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Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 05, 21:36

drac wrote:The PDP-11 was one of the best of the computers of that era - at least from a programmer's viewpoint.

From the viewpoint of a 14-year-old who played on one once upon a time (via one of those mad super-wide DECWriter things), I couldn't agree more. Until I discovered the VAX, that is.

drac wrote:I would think that would make it a negative example of that time.

To the contrary, contextually the tales are told from the viewpoint of people running away from Florence to hide from the plague. The stories they tell are actually rather bawdy (as is much literature from the time, contrary to popular impression), and as counterpoint to Dante's Divine Comedy (now that one's a bit depressing), Boccaccio's work is considered the Human Comedy - and it is indeed a real comedy - a major influence on Chaucer, anon. (The stories actually number around a hundred told, collectively, by 10 Florentine youngsters... hence the name.)

In case you're wondering why someone who claims to have been a philosophy major (in a previous life) would know so much about literature, it's just considered as part of the required curriculum... one cannot read the Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky and not feel one has been whacked on the head by a lifetime of theology... nor can one lightly fleece Proust's Remembrance of Things Past without dying a little one's self beneath the weight of time as conceived in his memory; as the most important man ever to have lived (in my meagre opinion), Montaigne loved to paraphrase Cicero by repeating "to philosophise is to learn how to die" to anyone who would listen. Needs be that one reads the ponderously pedantic "proper" philosophy as well, but those books speak of knowledge - not of life. Life is literature.

In case you weren't actually wondering about that, console yourself with the idea that philosophy is also about learning how to think... not merely the ebb and flow of what is considered logic throughout the centuries (again, contrary to popular opinion, logic is a malleable substance - it's much more than just a series of reasonable syllogisms which people use to console themselves that "eventually one would reach clarity and possibly truth" if followed to conclusion).

And, in case you weren't wondering that either, well - what can I say - I'm waffling. I do that.

One gets used to it.

drac · Post by **drac** » 2013 Mar 06, 23:08

The VAX was bigger and faster - not better from a programming perspective.

I was not really wondering about all those things, but I did enjoy reading about them. Since my degree is in engineering (electrical), and I was educated in the US, quite a few years ago, I was not required to take many hours of LAS courses. I did not have the time or the interest (at that time) in doing a lot of reading - too much math homework and other requirements to deal with. So I appreciate (as I have said previously) your belated but welcomed education in the humanities.

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 06, 23:46

drac wrote:The VAX was bigger and faster - not better from a programming perspective.

Depends on how you look at it - as I remember it, the PDP-11 was limited by being 16 bit - the VAX introduced 32-bit architecture (and bus size) to overcome the programming limitations therein - by the time VAX hit the VMS OS (when I found it, so skip ahead a few years) it was fully geared up for concurrent programming (which twisted my brain no end since languages weren't semantically designed for that properly [they all had subset commands, but not grammatical paradigms specifically based on it]), and later opened the door to Unix which was (in essence) the equivalent of the Fat Lady Singing as far as the lab rats were concerned. I have fond memories of being in the air-conditioned labs at 3am (no one to tell us we weren't allowed to smoke in there!) with 4 green cathode-rays positioned so the 2 101-key keyboards on my lap could work their magic and I could track the timing conflicts in real-time instead of "guessing" at expected register contents.

But then I discovered the real world (literature and music) and turned my back on all that techno-nonsense and changed majors - so what happened after that was lost to the mists of time as far as I'm concerned. :D

Strangely, the only thing I really missed was the air-conditioning.

drac · Post by **drac** » 2013 Mar 07, 00:25

Kilmatead wrote:as I remember it, the PDP-11 was limited by being 16 bit

It was not a limitation for the applications that I was developing. 32 bits made the VAX way more expensive. The company I was working for had too much legacy code to consider switching - besides we were using the LSI-11 embedded in our own hardware - it was an analyzer used by companies working with radioactive materials. I stopped programming mini computers a year or two after the first VAX systems were introduced.

After I left that company I resumed working with Intel chips (8008, 8080 and then 8086). Again, that company used chips in their products - they were not computers as such. Though that company did produce a computer that briefly competed with the then brand new IBM-PC. It was more advanced (higher res display, higher capacity floppy, better chip (8086), etc.) than the IBM-PC but it could not compete with their marketing and "name".

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 07, 08:10

drac wrote:...than the IBM-PC but it could not compete with their marketing and "name".

IBM marketing was rather useless for the PC as it was too expensive for anyone I knew to afford one - so cheaper alternatives were sought!

You might find this amusing in a retro sort of way.

Only for Apple-nonsense though.

Flux · Post by **Flux** » 2013 Mar 07, 15:26

I'm more than surprised, I'm astonished.
Nikos, come on! Tell these poors what "decameron" means!

The context is indeed a group of Florentine youngsters escaping in the country to stay away from the plague.
To pass the time, each of them in turn must tell a story.
The stories are around a hundred, so they can't be only 10 people!

And now I leave to Nikos to explain where the "10" comes from...

P.S. yes, the stories are rather bawdy and similar to Chaucer's ones.

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 07, 15:48

Considering it's been about 15 years since I last read it, I was going by memory! Yes, Decameron means "10-days" which is the time period of note. I don't especially remember the characters names either, so I've no eidetic memory, and there's always something which will get misplaced!

In fact, now that I pull out my well-dusty copy, the chapters headings themselves are spliced by days - so, hey, mea culpa! If you knew the sheer amount of medieval lit I was force-fed - or you ever tried to romance the rose with the danse macabre, you'd know the circle of hell my brain inhabits.

Look at it this way: if we were cheating and using Wikipedia to pretend to have posh educations, we'd have gotten it right! :D There's something to be said for the honesty of a faulty memory... if only I could remember what it was...

Flux · Post by **Flux** » 2013 Mar 07, 15:56

Kilmatead, hat off to your memory! (I'm a little bit envious...)
It's Nikos that surprised me: "decameron" is Greek!

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 07, 16:11

Flux wrote:The stories are around a hundred, so they can't be only 10 people!

And, for the record, there were only 10 people involved - I knew there was 10 of something!

Flux · Post by **Flux** » 2013 Mar 07, 16:30

I told you I'm envious!

fgagnon · Post by **fgagnon** » 2013 Mar 07, 18:28

English translation of The Decameron
10 storytellers, each telling a story a day over 10 days.
Written by Boccaccio (Jean Boccace) around 1350-53.
I had only read a few selected stories long ago but have now put it on my reading list.
also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 07, 19:09

If nothing else, the Wikipedia page tells us that a 2008 film (direct to video) Virgin Territory is encapsulated thusly...

The film is set in Tuscany during the Black Death. As in the Decameron, ten young Florentines take refuge from the plague. But instead of telling stories, they have lusty adventures, bawdy exchanges, romance and swordplay. There are randy nuns, Saracen pirates, and a sexy cow.

Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Why more films don't have randy nuns and sexy cows is beyond me.

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 07, 21:23

Never let it be said that I ever shirk my duties to investigate everything and anything in this crazy world.

Kilmatead wrote:Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know...

Ok, I was wrong, what tells you everything you need to know is to discover that a 6 year old film starring the worst Darth Vader in history (Hayden Christensen) is still so well "seeded", as torrents go...

Foregoing any semblance of a review, I will note that the scene with the cow is rather disturbing, if not downright emotionally damaging for any growing boy. :shock: And those who make it to the end hoping to see Mischa Barton get her kit off will be disappointed.

Oh, and Tim Roth's career doesn't appear to be going anywhere on the strength of this.

As is the case with all films (excepting, oddly, the Lord of the Rings), the tried and true sentiment of the ages remains salient: The book is most certainly better than the film. Never have I so enjoyed the effect of <Shift+Del>'s robust perma-delete. I even killed the log, for good measure.

drac · Post by **drac** » 2013 Mar 07, 22:22

Kilmatead, whether or not the IBM-PC was expensive is dependent on ones circumstance. As a kid of 15, that might be an accurate statement. But being a bit senior to you (in age at least), I was involved in business settings where the PC was the THE micro-computer of choice. There was an old saying that summed up the prevailing attitude about the IBM-PC and its lower priced competition: No one ever got fired for buying IBM.

I can see the influence of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne in your writing style. As an aside he did not seem to get around much - having entered and exited this world at the same place (Château de Montaigne).

Kilmatead · Post by **Kilmatead** » 2013 Mar 07, 22:46

drac wrote:No one ever got fired for buying IBM.

Aside from a rather dodgy history in Nazi Germany, no one ever said the IBM wasn't a decent machine - to be sure, we all wanted one - but circumstances decided otherwise. Hell, I had it in my delusional head that I wanted a PDP-11, so a friend and I did everything we could to turn a lowly TRS-80 into one... and, to be fair, I probably learned more about coding from that hopeless exercise than anything else! That said, at age 17 to pay for uni I did sit in a few boardrooms myself freelancing (and wearing jeans) and legitimately scoffing at the "knowledge" of the men who called the shots, so I learned early that that those who "do" and those who "decide" are rarely in the same skin. Thankfully, I lost all respect for boardrooms soon after, and stopped caring what they decided since it had nothing to do with life - and Montaigne contributed immensely in that liberation.