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Marc Clifton wrote: Interrupts were really nothing more than a hardware induced subroutine call
Yes but at least the definition I found for asynchronous allowed for that. So for the time period I was suggesting it was equivalent.
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"general" being the operative word.
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I did my first University level programming course in 1977, programming in Pascal. Later, I have realized that my professor was way ahead of his time: From Day 1, we were taught to put all attributes of <whatever> into a RECORD, and collect all manipulation of that RECORD type in a well defined set of functions/procedures that did nothing but operate on that RECORD type. All of these functions/procedures were to have a RECORD instance as the first parameter. So, when OO become mainstream a few years later, to me it was simply to change ThingFunction(Thing, A, B, C); into Thing.Thinfunction(A, B, C);
So what's the big deal with OO? Of course: OO is syntactical sugar. But I had tasted lots of that sugar already, in plain Pascal.
The first C++ compiler we got hold of - around 1981, a couple years before the official release, was really a prototype that wasn't a full compiler: It transformed C++ constructs into plain C, which could be compiled by any K&R C compiler. (I believe that even the first official releases worked that way.) It gave us the opportity to see how the C++ compiler did it: The class objects, the function pointer tables and so on. That was really great, helping us to understand how the mechanisms were intended to be used.
It also made me recognize OO written in assembly code! I got acccess to the source code of a 1974 vintage OS (not a toy one, but a full-blown with multiuser time sharing and real-time functionality). The driver model of the OS had class objects, inheritance, fuction tables, class instance objects... All the stuff we had seen the C++ compiler create. I don't think the OS creators ever put the label 'OO' on it; it was just a proper way to implenment an OS (very similar to the methodology taught by my 1977 professor). So again: OO methodology and mind set was not revolutionary at that time - it was primarily the high level language support for those ideas, and, of course, the terminology, putting the right labels on it.
I had my first Simula course in 1979/80. At that time, noone called it an "OO language", it was a "simulation language". Not until C++ made OO mainstream did the Simula people jump up, exclaiming "But we did that years ago, we did OO, too!" Even though Simula is older than C++, C++ was the one introducing the term "OO" to the general programming world, and OO in Simula appeared as an afterthought, not as a predecessor OO language.
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Its a sliding scale. In the mid '80s, when & where I was in college, we weren't taught anything OO. However, I talked to people who were using Smalltalk in their research. I even ran into one guy who claimed to be working on OO extensions to Cobol (yeah, none of us believed him either at the time).
So, as of the mid 80s, OO and OO languages were already being used for research in some groups, but many others still didn't, and it hadn't made it into the curriculum where I went to school.
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Clever - unlike the person who chose the muzak. 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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poor thing, did you look at the cage they're keeping it in?
- it's a jungle beast, not supposed to be in a hard cold stainless steel box.
Format Success.
Welcome to your new signa&*(gD@@@ ![Beer | [beer]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/beer.gif) @@@@@@*@x@@
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Trouble is, a lot of these animals have lived so long in zoos, or were born there, that they would never survive in their natural habitat.
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... which pretty much describes my last job.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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Yeah, been there more than once. 
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More than that, it is an intelligent jungle beast. It should have far more stimulation than a fairly bare cage.
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Being able to communicate so intricately, is one of the most powerful tools humans have at their disposal. But we aren't only ones. This may not be news to some but it is very interesting.
I am not the one who knocks. I never knock.
In fact, I hate knocking.
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Munchies_Matt wrote: The idea that man is separate from nature is preposterous.
Yep, it always boggles my mind when people speak of animals like we aren't one ourselves 
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Indeed. I hate it when people believe that animals don't have emotions and feelings. Where do they think our emotions and feelings came from?
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Alcohol and drugs.
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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Elephants in SA intentionally eat rotting apples to get the alcohol hit.
Oh, did you see the 'drunk monkeys' vid on you tube?
A troop of them live near an 'all you can drink' beach resort somewhere. They move in in the afternoon to drink the left overs.And love it. It really is very funny, pissed monkeys falling about.
But interestingly the proportion of abstainers, moderate drinkers, and complete piss heads is roughly the same as in the human population.
We are so close to nature. And admitting that allows us to understand ourselves better.
Far better than to pretend we were made by some kind of super being. It also allows us to take possession of our own morality, our own judgement. And that gives us power.
And I think that is why Protestantism, the religion that does take possession of these things, compared to Catholicism, is the region of Europe from which stemmed industry, engineering, and the modern world.
Virtually all scientific, medical, engineering, social, economic and political advances of the last 500 years has come from the part of the world where Protestantism started. Northern Europe.
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Feelings?
Whenever someone claims that animals have no feelings, I tell about my St. Bernhard, who was dumb enough to believe he could catch cats, would try to chase them. He could almost (but not quite) get up to the speed of the cat running towards this dense hedgerow, slipping under it. My 80 kg St Bernhard tried to follow it, slamming into the hedgerow with such power that it made the ground shake...
He curled his tail firmly to his belly, bowed his head looking into the ground - he didn't dare to meet my eyes for an hour or two. He was so ashamed that he didn't even want me to pet him, turning his head away from me. I really felt sorry for him then, but I admit that I did laugh like crazy when it happened. (Before you ask: He was in no way physically hurt by the incident, only mentally.)
I cannot belive that anyone who saw that dog would deny that animals have feelings. Strong feelings. Norwegian national television is currently showing a British 2-part documentary "Animals in love" (made for BBC by Oxford Scientific Films). If all of that is "instincts only", then a major part of my own feelings as well are nothing but instincts...
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Animals are smart, he definitely is a cool monkey.
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Animals are considered smart, this video that you have shared is pretty cool.
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I was reading yet again about another cryptoware outbreak being delivered by a DOC file with the subject being "Invoice". Now businesses run on invoices being conveyed & paid all the time, and so I can say how easy it can be for a payment clerk to click on yet another message that says "Invoice" with a DOC file. I think I've read that PDF files can be hacked as well.
And I've been noticing that customer businesses I deal with (i.e., with myself as the customer) don't allow me to send a PDF file of whatever documentation they demand, but rather only a stupid fax through Ma Bell, causing me to use a service like GotFreeFax to send my PDF file.  And this makes me wonder if this will cause all these "smart" file types like DOC or PDF to become obsolete for regular business, with them using a "stupid" file type like BMP to transmit a static document. (I presume that BMP is impossible to hack ...)
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Or in general a dumbing down of formats. Many of the attack vectors are in Weird Features that no one uses, so disable them by default.
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Especially when a seemingly-innocuous file format was designed to allow embedded code to run as soon as the file is opened! 
Windows Metafile vulnerability - Wikipedia[^]
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Ah that shines a light on an issue I had recently, I needed to fill a PDF form for a bank recently and the only way they would accept it was via fax. I was quite annoyed that they were so old fashioned, attack vectors were not considered.
I refused to send my banking details via a free fax service, hunting down a real fax machine was a challenge.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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My printer / scanner unit can double as a fax, apparently. Never tried, or wanted to - last time I saw a fax was around the start of the century! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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