I'm old enough to remember the days of Telnet and Gopher. Back then, Telnet was key in the early "MUDs" (text-based, multiplayer games). MEAT MUD and Looney MUD were my favorites, but I honestly must have tried over 100. I sometimes wonder how much of the old "Telnet Internet" still exists from 30 years ago.
Having played MUDs as a preteen, I dabbled again in them a few years ago when I found some Spanish language servers. Thought it might be an interesting way to practice Spanish.
Ended up on mud.balzhur.org:5400 where I befriended a blind Venezuelan guy.
And after a while I soon realized that everyone on the server was probably blind.
Pretty fascinating.
I logged in just the other day and saw that he still plays daily. I want to talk to him again, but I need to go through the noob tutorial to remember how to do anything.
There are some clients which are just packed up libre MUD clients with sound and music triggered on actions/words.
Yes, there are tons of blind people playing them, altough several of them prefer either text adventures, fighting games or adapted pokémon for emulators.
I suspect all the active muds remaining have significant blind cohorts. The one I play has at least a dozen blind or severely vision impaired users, which is very disproportionate in a population of only a few hundred.
It makes you wonder if some of them preceded the whole CR/LF convention.
If I understand correctly, with a true mechanical teletype CR only returns the print head to the start of the line, and LF only advances the paper by one line. If you want to move your cursor to the start of the first line you have to send both, but there's no reason for the teletype to care about their order.
That's almost correct. The order matters to an extent inasmuch as for the older paper terminals one had to delay after sending a CR in order to let the print head actually travel. So it wasn't LF+CR, but actually LF+CR+delay. In the other order it would have had to be CR+delay+LF.
MUDs didn't precede the CR+LF convention, because that convention (if memory serves) pre-dates the Internet itself by a few years. However, it wasn't the case that CR and LF separately had the individual functions that they commonly had a decade or so later. Sometimes, for example, LF on its own was newline, or CR had to be simulated with lots of BSes.
The thing about TELNET is that in 1983 it explicitly specified an abstract Network Virtual Terminal and was definite about what newlines should be for it. See RFC 854. Anything TELNET-based was supposed to operate to that abstraction, not take advantage of the fact that sometimes LF+CR worked on real terminals. An NVT wasn't a real terminal. All of the delays and what the characters really did was supposed to be hidden by the abstraction.
After all, if you're not controlling a mechanical print head, then LF+CR vs CR+LF should always land you immediately in same place anyways because you're just moving the pointer around a virtual grid.
So it makes sense to get it wrong in 1998 since you're post-teleprinter while also in the early days of the convention becoming crystalized.
Unfortunately many older mud servers (diku? Rom?) started with the wrong \\n\\r and codebases spawned from them just continued.
Very few send the proper \\r\\n
So yet another of many places where one just has to know that the RFC does not match the real world. An interesting test case for my state machine. But I can see the dragon in the proper colours, now.
I met the developer who was responsible when I was employed by Amazon. He was trying to reply to an email, but I believe it was a "reply all" (if I recall the details of the story correctly) and the list was massive. Meanwhile, people on that same massive list were also doing a "reply all" to submit their feedback or reply that the email didn't apply to them. Massive email storm resulted. He didn't give all the details but he was ear-to-ear grinning as he told us the story.
A key indicator I've seen in past companies was when "top skill" or "top manager" level people suddenly submit their resignation and then spend two weeks calmly walking around the office with an ear-to-ear grin. Not too long after that, whisperings of "Why?" start circulating. And shortly after that, I got an upbeat email from HR about "Exciting new company direction" and "Rethinking our core strategies for better customer alignment." In all seriousness, shake-ups and re-alignments are frightening and kill everyone's morale with fears of uncertainty.
I've been an avid reader almost my whole life. Since 2010, I've had a 90-minute commute to/from work each day. I can't afford satellite radio, and regular radio gets old very quickly. I initially started saving podcasts to my iPod and playing those, then I started ripping audiobooks from the library and listening to those. I also have an Audible subscription. That's three hours a day of "reading", per se, and I typically listen to 2-4 books a month that way.
I agree with the value of audio books! I have always been an avid reader (probably 20+ books a year) and I am the author of 24 books - but, when I started using Audible and listening to other audio books from the public library my 'reading' time increased a lot.
I enjoy reading blogs on the web and social media on HN and Reddit, but I find I generally get more from books on computer science, philosophy, spirituality, science fiction, cooking, etc.
EDIT: I would like to add that I also feel fine starting a book and not finishing it. This is especially true with technical books when I realize that only some of the covered topics are interesting/useful to me. This allows me to be exposed to more ideas.
How do you do find non-fiction to be on audio? The couple of times I tried it I found that all the unnecessary words give me too much time to be distracted. Works great for me for fiction, and I'm hoping I just had bad luck I'm my initial non-fiction selections ...
Technical writing/Technical Communication. Throughout my IT career, I've always been "the guy who documents everything". It's actually my favorite part of my job because I feel like I'm adding a layer of structure and peer reference to what is otherwise chaos and tribal knowledge.
would love to know your path into it. part of my job now is to mitigate the frictions between views of devs and users but not nearly enough for me. instead i have to code a lot (which i am not too good at).
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