From Punched Cards To Flat Screens A Technical Autobiography Philip Hazel From Punched Cards To Flat Screens Author: Philip Hazel Copyright © 2017 Philip Hazel Revision 0.03 11 August 2017 This memoir is published online under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives licence. You may download the PDF and share it with others as long as you make no changes, nor use the contents commercially. The following are links to a summary of the licence and to the licence itself, respectively: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode Contents Preface ......................................................................................................................... v 1. Early days .............................................................................................................. 1 2. A research student at Cambridge ................................................................... 6 Learning to use the Titan ....................................................................................... 7 Another programming language ......................................................................... 10 Going online .......................................................................................................... 12 The summer of ’68 ............................................................................................... 14 Yet more programming languages ..................................................................... 14 Other Titan interests ............................................................................................. 16 The PDP-8 ............................................................................................................. 17 A short stint in the Computing Service .............................................................. 18 3. A brief career as a lecturer ............................................................................. 19 4. A computer officer at Cambridge ................................................................. 21 Replacing the Titan .............................................................................................. 22 Many years, many computers ............................................................................. 23 5. The Phoenix Years ............................................................................................ 25 File management utilities ..................................................................................... 25 Timesharing and the birth of Phoenix ............................................................... 27 Mainframe peripherals ......................................................................................... 28 A dead-end operating system ............................................................................. 29 Programming languages ..................................................................................... 29 Other people’s projects ........................................................................................ 31 A user message system ...................................................................................... 33 The Jackdaw database ........................................................................................ 33 The Phoenix HELP system ................................................................................. 35 Replacing the 370/165 ......................................................................................... 35 Leaving Phoenix ................................................................................................... 37 6. Programming in communications ................................................................ 39 The Interdata-11 Remote Job Entry System .................................................... 41 7. Text editing and text formatting .................................................................... 43 ZED ......................................................................................................................... 43 iii A portable screen-based text editor ................................................................... 44 The successor to E ............................................................................................... 47 Text formatting ....................................................................................................... 47 Other uses of PostScript ...................................................................................... 49 The successor to GCAL ...................................................................................... 49 Using XML and DocBook .................................................................................... 50 8. Acorn computers, music printing, and athletics ...................................... 54 Acorn’s first 32-bit system ................................................................................... 54 The ARM processor ............................................................................................. 55 Music typesetting .................................................................................................. 56 Scoring athletics matches ................................................................................... 66 9. Email, the DNS, and regular expressions ................................................... 67 Email outside Cambridge .................................................................................... 68 Email on the Central Unix Service ..................................................................... 68 The problem of domain reversal ......................................................................... 69 JANET converts to Internet Protocol (IP) ......................................................... 70 Abandoning Sendmail .......................................................................................... 71 Managing the DNS ............................................................................................... 72 The start of Exim .................................................................................................. 73 Growth in the use of Exim ................................................................................... 76 Other contributors ................................................................................................. 77 Design re-thinks .................................................................................................... 78 Exim and ISPs ....................................................................................................... 78 Exim training .......................................................................................................... 79 Exim in Africa ........................................................................................................ 80 Other continents ................................................................................................... 82 Debian’s use of Exim ........................................................................................... 83 The Exim books .................................................................................................... 83 Exim in retrospect ................................................................................................. 84 Regular expressions and PCRE ........................................................................ 85 10. And finally ......................................................................................................... 91 11. Publications ...................................................................................................... 92 Index ........................................................................................................................... 94 iv Preface When I retired at the end of September 2007, I knew I would be expected to make a speech at the retirement lunch. Looking back over the 40 years that I had been part of the computing community in Cambridge, it struck me again just how much change there had been, and also how many different areas of computing I had worked in. For the younger colleagues who listened to my speech, the early years must seem like ancient history. A few minutes is a short time in which to summarize almost half a century, and afterwards I decided to write a longer account. This memoir is the result. It is a set of personal recollections of computation and computers and things that hap- pened in connection with them, even if only loosely. I have not attempted to include detailed descriptions of the machines’ hardware, as I was never a hard- ware person. Most of the technical detail is about software – after all, I was primarily a software developer – and inevitably it covers only the software that I wrote or used or had some dealings with. This is definitely not a history of the University of Cambridge Computing Service. When I first joined this fledgling organization, many of the staff were software developers, and I knew more or less what everybody was doing, but as we got bigger I knew less and less about areas other than my own specialities. By the time I retired, I think I was probably the only member of the Service who was still developing software full time. 2017: The first version of this memoir was published online in December, 2009. In 2017, ten years after I retired, I have revisited it and added a few further comments in paragraphs