PDP-11

And

my accounting teacher told me that PDP-11 was unhackable.

You could never break into it.

So- I proved him wrong and handed him the accounting final that I had, I had hacked and downloaded and printed out.

Yeah,

my high school had a PDP-11, it turns out, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, go Patriots.

I had a PDP-11 that was running RSTS, which was like Dex operating system, it wasn't even Unix.

The editor was a version of Tico, which was like the descendant of Emacs, right? So he was going to like amber terminals and stuff.

And it basically was like available to me for relatively uninterrupted blocks of time, like once a week.

Not quite.

Uh, what access did ASTRA have to the PDP-11, and what did it change in the C compiler to get ksh ported?

So it had, so I was porting the ksh shell, which is the newest, biggest shell that you've got a, any kind of reasonable hope-

Okay

... of running in 128K of address space-

Yeah

... which is what the PDP-11 has.

Because even if your machine has, like, four megabytes of memory, as mine does, only 64K of that can be code-

That was '85, '86.

On a Tele typewriter dialed in on a PDP-11 mini computer.

I don't know what the computer was, but, um...

Only thing I like about maids is their silky, lacy uniforms.

That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R.com/wired.

After a few years at Berkeley, I started to send out some of the software I had written, an instructional Pascal system, Unix utilities, and a text editor called Vi, which is still, to my surprise, widely used more than twenty years later, to others who had similar small PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers.

These adventures in software eventually turned into the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system, which became a personal success disaster.

So many people wanted it that I never finished my PhD.