User talk:Rich Farmbrough

Greetings!

I visited your talk page today, and I saw a link to this wiki. I see close to a dozen people signed up today -- maybe other visitors to your page.

Ideally we could be completely fickle, and package up our contributions and port them to any wiki we want. Did you see there was a link to upload any article from the wikipedia? I'll have to try that. Some other wikis I have tried, like http://complexoperations.org, don't support {{cite}} templates, making porting article there take a considerable hit per reference. I have also made a meaningful contribution to http://Citizendium.org. Both of these wikis have interesting local adaptations to the mediawiki software.

Are you old enough to remember the wars between fans of the emacs editor and fans of vi? Emacs fans used to say "Why even Bill Joy (vi's author and the founding vice president of technology for Sun Microsystems) doesn't use vi anymore." I heard this claim for years. Then I read an interview with Joy.

He explained that since everyone had the source to vi, it was so likely to be locally modified, that, if he were visiting some other site, and decided to give a little demonstration, he was very likely to find laconic vi wouldn't work. So, when he visited other sites he would always used the 1970s era ed -- a simple non-visual editor.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 01:49, 6 June 2012 (MSD)

Ah yes, Ed (unix)... I used it for ages while waiting to see who would win out of vi and emacs. Same with shells, I feel I should probably used tsch, but I end up using the default. Rich Farmbrough (talk)

(talk page stalker) Vi... what a blast from the past. I haven't used that for a decade or two. Since this seems to be an old-timer discussion, I thought I'd join in, hope you don't mind. I remember the good old days writing scripts for tcsh and bash. I grabbed slackware when Patrick V. first released it. Speaking of slackware, I remember when the Church of the Subgenius was all over Usenet, and their kerfuffle with Co$. I see Modemac was one of the first admins on Wikipedia. Back in the early days of Wikipedia, it seemed like it attracted a lot of the "Usenet refugees" (as I like to call them), myself included. Those were the good old days, when you knew most everybody that was on the net. Fun times. Thanks for bringing back some fond old memories. Web (talk) 07:42, 6 June 2012 (MSD)