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Wasn't it? And for that moment, you could look out and imagine "Damn, I could code the whole freaking thing like this!" Then you realize it would take around 3

Wasn't it? And for that moment, you could look out and imagine "Damn, I could code the whole freaking thing like this!" Then you realize it would take around 30 years, but still -- it was doable. You finally figured out how it all worked. You could make the computer do anything it was capable of doing. There was no more mystery there. Fun stuff.

kragen 14y ago
Do you really think it would take 30 years? The NAND-To-Tetris kids do most of it in a semester, and they're starting at the level of individual gates. I mean, Chuck Moore has been doing it for about 30 years, but he had a working top-to-bottom system after less than five years. Here's what I think it would look like: Week 0: build a working interactive Forth system that can compile itself, in machine code. This is assuming you already have hardware and a way to boot it into some code you wrote. If not, that could be a matter of minutes or of months. Weeks 1-3: build an interactive high-level language interpreter on top of it. Say, JS. Week 4: enough of TCP/IP to do HTTP GET. Week 5: write a bitmap font editor and a minimal filesystem. Weeks 6-8: parse HTML (more or less), lay it out with a simplified box model, and draw it to pixels on a canvas, using a pixel font. Week 9: cookies, HTTP POST, XMLHttpRequest. Week 10: a more elaborate filesystem, maybe based on Git. Weeks 11-12: some more HTML5 features, maybe including WebGL. Weeks 13-14: TLS. This is sort of cheating because you're taking advantage of our previous 70 years of experience to figure out what's worth building, and you're likely to end up spending a fair bit of time going back and retrofitting stuff onto previous iterations — JIT compilation, say, and multitasking — but it still seems like rebuilding the personal computing environment ought to be more like a one-semester project than a 30-year project. You could argue that you get a huge speedup by not writing stuff in assembly, and I agree, but I think that's only a constant factor. You could easily write assembly code that maps directly onto JS semantics: ;;; invoke getContext("2d") on the canvas object .data sgetContext: .asciz "getContext" s2d: .asciz "2d" .text mov $sgetContext, %eax call GetProp mov $s2d, %edx call InvokeMethod That's more code to write and read, but only by a linear factor. So it might take you two semesters, or four, but not 60.

kragen 14y ago

Do you really think it would take 30 years? The NAND-To-Tetris kids do most of it in a semester, and they're starting at the level of individual gates. I mean, Chuck Moore has been doing it for about 30 years, but he had a working top-to-bottom system after less than five years. Here's what I think it would look like: Week 0: build a working interactive Forth system that can compile itself, in machine code. This is assuming you already have hardware and a way to boot it into some code you wrote. If not, that could be a matter of minutes or of months. Weeks 1-3: build an interactive high-level language interpreter on top of it. Say, JS. Week 4: enough of TCP/IP to do HTTP GET. Week 5: write a bitmap font editor and a minimal filesystem. Weeks 6-8: parse HTML (more or less), lay it out with a simplified box model, and draw it to pixels on a canvas, using a pixel font. Week 9: cookies, HTTP POST, XMLHttpRequest. Week 10: a more elaborate filesystem, maybe based on Git. Weeks 11-12: some more HTML5 features, maybe including WebGL. Weeks 13-14: TLS. This is sort of cheating because you're taking advantage of our previous 70 years of experience to figure out what's worth building, and you're likely to end up spending a fair bit of time going back and retrofitting stuff onto previous iterations — JIT compilation, say, and multitasking — but it still seems like rebuilding the personal computing environment ought to be more like a one-semester project than a 30-year project. You could argue that you get a huge speedup by not writing stuff in assembly, and I agree, but I think that's only a constant factor. You could easily write assembly code that maps directly onto JS semantics: ;;; invoke getContext("2d") on the canvas object .data sgetContext: .asciz "getContext" s2d: .asciz "2d" .text mov $sgetContext, %eax call GetProp mov $s2d, %edx call InvokeMethod That's more code to write and read, but only by a linear factor. So it might take you two semesters, or four, but not 60.