It's worth noting that Stallman had earlier proposed a design for Emacs "to handle all the world's alphabets and word signs" with similar requirements to UTF-8. That was the etc/CHARACTERS file in Emacs 18.59 (1990). The eventual international support implemented in Emacs 20's MULE was based on ISO-2022, which was a reasonable choice at the time, based on earlier Japanese work. (There was actually enough space in the MULE encoding to add UTF-8, but the implementation was always going to be inefficient with the number of bytes at the top of the code space.)

Edit: see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tsutsui/emacs-18.59-netbsd...

> Active Directory (invented at MIT)

AD was invented by Microsoft, gluing together Kerberos (from MIT) and LDAP (from UMich). If it was from MIT, we wouldn't have had Windows 2000's infamous proprietary PAC.

History of Active Directory (derived from MS Exchange), see https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/bonus-the-...

This hasn't been posted for two years and still deserves reading 60-ish years later.

Block structure as indentation was introduced in Landin's ISWIM. I think the first actual implementation was in Turner's SASL (part of the ancestry of Haskell). Note that Haskell doesn't have Python's ":" and it also has an alternative braces and semicolons block syntax.

Then, after successful debugging your job isn't finished. The outline of "Three Questions About Each Bug You Find" <http://www.multicians.org/thvv/threeq.html> is:

1. Is this mistake somewhere else also?

2. What next bug is hidden behind this one?

3. What should I do to prevent bugs like this?

Not relevant to the article, but for the history of UK academic networking mentioned in various comments, Wikipedia's account looks about right, though I'm not sure it's up-to-date concerning the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET

I was using SRCnet in 1981, when Liverpool Physics had a dedicated link to Daresbury (national lab) whose speed I don't remember at that stage. Unfortunately the infamous PDP11 "terminal concentrators" for interactive use then were horribly unreliable. RJE to the cloud, where analyses ran, worked well.

Yes, SRCNET/SERCNET/JANET were great as a physics researcher, despite what people have said about X.25. A potentially interesting point is that TCP/IP on JANET originally ran over X.25 until X.25 was finally phased out.

The "fat pipe" didn't look so fat at that stage! (I don't remember when you could first easily interact with the Internet.)

Red book was particularly interesting (modulo lack of security) long before "the Grid"; it worked between various computer centres.

The trouble was that it was quite unclear to a researcher, even in one of the research council networking hubs, how to get access to the gateway, and it may have cost. I gave up trying before going to work in Oak Ridge for the summer (where I was taken aback by the primitive computing, at least "outside the fence"). For some time (mid-80s to early 90s? I don't remember) we were generally dependent on the infamous BITNET email gateway to communicate with the rest of the world from the well-developed UK network. It was "interesting" to deal with code in a Swedish 6-bit character set sent through the EBCDIC gateway to ISO 646-GB. (The Fortran Hollerith formats were added interest...)