3 ms·

Yeah, the naming conventions between 8008, 8080, 8086, 8088, and 80186 is enough to make you nuts. Anyway, let's check the sources! Surfing over to https://www

Yeah, the naming conventions between 8008, 8080, 8086, 8088, and 80186 is enough to make you nuts. Anyway, let's check the sources! Surfing over to https://www.saildart.org/[ALF,DEK]/ https://www.saildart.org/[ALF,DEK]/ and clicking on ALPHA.LST on the left, shows code that looks like it's for an 8080 to me, but I'm rusty on this. The file itself is dated July 1980, but it's just a listing and not the sources themselves (not sure why). Knuth starts the "Preface to the Third Edition" of Vol 2 with: "When the second edition of this book was completed in 1980, it represented the first major test case for prototype systems of electronic publishing called TeX and METAFONT. I am now pleased to celebrate the full development of those systems by returning to the book that inspired and shaped them." Here he's talking about our very first Alphatype production output, confirming it was 1980. Note that the CRS wasn't an especially new model when we got ours, so it wouldn't be too surprising for the CPU to not be the latest and greatest as of 1980, especially as I got the feeling they were pretty price-sensitive designing it. By the way, the mention of "fonts came on floppy disks" elsewhere was generally true back then (and selling font floppies was how the typesetter manufactures made some of their income), but we didn't use the floppy disk drives for Knuth's CM fonts at all. All required METAFONT-generated characters were sent down along with each print job. And, in fact, there wasn't enough RAM to hold all the characters for a typical job (remember, each different point size had different character shapes, like in the old lead type days!) so the DVI software on the mainframe had to know to mix in reloads of characters that had been dropped to make room for others, as it was creating output for each page. It's essentially the off-line paging problem: If you know the complete future of page accesses, how can you make an optimal choice of which pages to drop when necessary? That's my one paper with Knuth: "Optimal prepaging and font caching" TOPLAS Jan 85 (ugly scan of the 1982 tech report STAN-CS-82-901 at https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a119439.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a119439.pdf when it was still called "Optimal font caching"). Actually, the last full paragraph on page 15 of the later says that the plan to use the Alphatype CRS started two years before production happened, meaning that the CRS was available commercially by 1978.

acqq 7y ago
> Surfing over to https://www.saildart.org/[ALF,DEK]/ https://www.saildart.org/[ALF,DEK]/ and clicking on ALPHA.LST on the left, shows code that looks like it's for an 8080 to me Wow, thanks for that! Yes it is surely 8080 code (at least, 8080 mnemonics, definitely not 8088 which are different, 8008 initially used other mnemonics than in that LST, then the 8080 mnemonics were applied to 8008 too, but 8008 needed more hardware to use, so it should be 8080 in CRS then). Also thanks for the STAN-CS-82-901. Now the story of programming CRS is quite clear. And even as a poor scan, it can be compared to doi.org/10.1145/2363.2367 Did I understand correctly, for CRS, what was uploaded were never bitmap fonts but always the "curves" of the letters? I believe 100 bitmap images in the resolution of 1024x768 were too much for the whole setup, even only for the cache? And... I'm not surprised that Knuth managed to develop that firmware after I've discovered this story ("The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567 As you see I'm also really interested in everything you can tell about Autologic APS-5, both how it worked and how it was used in TeX context!

acqq 7y ago

> Surfing over to https://www.saildart.org/[ALF,DEK]/ https://www.saildart.org/[ALF,DEK]/ and clicking on ALPHA.LST on the left, shows code that looks like it's for an 8080 to me Wow, thanks for that! Yes it is surely 8080 code (at least, 8080 mnemonics, definitely not 8088 which are different, 8008 initially used other mnemonics than in that LST, then the 8080 mnemonics were applied to 8008 too, but 8008 needed more hardware to use, so it should be 8080 in CRS then). Also thanks for the STAN-CS-82-901. Now the story of programming CRS is quite clear. And even as a poor scan, it can be compared to doi.org/10.1145/2363.2367 Did I understand correctly, for CRS, what was uploaded were never bitmap fonts but always the "curves" of the letters? I believe 100 bitmap images in the resolution of 1024x768 were too much for the whole setup, even only for the cache? And... I'm not surprised that Knuth managed to develop that firmware after I've discovered this story ("The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567 As you see I'm also really interested in everything you can tell about Autologic APS-5, both how it worked and how it was used in TeX context!