I guess you've never programmed in Cobal or Fortran.

I've never programmed in Cobol, but Fortran (77) kicked Pascal's ass. (I'll agree that Pascal is better than Fortran IV, or lower, but just barely.)

You could call it a superset.

That was kinda my point; it had to be a superset to do anything useful, because actual Pascal was crap.

the obvious elegance of Pascal

Care to elaborate? I always thought Pascal was one of the worst languages, and it should NEVER have been used as a teaching language; it's too hard for beginners and nowhere near powerful enough for experts. I was so annoyed they were using it in our CS classes, I used C for my assignments, instead.

Turbo Pascal revolutionized programming the PC.

But Turbo Pascal wasn't really Pascal, was it?

When I see anyone using CLI from 40 years ago

Yeah, sure. For decades, Windows users would tell me how antiquated the command line is - then Microsoft released PowerShell. Now, the command line is THE BEST THING EVER!1!

The next big thing wasn't RISC, it was 68000 assembler designed for 32-bit from the ground up

Yeah, the first RISC machine I'd ever seen was a SPARC server, but that was probably in 1988. By that time, 68K machines had been around for nearly a decade. In fact, the SPARC server replaced a 68K-based 3/280. (The professor who owned it was doing Navier-Stokes computation for the Navy and always had to have the latest and greatest.)

a few of the operators had something like four or five operands

Wasn't there a VAX instruction to evaluate a polynomial?

I wonder if anybody has ever brought back the Data General Eclipse MV/8000 from Soul of a New Machine.

An MV/8000 is a significantly more complex (and more powerful) machine than a PDP/11. I imagine that would be a lot more work.

Systemd is pretty much the opposite of the Linux philosophy

Yes it is (and that really doesn't thrill me), but someone had to do something about SysVinit.

Devuan Linux is Debian without the systemd

What does it use for the init system? I would love a distribution that doesn't use systemd, but if it's SysVinit, I'm not interested. That's amateur hour.

When I first started using Unix, back in the 80s, I spent months going through the manuals, trying to figure out how the startup process handled dependencies. I mean... a multitasking system like Unix must have a parallel startup process, right? Right? I was pretty disappointed when I found out how it really worked. Don't get me wrong: I love Linux (and Unix). They're both light years ahead of anything Microsoft has ever written, but neither is perfect.

It will make software even shittier.

Yup. One of my coworkers recently spent several hours working with an AI to write a 50-line (Python) program that I duplicated in 10 minutes with a single shell pipeline (with three commands).

If only. Recently, I tried getting the original After Dark working on my Linux machine, and using DosBox, it works pretty well, but only when I'm logged in and active; I can't get it working on the lock screen. I've googled how to fix it, but I have yet to find a page that has a good solution.

I think it would be pretty hilarious to get Totally Twisted working on my machine at work.

What happens when PC manufacturers lock Linux out and only support Windows Boot for security?

You know how some Linux fans say, "we should try to make Linux more popular", and other Linux fans say, "we don't care how popular Linux is, it does what I want?" The people saying they don't care need to STFU. Why do they think hardware manufacturers haven't locked down their hardware already?

When a enough people call up the company and ask, "does your hardware have Linux drivers", they're going to write Linux drivers, but there's definitely a critical mass, and not caring what anyone else thinks makes it harder to reach that critical mass.

Chat AI can't balance brackets either.

Funny you should say that. Earlier today, a coworker asked ChatGPT to generate a line of 1040 "o"s. No matter how we specified the input, we could not get 1040. (If I remember correctly, the first attempt gave us 570.)

Exactly.. Nothing

You have an interesting definition of "nothing". I mean, the last administration just moved us significantly closer to the end of American democracy than we've ever been, and people still aren't sure we'll be able to fix it.