termcap - off topic musing

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2018, Richard Kreiss via Filepro-list wrote:
>My daughter was in 7th grade and had a terminal in her room.  She used
>Scriptsit and MultiPlan to do her school work.  She was probably the only
>kid with access to a computer at the time.
>
>I do remember teaching her basic as she had to take a course in basic.  The
>one lesson I clearly remember was when she and her friends came over to
>learn If/When programming.  I took most of the girls about an hour to grasp
>the concept.  This lesson was started the first week in April (class met
>once a week).  My daughter went to her band practice rather than the
>computer class. Although she did attend the first class of each month.  She
>came home amazed that the class was still working of the basics of  if/then
>programming.  

     "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to
     students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
     programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
     regeneration."  -- Dijkstra

>We have reached a point where an external device can hold 64Tb of storage.
>The next step is petabytes I think.  As it is my new NAS has 4 -4TB drives
>in a raid 5 configuration. 

I've had a Synology DF414 NAS box with 4 3TB drives in RAID 5 for
about 3 years now as my primary backup device here.  I had one HD
fail after a power outage, and was very happy to see how easy it
was to replace without having to power the box down.  It's also
nice in that I can ssh into the box, and configure things like
rsync modules quite easily.

As for storage sizes, I'm working witn a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a
32GB Micro SD, building much of the same software we use on our
Linux servers.

Gordon R. Dickson wrote an interesting novel, "The Final
Encyclopedia" in which posited an on-line encyclopedia
encompassing all human knowledge.  If I remember correctly, they
lost the index to it causing major problems.  What happens if
nothing is available in hard-copy?

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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Freedom from prices is freedom from responsibility. You can simply pass
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unspecified costs to be paid by others. -- Thomas Sowell Aug 2000