Whenever I install Debian or a derivative of it, I always find it includes Guile, but that no packages depend on it. The only reason it exists is because RMS didn't like Tcl, which was the up and coming glue language at the time. Despite its shortcomings, Tcl was a very nice language to extend, whereas Guile was (and probably still is) an incomplete dialect of Scheme that only satisfies the Lisp obsessives.

Better hygiene. Less beards. More women.

There's an E10000 Starfire still chugging away in it's own extremely secure cage at a large data centre in East London. I always wonder what it's used for every time I wander past it to our own rather less impressive servers.

I can't remember their names, but there were two programming editors I used on VMS. Both had their quirks - the first wouldn't wrap text that was wider than the terminal screen (72 characters?), nor could it scroll. The second could wrap, but wouldn't allow you to do a "save as", which was a bit of a pain as you could accidentally navigate to a non-existent directory and open a new file by mistyping the name of the directory you'd intended to create the file in. You'd then happily enter a bunch of code, only to discover your navigation mistake when you went to save the file. Cue a bunch of DCL (DEC Command Language - the VMS shell scripting language) to create a 'cd' command that would check for the existence of a directory ...

Blimey, just checked the Wikipedia article for Turbo Pascal and it did indeed pre-date the ST. In a weird piece of synchronicity, the article mentions the Nascom computer, since that's where the Turbo Pascal compiler originated. It's the second time in the last few days the Nascom has intruded on my consciousness, as it's the basis of a very rare drum computer that's just been added to the Vintage Synth Explorer.

I thought Turbo Pascal came out around 1988 - 89. That's certainly the timeframe in which I first started to notice people talking about it.

That's a very Microsoft-centric article, although it does have a passing mention of Smalltalk. Earliest IDE I ever used was the toolset on VMS, which included editor, compiler, debugger and profiler - they were integrated via the shell. If that doesn't qualify, then there was DevPac for assembler and a C development package (Lattice C I think) on my Atari ST, which inclued integrated tools that were far more sophisticated than what was later offered by Turbo Pascal.

I also have an integrated dust removal tool. It operates by projecting a high velocity jet of yellow liquid.

Damn. I was hoping he'd answer the question inquiring what it was that he ate from his foot. My money was on a large verruca.

I even wrote a small DOS virus in assember myself (never released it, just as a study).

I did an evening course in x86 assembler at a college in the UK many years ago. In our first lesson the tutor showed us how to write a boot sector virus for DOS - I thought it was quite an amusing way to motivate us!

Dear God. I used IRIX on an SGI Indy, and it was the perfect disaster of buggy, unstable software on top opf painfully slow hardware. In comparison, the OpenWindows desktop on my Sun workstation was a thing of reliable elegance.

Linux would not exist without the annoying aspects of GNU and the FSF. They would have made their own kernel in a timely fashion and Linus may never have been motivated to make his own.

Interestingly, the original architect of the Hurd kernel wanted to use 4.4BSD as a starting point, but was overrulled by Stallman who wanted to use Mach.

The company claims that it's one of the best releases till date

Well, you would rather hope so.

Ladyada created the brilliant x0xb0x - a faithful recreation of the Roland TB-303 synthesiser and sequencer, but with MIDI and a flashable firmware. It's a a brilliant device, and acknowledged that what made the 303 so good was the combination of synthesiser and sequencer. All previous clones had imitated the sound generation aspects alone.

OS X has user land components and code from both Net and Free. The initial updates to the creaky old OpenStep code base relied on NetBSD as the primary source, but this gradually changed as key FreeBSD developers were recruited by Apple.