5

The 1.5 revision of Things Every Hacker Once Knew is out.

Alas, I had to drop the reference to the Space Cadet keyboard. Turns out it shipped a 32-bit status word and this had nothing to do with 9-bit bytes at all. The indirect reference to the SAIL extended ASCII keyboard is still in.

Patrick Maupin’s revelation about the AT prefix is summarized.

The fact that UUCP was a hack around the old two-tier structure of phone rates is mentioned.

There’s more about TTL serial. Gary Miller, my very hardware-savvy lieutenant and now acting lead on the GPSD project, thinks this didn’t become a common way to ship data off peripherals and daughterboards until after 2000, with GPS chips leading the way. This matches my recollection, but I was pretty oblivious about that sort of thing until the last decade so I don’t consider my recollection very good evidence. Commentary an correction invited.

I’d like to pin down the year cathode-ray tubes disappeared. I know the leading display vendors ceased production in 2005, but I think the transition might have been as much as two years sooner. Again, corrections welcomed.