jecel

41 ms·

391.
by jecel 6y ago
VLSI made the ARM2 and chipset available in early 1987. I seriously considered using that in a machine I was designing instead of the 68020. But I had been burned by Motorola announcing chips and then cancelling them when almost nobody used
392.
by jecel 6y ago
> I read a comment here talking about women going into management roles because of higher 'EQ', and being better than men at noticing social and monetary rewards, and what not. There was more than one comment, so you might be r
393.
by jecel 6y ago
> That's a bit ironic given that Guy Steele (one of the creators of Scheme) helped write the original Java specification. Note that "write the specification" in this context meant creating a text to describe a design that
394.
by jecel 6y ago
"BASIC interpreters for the Altair" doesn't sound impressive, but "a computer on every desk, Microsoft software in every computer" was Bill's actual pitch and is a bit better.
395.
by jecel 6y ago
The follow-on to the iAPX 432 ditched the CISC design for RISC but kept the capability architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960
396.
by jecel 6y ago
The version I have is a Portuguese translation, but a 1982 edition in English is: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0960786406/acmorg-20 "Computer Design" by Glen. G. Langdon https:&#x2F
397.
by jecel 6y ago
You can divide a processor into two blocks connected to each other: the control and the data path. A 1970s book illustrated this as a puppet controlled by strings, with the puppet being the data path and the hands at the other end of the st
398.
by jecel 6y ago
If you don't mind dealing with dead projects, you might enjoy Slate as a Smalltalk with multimethods: https://github.com/briantrice/slate-language
399.
by jecel 6y ago
In 1999 I set up a company to develop a VLIW processor that used adaptive compilation (but for Smalltalk bytecodes instead of x86 instructions). I was taken more seriously after Transmeta announced Crusoe, then a lot less seriously when it
400.
by jecel 6y ago
Found it (Google didn't help at all) on page 19 of the oral history of David Ditzel at the computer history museum. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... But I sort of remembere
401.
by jecel 6y ago
The Smalltalk community is an artifact of the pre-Internet days. See Forth or Lisp for the same result. Communication was slow, in the form of publications and you couldn't get your hands on actual code (which probably wouldn't ru
402.
by jecel 6y ago
About bad business decisions, I have read that some were made for them by others. They were using IBM as their foundry and a new head of IBM's semiconductor department decided to cancel CMOS to focus exclusively on SOI. Now Transmeta c
403.
by jecel 6y ago
Here is a 2016 paper about the changes to the OpenSmalltalk bytecodes: https://rmod.inria.fr/archives/papers/Bera14a-IWST-BytecodeS...
404.
by jecel 6y ago
Allen, thanks for confirming the microcode thing. It certainly wasn't the impression I had gotten from the green book, but history does tend to get cleaned up as it is retold. To be fair to the PARC people other people had done Alto cl
405.
by jecel 6y ago
Didn't Digitalk Methods and Smalltalk/V also use a linear stack? Self did as well and to make that simpler they made using a block from a method that had already returned an error (an optimization that some have regretted). About
406.
by jecel 6y ago
Here is a long talk (more than 1 hour) I gave at the Smalltalks 2019 conference in Argentina about the history of Smalltalk computers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tATpzsyC6OA and slides in PDF and LibreOffice formats:
407.
by jecel 6y ago
While being class based does make Squeak's Morphic a bit more awkward than Self's, the big difference is that it is a hybrid system that can run older MVC (Model View Controller) applications with little or no modification. That m
408.
by jecel 6y ago
I design processors optimized for Smalltalk.
409.
by jecel 6y ago
The original Squeak was the very first attempt at Apple to do open source. But the license had some terms that upset some people (about fonts, no export to countries with US restrictions, having to help Apple in any lawsuit against it due t
410.
by jecel 6y ago
Not only did Sun lose a lot of money on Java, they got other people (I remember Borland and IBM but there were probably others) to throw away money for a few critical years. Why the new CEO of the merged ParcPlace/Digitalk thought it w
411.
by jecel 6y ago
Those are all very good points. Since Allen was there and I was not he is in a far better position to know. But my impression was that the Smalltalk group had been reasonably happy with their 8086 based NoteTaker computer and expected their
412.
by jecel 6y ago
The idea is that the Squeak image is a "binary blob", so doesn't count as a source package. The image file does come paired with two text files (sources and changes) that can be viewed in any text editor (but with old Mac lin
413.
by jecel 6y ago
The best documentation is inside Squeak itself, specially very early ones. In later version the VM code was spun off as an external VMMaker package that you have to explicitly load. This 2008 post in Eliot's blog shows the first change
414.
by jecel 6y ago
The evolution from Apple Smalltalk to Squeak did change the object memory quite a bit but only added a few bytecodes. The Cog project added even more to the bytecodes in several steps (specially with the change of blocks into proper closure
415.
by jecel 6y ago
Great job! After Squeak changed its license from the original Apple one to Apache it still wasn't accepted as free software by Debian because of a lack of C based tools to examine the image. A Virtual Image Viewer like yours would have
416.
by jecel 6y ago
Even if the Earth loses all its ozone we would still be more protected here than anywhere else in the Solar System. So any solution you come up with for, for example, living on Mars would work here as well and be cheaper. If you live in she
417.
by jecel 6y ago
The term hacker is indeed pretty old. As far as I know the MIT model train club divided themselves into the artists who worked on the scenery on top of the board and the hackers who worked on the underside of the board on the fancy electric
418.
by jecel 6y ago
Not having used them myself, I can't comment on the quality of the JVM based Smalltalks: http://www.redline.st/ https://github.com/hpi-swa/trufflesqueak Another project that I watched without tryi
419.
by jecel 6y ago
Right, Dolphin is still around. It seems that so is Smalltalk/X (which I used in the early 1990s), but there are now two versions: https://www.exept.de/en/smalltalk-x.html https://swing.fit.cvut.cz&#x2F
420.
by jecel 6y ago
> Bill Gates' mother knowing the chairman of IBM I find this story annoying. Imagine that Mary Gates did not know John Opel. Who would have IBM done business with instead?

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