OMFG brain short-circuiting

Sec­ond by sec­ond, the Qeng Ho count­ed from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth­’s moon. But if you looked at it still more close­ly… the start­ing instant was actu­al­ly some hun­dred mil­lion sec­onds lat­er, the 0‑second of one of Humankind’s first com­put­er oper­at­ing systems.
[A Deep­ness in the Sky]

Damn that’s cool.

4 Replies to “OMFG brain short-circuiting”

  1. I need some help here. What
    I need some help here. What OS was born around 1972? OS/360 and UNIX pre­date that, and CP/M and the micro­com­put­er OSs post­date it.

    Dad

  2. I was assum­ing this was the
    I was assum­ing this was the Unix epoch, although it begins only about 15 mil­lion sec­onds after the moon landing.

    I note that it’s quot­ed as 15 mil­lion elsewhere: 

    http://www.umsl.edu/~sauter/languages/endure.html
    http://www.usenet-archive.de/comp.arch/202261-Re_Integer_types_for_128_bit_addressing_.php

    so I have to won­der if the 100 mil­lion fig­ure is spe­cif­ic to this ebook edi­tion, per­haps an inten­tion­al vari­ance from the orig­i­nal text to all ow the pub­lish­er to trace the source if the text is dis­trib­uted elsewhere.

  3. Unix was offi­cial­ly
    Unix was offi­cial­ly avail­able for the PDP‑7 in 1969. It had been run on the 7 for sev­er­al years before that, more if you count when it was called Unics. It was a clone of the ear­li­er Mul­tics. Your 15 mil­lion sec­onds must refer to the release of the PDP-11 ver­sion, at least 200,000,000 sec­onds after it’s first appear­ance. It was­n’t until 1975 that it was rewrit­ten in C (sac­ri­fic­ing speed for porta­bil­i­ty), so Vinge’s lit­tle bit of C timer code had to have been writ­ten between 1972 (when the C con­ver­sion began)and 1975 (when it was released.) I would sus­pect that the timer code was writ­ten fair­ly ear­ly in the devel­op­ment cycle. VBG.

    I am keep­ing my eye out for Vige’s books. They look interesting.…

    Dad

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