A bit like LISP then ...

Great stuff. I always love technical fluff about the history and philiosophy of operating systems

How does this compare to https://aframe.io ?

haha, funny, I was thinking the same thing!

Pretty cool.. I had no idea Hal was such a hacker on the personal computers in those days... makes me think of Bitcoin whenever I hear Hal mentioned

He wasn't hacking. Hal worked for Aph, and Aph contracted with Mattel to deliver console game cartridges.

There was once a contest between Caltech and MIT. Each was to write a program to play Gomoku, and they'd play against each other. Hal wrote a Gomoku-playing program in a weekend, and it trashed MIT's program.

It was never dull with Hal around.

Great article. I need to care more myself even if other do not care, thanks for the wake up call!

Almost skipped this as there were no comments. Ended up favoriting it. Thanks :)

I remember trying to help a fellow student in Manchester University around 1991 and thinking I was deleting a subfolder when in fact I was in their home directory:

rm -rf *

: and deleting everything from their Sun Workstation Unix account. Apologies!

I went to clear some games off a drive to make room for new games, went to type RM -rf ./ and accidentally smacked enter instead of a slash. Wiped out a few games before I could stop it.

Got lucky there was nothing really important on there, and it didn't take long to fix things up. Fortunately, some stuff I was removing was at the top anyway.

Wow, I see you made SQLWindows too. I am in awe!

You have probably heard the saying "Never meet your heroes; you will be disappointed."

When I think about SQLWindows, I mostly think about what I got wrong.

Specifically, I had the mindset that "I don't know anything about databases, I'm just a Windows UI guy."

So I didn't put any effort into understanding SQL databases and maybe creating any kind of visual interface for the database.

Instead, I just worked on the Windows application side and dropped you into raw SQL for any database code.

You can also blame me for the outline code editor. All I can say is the classic excuse: "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

As someone building a JS type low code tool (yazz.com) which is also open source I am very impressed. Well done!