I hate that logo. I glanced at the subject and thought the X Window System was standardizing remote audio over the X protocol.

If I remember right, it was sponsored by DARPA. It was in the early 80s, so it would have been on VAX. It wasn’t the first implementation (there were several prototypes), but it’s the design that stuck; all the major OS implementations of TCP/IP today use the sockets API (if not the source code directly; several identical network vulnerabilities on different OSs are due to the fact that BSD code was free to use and copy).

Ah, DEC. Some really cool stuff came out of Maynard, MA.

A few notable things about DEC:

• They made computers that were affordable by smaller businesses and universities.
• The PDP-10 - one of DEC’s only mainframes - was where the bulk of early Lisp development occurred, mostly for AI research.
• UNIX originated on DEC hardware (before VMS).
• The team that developed the Alpha (the successor to the VAX) was hired by AMD to develop the 64-bit Athlon architecture (what became X86_64 - i.e. what your computer is probably based on).
• Intel chose a little-endian architecture for the 8086 because that’s what the VAX used.
• TCP/IP was developed on UNIX running on a VAX.
• After the minicomputer market crashed, DEC was bought by Compaq, taken out behind the woodshed, and shot like a dog.

Honestly, the cat photos are just a bonus.

“Cross compiler” usually means a compiler that generates machine code for a machine other than what it runs on. For example, a compiler that runs on X86_64 but creates binaries for Atmel microcontrollers.

You might be thinking of transpilers, which produce source code in a different language. The f2c Fortran-to-C compiler is an example of that.

In my experience, transpiler output is practically unusable to a human reader. I’m guessing (I haven’t read the article) that IBM is using AI to convert COBOL to readable, maintainable Java. If it can do so without errors, that’s a big deal for mainframe users.