drfuchs

5 ms·

31.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Real programmers would have donated $524,288. But seriously good news nonetheless.
32.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
That’s a ZipCode.
33.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Typical TOPS-20 and VMS hardware of the time would have less than a gigabyte of spinning disk space, to be shared among many dozens of users. Full copies of files were saved, and there were strict per-user disk allotments. Creating Generat
34.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Not being able to chown() caused us grief developing Frame Maker back in the 80s. The responsible way to handle "save" was to write the document into a new file mydoc.new, then rename mydoc.cur to mydoc.backup and then rename myd
35.
by drfuchs 1y ago
And when it finally dies and is disposed of, the mercury in the internal (ingenious) mechanism will likely end up in the wild. P.s. They came in colors? I only ever saw them in tan, which virtually everyone had half a century ago.
36.
by drfuchs 1y ago
Steve Gibson? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time… Maybe 30 years? SpinRite?
37.
by drfuchs 1y ago
The RPC-4000 (the "big brother" of the LGP-30) had each instruction specify the next instruction address. I believe this was to allow for optimizing your program such that the next instruction would always be right under a read h
38.
by drfuchs 1y ago
The annotations say "... I don't have the exact instruction format for the either the LGP-30 or RPC-4000 ..." but the entire manual for the LGP-30 with this information, and way more, is available at http://www.bit
39.
by drfuchs 1y ago
But will your grandchild be able to read handwriting?
40.
by drfuchs 1y ago
1979 called, and they want their "Intel Magnetics 7110" one megabit bubble memory chips back. At the time, it seemed that bubble memory would supplant disk, tape, and even core memory (RAM to you). Maybe memristors will happen.
41.
by drfuchs 1y ago
There’s a strong connection between President Lincoln and log cabins. He grew up in a series of log cabins, and this fact was widely known during his campaign.
42.
by drfuchs 1y ago
Perhaps strong no-alcohol-in-public laws are related to weak no-guns-in-public laws.
43.
by drfuchs 1y ago
Right, not a plate: the 6 month temporary operating permit was taped inside the windshield, not on the back of the car, but was still ticketable. On the other hand, the car pictured is from after his death; all of his were black.
44.
by drfuchs 1y ago
No, they always had legit California "temporary plates" for the allowable (at the time) 6 months. They were very ticketable; his motivation was to keep his car relatively anonymous when driving around. Source: Me, living near his
45.
by drfuchs 1y ago
DVI isn’t suitable as you’d still have to intuit where the paragraph- and even word-breaks are; what’s body text vs. headers/footers, sidebars, captions, etc; never mind what math expression a particular jumble of characters and rules
46.
by drfuchs 1y ago
Similarly, “hacker” used to be positive, until the public at large got ahold of it.
47.
by drfuchs 1y ago
Being able to start a process, have it run for a bit to, say, read in initialization data, populating dynamic data structures along the way, and then interrupt the process and save the whole state as a new executable, was a feature built in
48.
by drfuchs 2y ago
Here's a literal "hostage puppy" that was quite the rage in 1973 (though National Lampoon didn't use that phrase): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon_%28magazine%2...
49.
by drfuchs 2y ago
The speaker’s claim that it’s hard to find a two-character name that hasn’t already been used for a CPU architecture seems ridiculous on its face. And his tone seems to indicate that he knows that (to me, anyway). I programmed the real F8 b
50.
by drfuchs 2y ago
Mavis Beacon.
51.
by drfuchs 2y ago
A bug, I believe: If you "put" three colliding strings A and then B and then C, and then "delete" B, you won't be able to find C anymore.
52.
by drfuchs 2y ago
Yes, in the US, Bell Telephone White Pages absolutely showed your house address by default. How else would you know which John A. Smith was the one you were trying to look up? By the 1980's I recall being able to pay to remove your ad
53.
by drfuchs 2y ago
Fun Fact: The Stanford Computer Science Department was (mostly) housed in Margaret Jacks Hall from 1980 - 1996, and if you went down to the basement where the department's mainframes and Arpanet IMP and phototypesetters lived, just aro
54.
by drfuchs 2y ago
UPS trucks are custom designed for UPS; they used to have a nice documentary about it. New Amazon trucks around where I live are clearly custom (and also not very pretty, if you ask me).
55.
by drfuchs 2y ago
Isn't your basis simply the price of the stock on the day your rich uncle died? What other information did you need?
56.
by drfuchs 2y ago
Exercise for flat-earthers: how does the GPS mapping on your phone work, without satellites orbiting a spherical Earth? Show your work.
57.
by drfuchs 2y ago
The Mouse Systems mouse used on Sun workstations had two LEDs (and matching sensors) of two different colors, and the solid mouse pad had vertical bars of one color ink, and horizontal of the other. You can take it from there. Inventor &#x2
58.
by drfuchs 2y ago
I was hoping it would be Oscar-nominated “Passport to Pimlico” (Ealing Studios, 1949).
59.
by drfuchs 2y ago
Tell me it can also boot WAITS (ala SAIL) and I'll buy one.
60.
by drfuchs 2y ago
Well, plus the $200,000 that Columbia Pictures spent for post-production to fix it up for release to actual movie theaters. Still an amazing achievement, of course.

More ›