jecel

57 ms·

301.
by jecel 6y ago
IBM used an external processor, they 8042 which was the keyboard interface, to reset the 286 on demand to go back to real mode. The 286 did have some quirks, but as far as I know none that allowed you to escape protected mode.
302.
by jecel 6y ago
Here is a project to reverse engineer the Xilinx series 7 FPGAs to be able to target them with open source tools: https://github.com/SymbiFlow/prjxray
303.
by jecel 6y ago
The J1 was published in 2010 and the J2 in 2015, so it was up to them to avoid the confusion.
304.
by jecel 6y ago
Another book from back then was "A Little Smalltalk" by Tim Budd. http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~budd/Books/little/ http://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/LittleSmalltalk&
305.
by jecel 6y ago
That is actually one of C.S. Lewis' examples of how humans have not evolved morally. He claims that the difference is people not believing their child was sick and might die because the weird old lady at the end of the street is a witc
306.
by jecel 6y ago
Most calculators at the time were mechanical and also very expensive. So there was money to be made with expensive alternatives. Everything is expensive at first (low volumes, new factories and processes, research and development), so if a
307.
by jecel 6y ago
What about the Apple IIgs (1986) and its 65C816 processor? I suppose it would be valid to consider it a version of the 6502 if you are not separating 32 and 64 bit PPCs, x86 and ARMs.
308.
by jecel 6y ago
Note that RISC-V can have 32, 64 or 128 bit wide registers. The instruction length can be any multiple of 16 bits, though the base instructions are all 32 bits and the C extension adds 16 bit instructions and other lengths have not yet been
309.
by jecel 6y ago
For those interested in the details of the cancelled Apple processor, here is the manual: https://archive.org/details/scorpius_architecture
310.
by jecel 6y ago
Some people take this seriously, not realizing that Seymour was being sarcastic. He used pencil and paper to design his computers, not even an Apple II.
311.
by jecel 6y ago
Sure, Intel didn't have any serious patents on the 8080 but they did copyright the assembly language mnemonics. So the Z80 was 100% compatible at the binary level but had to use other names for the instructions. Same thing with tradema
312.
by jecel 6y ago
Isn't the point of patents that instead of ideas being kept secret (and often vanishing when their inventors die) they are published in exchange for a limited time monopoly on their use? In that case when a patent expires it does indee
313.
by jecel 6y ago
I tried this in the late 1990s with my tinySelf version 1 experiment: http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/tiny.html It worked great but still had bugs when I got sidetracked by a completely different project so it was never f
314.
by jecel 6y ago
There were changes in 1965 and the 1967 version is considered the official one. Companies who adopted ASCII before that, like Xerox and DEC, had a left arrow instead of "_" and up arrow instead of "^" in their equipment.
315.
by jecel 6y ago
You could add a hard disk to the original PC, but it wouldn't boot from it as the code in the BIOS wouldn't recognize your HD controller card (initially MFM like you said, a few years later RLL before we moved to IDE/ATA and
316.
by jecel 6y ago
One of the improvements of the 1983 PC XT (5160) over the 1981 PC (5150) was the removal of the tape port since nobody was using it and it was an extra (and confusing) connector on the back. The other improvements were more on-board memory,
317.
by jecel 6y ago
You can run Linux off of a single floppy (though formatted as a bit more than 1.44MB): http://www.toms.net/rb/ Text-only, however, unlike the QNX demo.
318.
by jecel 6y ago
The only thing that comes to mind are the new 386 Bit Test instructions which could speed up manipulating tag bits in pointers and also any garbage collector bits.
319.
by jecel 6y ago
A few comments pointed out that the 1992 ARM 250, as the first SOC, would be a better comparison for the M1. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures... 1000 nm CMOS process, two metal layers,
320.
by jecel 6y ago
The reference for the PC team at IBM was the Apple II running CP/M on a Microsoft SoftCard Z80 board as this was the most popular small business computer in early 1980. It is likely that this was an influence on the PC's expansion
321.
by jecel 6y ago
While it doesn't use a CRT as its display, perhaps this 1973 portable is what you are looking for? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCM/70
322.
by jecel 6y ago
A Byte magazine editorial praised the newly launched PC as being the "Rosetta Stone" of computing for offering such a choice in operating systems. In practice, with PC-DOS being 5 times cheaper than the other two it was a standard
323.
by jecel 6y ago
Note that Squeak was created specifically to implement Etoys which is what is meant for children. It was the inspiration for Scratch (which was initially implemented in Squeak) but they have different goals. http://www.squeakland
324.
by jecel 6y ago
CP/M and UCSD-Pascal, two operating systems available for the IBM PC besides DOS, had already been sold to individual users for many years. Microsoft itself launched Xenix a year before the PC (August 1980).
325.
by jecel 6y ago
The 1995 paper compares Self 1 and 2 which was a JIT which was based on type inference with Self 3 and 4 which was an adaptive compiler (where Java's Hotspot technology came from) which was able to use type feedback thanks to the secon
326.
by jecel 6y ago
A jet engine that needs forward motion to compress air is called a "ram jet" which is only used in a few applications even though it is so simple. Airplanes normally use either "turbo jets" or "turbo fans". The
327.
by jecel 6y ago
Woz didn't like that there were extra chips in the design to disable the more advanced features when using Apple II compatibility mode.
328.
by jecel 6y ago
The time travel hook at the end of "Out of the Silent Planet" actually was to be about travel to parallel timelines and not to the past or future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_(Lewis_novel) Th
329.
by jecel 6y ago
The programs studied in this talk were all by Babbage. They were never published. Ada's program in her translator's notes was later, but was published in a scientific journal. It was the very first program the world got to see.
330.
by jecel 6y ago
It seems odd to talk about hash tables as design patterns. To me they are just a data type. It is true that other languages have a built-in implementations and yet others have a standard user level implementation while in C there are many.

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