
Dennis Ritchie (R from K&R) explains "/* You are not expected to understand this */" - henning
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html
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noonespecial
Sometimes I think I was born at the wrong time. I sure would have loved to
hack in the bad old days of computing where the computer came with schematics
and you understood exactly (or had a good try of it) what the machine was
doing.

At least, I think I'd like it better than hoping that my motherboard can
authorize itself to the drm in my graphics card so the hi-def from my own
camera will play on my screen at more than 320x240.

~~~
henning
I'm sure they dreamed of a bright future where 1 Mhz, even 100 Mhz, machines
were common.

~~~
dkokelley
100Mhz?! Well now that would be nice but let's be reasonable here. :)

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soundsop
My favourite part is about the lack of memory protection on the multi-user
PDP-11/20:

 _When anyone was working on a program, it was considered a courtesy to yell
"A.OUT?" before trying it, to warn others to save whatever they were editing._

~~~
pmjordan
Hardware interrupt.

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lpgauth
Great read although I'm not sure I understand the assembly part :/

~~~
henning
Low-level machine hacks can be inscrutable even when the machine they're
implemented for is current. For instance, there's the infamous line from Quake
source code that reads:

    
    
        i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck?
    

People have tried to investigate the origin of this baffling hack and mostly
failed. See, e.g., <http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/> .

~~~
jmagar
That's one heck of a magic number...

The strangest one I've seen is the fast sqrt() function in SGI OpenGL source
code: there's a magic step where a right bit shift is applied to a 32bit IEEE
float.

(oops.. just clicked your link, looks like we're related)

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DaniFong
Is the Bob Morris he references rtm's dad?

~~~
pfedor
Yes. One of the original Unix guys.

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jmagar
Who visits Hacker News and doesn't know that "Dennis Ritchie" is the R in
"K&R"?

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pmjordan
Hooray for programmer folklore!

