[Myrddin]

In 1984 I was standing up a bunch of UNISYS 7000 UNIX systems. There was a version of ZIP available as open source, but it did not function on my OS. It took about 4 hours to redesign the central directory part of the code to be portable to my OS on an AMD29000 bitslice CPU and Xenix running on a 286 at my desk. I returned that updated code to the open source developers and that version of ZIP functioned on a lot more platforms in the following weeks. It was a time when developers shared and contributed to open source to get our work done. I ported the Korn shell to 30 platforms inside my company and shared fixes with David Korn. The company rep for Pyramid wrote the a2ps tool and shared that with me. Very useful for printing to our PostScript printer.

[Bobalu]

That’s impressive!

Nowadays I stick mostly to embedded work but back in the day I churned out some interesting software tools.. small compilers, program generators, parsing tools, web spiders... and various odd things. And if a problem involved pattern recognition then I was there...

We used to use small 286 mobos with modified bios chipsets as custom PLCs

I love this stuff :-)