jecel

33 ms·

331.
by jecel 6y ago
Here are the numbers that Jeremy Reimer has for thousands of units sold in 1978[0]: TRS-80: 150 Commodore Pet: 30 Apple II: 7.6 Altair: 4 Others: 100 It lists a total of 258 thousand,
332.
by jecel 6y ago
This book is a reasonable introduction to RISC-V: http://riscvbook.com/
333.
by jecel 6y ago
In late 1981 I built a computer around the Z80, TMS9918A (actually 9928A as I wanted PAL-M output) and the TMS5220 voice synthesis chips. I called it "Einstein" and only found out decades later that there was a computer from Tatun
334.
by jecel 6y ago
I looked at COMP.LANG.SMALLTALK to see if I could figure out why Google is still blocking it but the contents seem to be from Scheme instead: https://www.usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=comp.lang.smal...
335.
by jecel 6y ago
John McCarthy did not consider full determinism incompatible with free will: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/freewill.html
336.
by jecel 6y ago
Squeak includes EToys, which was the inspiration for Scratch (originally written in Squeak, then rewritten in Flash and then rewritten in Javascript) which was the inspiration for most current block languages. https://en.wikipedi
337.
by jecel 6y ago
I am not sure if there were any other implementations of overlapping windows on the Alto other than Smalltalk-76 (which was what Steve Jobs saw in his famous visit to PARC). The windows idea was cleaned up and implemented in more static lan
338.
by jecel 6y ago
My first commercial program was done on a machine with bubble memory (Fluke 1720A). The problem is that there was no Moore's Law for this technologies: the first chips (128Kbits) were as good as it was going to get. It might have gotte
339.
by jecel 6y ago
From the end of the post: "Now, counterfeiters re-label RC4200 chips and sell them as the more-expensive AD633 multiplier." The counterfeiters are doing this now, not in the 1970s. They just happen to be using a chip from 1978 sin
340.
by jecel 6y ago
Most current FPGAs offer the option to have one configuration select a different bitstream in the configuration memory and have that replace itself. That allows a simple menu configuration to let the user select between several actual confi
341.
by jecel 6y ago
Moore's Law allows later and more sophisticated processors to compete in price with earlier ones. But a separate factor is the "learning curve". The same chip built in the same old process node will get cheaper over time as p
342.
by jecel 6y ago
Like the Scorpius (1989)? https://archive.org/details/scorpius_architecture
343.
by jecel 6y ago
I am pretty sure that I paid something like $300 for the XACT software in 1986. It would be really educational to have students play around with it today. You could edit the bits in the LUTs directly and see the equations change in the bott
344.
by jecel 6y ago
Note that a "pure" 8 bit processor, one with 8 bit data and 8 bit addresses, can't do much either. That is why there were so few of them (like the Kenbak-1) and most 8 bit processor were a hybrid design with a wider address l
345.
by jecel 6y ago
Actually, the 6883 SAM (synchronous address multiplexer) is the DRAM controller and the 6847 VDG (video display generator) is the one that has the various video modes. See the character set implemented by the internal ROM in figure 20 of h
346.
by jecel 6y ago
Actually, the TMS9918 has a 240x192 text mode with 40x24 characters of 6x8 each and several 256x192 graphics modes with 32x24 characters of 8x8 each. This is always fewer than Apple II's 280 pixels per line.
347.
by jecel 6y ago
Commodore Pet: introduced in January 1977 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. What was shown had many differences from what eventually shipped, but Commodore started accepting orders. They only shipped 500 machines by the end of th
348.
by jecel 6y ago
In Unix terms PR# redirects the standard output to the hardware in the indicated slot and IN# redirects the standard input. From then on the BASIC commands PRINT and INPUT will access that hardware instead of the screen and keyboard respect
349.
by jecel 6y ago
The raisin bread is a 3D expansion in 3D space. So from the viewpoint of a specific raisin the others are moving differently depending on what direction you look and you can use that to determine where the center of the bread is. The balloo
350.
by jecel 6y ago
The author found some nice references but seems to not have read them all. The text says: > It’s been a long, strange trip for MIPS. What started out as a university research project (under Dr. David Patterson, no less) while https:&#x2
351.
by jecel 6y ago
The iAPX432 was released in 1981 but by 1984 Intel had already given up on it, morphing it into the Intel 960. That was a long time before the DEC Alpha came out. The Alpha had already been killed in practice by the time the Itanium project
352.
by jecel 6y ago
It is interesting that the hand drawn retro-projector slides have been replaced with computer graphic ones. It reminded me of the upgrades in the original Star Trek series for the Blue Ray release.
353.
by jecel 6y ago
And the 01 at the start of the line is the level number as explained in the link. It is how Cobol declared nested records, which Fortran and Algol lacked but became popular through PL/I, Pascal and C.
354.
by jecel 6y ago
The masks show how critical alignment is in metal gate transistors. The green, magenta and light blue have to just touch. Too much overlap or too far apart and you don't have a working transistor. With polysilicon gates the equivalent
355.
by jecel 6y ago
I have now read the transcript and it has "end of tape 1" and "start of tape 2" which makes me think it might be an audio only interview. In that case it probably won't show up on Youtube. Douglas Fairbairn, who did
356.
by jecel 6y ago
The recordings of the oral histories done at the Computer History Museum are at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQsxaNhYv8daKdGi7s85u... There are 318 at the moment and they post several new ones each week. But they
357.
by jecel 6y ago
With wafer scale the amount of connections that can cross a border between two tiles is limited by the spacing rules for the top metal layers and by the number of layers you can dedicate to this (1 or 2, I would guess). For TSMC N7 Design R
358.
by jecel 6y ago
I think it is important to separate the several technical failures in wafer scale from the commercial one: Sinclair's Anamartic worked exactly as planned but the prices for conventional hard disks began to drop and that caused investor
359.
by jecel 6y ago
For the past few decades it has been common practice to treat language names as normal words independent of their origin. So FORTRAN, LISP, SNOBOL and BASIC have become Fortran, Lisp, Snobol and Basic. Unless the name doesn't look like
360.
by jecel 6y ago
Would the latch still work without the clock pass transistors? It seems to me that as long as there is no overlap between hold and load and they are not both low for too long it would store a bit in a controlled fashion. The output would ch

More ›