Jon Postel, who ran the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for many years, used Engelbart's NLS system to manage all of the information for IANA. He used a mouse and chord keyboard. I was interested at one time in user interface issues, and I'm located in L.A., so Jon kindly allowed me to interview him and watch him work (the Internet was a far smaller and more friendly place back then). NLS was designed to use these two devices in concert. The usage model was of a hypertext, with a mouse click on an item followed by a single-letter command. The command letters were typed in on the chord keyboard, at two chords per character. The scheme was to type in 8- or 9-bit characters as bits, five high bits followed by five low bits, or the other way around, I don't remember which. The effect was that to manipulate information, as opposed to entering it, you didn't have to move your hands back and forth to and from the keyboard. Just click-chunk-chunk, click-chunk-chunk.

At two chords per character, and with pretty clunky-chunky piano-type keys on the chord keyboard, entering more than a few characters via chord keyboard was slower and more painful than using a regular keyboard. I asked Jon how many characters he would type on the chord keyboard before switching to the regular keyboard, and his answer was, "About ten."

Jon was probably the last user of NLS aside from Doug & Friends. I believe ISI, where Jon worked, kept a PDP-10 running just to support his use of NLS in running IANA.

I wonder if anyone's done an Antikythera mechanism in Minecraft?

This reply is exactly right. The OP is a troll, for all the reasons he cites.

Even if he were not, the bulk of replies are totally out of touch with reality. A head of a clinical department is never fired unless he shows up on the front page of a big-city paper (c.f. Aceveda). He is God and can do what he wants unless the hospital director and the hospital board, acting in concert, shut him down. In practice, this never happens.

So a) OP is a troll, this never happened, b) even if OP is not a troll, this never happened because no clinical head of department would have time or inclination to do it, and c) if he did, he wouldn't "take it up the chain", or come to Slashdot - he'd tell anyone silly enough to complain to his face to pound sand, THEY were fired. Until he was arrested for HIPAA violations, which would appear on the front page of a big-city paper, c.f. para. 2.

PLATO was just a platform. The PLATO Project never created any courseware of its own. It merely taught professors how to write their own courseware. They told them pretty baldly what they (PLATO folks) thought worked, and what didn't, but the results were up to the courseware authors, and their students were stuck with the results. Some were drill'n'practice types, some did thoughtful, exploratory stuff, and some (to my mind the most successful) wrote laboratory-emulation software that let the students run experiments on their own on stuff that would cost too much or take too long in the real world. PLATO's big showpiece was a bio lab called "fly" that let students breed fruit flies in emulation and see how traits were inherited. No hint of drill'n'practice or programmed courseware in sight.

PLATO lessons, like textbooks, came in good, indifferent, and truly stinky varieties. The reason people remember the games is that they operated under rapid and ruthless natural selection...unlike courseware.

Yes, exactly. Xmarks does allow cross-browser synchronization, which is why I use it, but it also allows you to redirect it away from the Xmarks server and to any other server to which you have access, including (in my case) Mobile Me. So when Xmarks closes its doors, its servers will go away, but so far as I know, my copy of the code will keep right on working. I'm unhappy that development will stop, so as browser development continues and the code becomes out-of-date and non-functional I'll eventually have to find something else, but for now, my bookmarks will keep right on synchronizing.

Hello, fatankles. Good to hear from you. :-)

I think I'm the one who taught you TUTOR.

Do you think Slashdot would improve if they hired The Red Sweater as an editor?

Well, offhand I'd say Solaris is better because its ZFS is more advanced and more mature. Obviously this is not an option if Solaris doesn't support your controller (but remember, for ZFS you don't need a RAID controller; in fact you're better off without one). If your hardware is already in place and Solaris won't run on it, then Welcome to FreeBSD!

True, I did not export the tank, but that's because on Solaris you don't have to. You should, but you don't have to. It says "Say, there's a tank out there, but not my tank." Then you can import it with a "-f" flag.

The machine was experimental so I didn't lose any data; had there been real data out there of course I'd've been more careful and exported properly.

I should mention that the tank on disk was ZFS v4, so it was not a case of the Solaris tank being of a rev level higher than what FreeBSD could handle.