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It may one day be, far in the future, although that's predicted to be so far off that Sol might have become a red giant by then, making the issue moot.

But only Luna is tidally locked at the moment. Terra is not, and its rotation still has a long way to slow down before it becomes so.


Then go to Midwinter, the home of The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5, and prepare to be absorbed for days.


Oh for sure, love it. I just hadn’t seen the above before and thought maybe a new source!


And also not entirely correct. The 16-bit 1.x API was definitely x86-specific. But the 32-bit 2.x API was not, as evidenced by OS/2 for PowerPC actually existing at one point.


Transputers. Lots and lots and lots of transputers. (-:



Lots and lots of red LEDs. Such an iconic machine! I miss computers that look good.

BTW, IBM has been doing a fine design job with their quantum computers - they aren’t quite the revolution we were promised, but they do look the part.



There are no contemporary sources for that because it is, as it was called here on Hacker News some years ago, an 'ahistoric retcon'.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31338349

The 's' is for 'static' version of the explanation of the name of sbin is not actually supported by any 20th century Unix doco. The books on AT&T Unix System 5 (before which, things were in /etc) that actually give an explanation for sbin all say system binaries, or system administration commands; and none of them says anything about linkage.

The 'static link' story came from Linux people years afterwards. Here's Ian McCloghrie correcting this misconception in a Linux discussion back in 1993:

* https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.development/c/EKzL...

I pointed out the origins of sbin some years ago.

* https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2019/02/msg00041.html


If you had been born in the 1960s, you might well have learned by dint of being alive at the time that the world underneath /usr was pretty complicated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; that /etc was where some of the things that were used to boot the system once went; and that the tale of sbin is complex and slightly sad.

The tale that things were simple until they went to pot in 2000 is wholly ahistoric.


The problems with what you say are that:

1. The history of /usr subdirectories is a lot more complex than that. There was a /usr/lbin once, for example.

1. /usr/local is not where third party softwares from packages/ports go on "the BSDs". On NetBSD, they go in /usr/pkg instead, again exemplifying that this is quite complex through history and across operating systems.


I really should write that "Yes, Virginia; executables once went in /etc." Frequently Given Answer.

Because it was /etc (and of course the root directory) where the files for system boot and system administration went in some of the Unices of yesteryear. In AT&T Unix System 5 Release 3, for example, /etc was the location of /etc/init, /etc/telinit, and /etc/login .

sbin is actually quite complex, historically, because there were a whole lot of other directories as well.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/unix-path-and-personalities.html


To add further evidence: People actually discussed this here on Hacker News three months ago.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45444362


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