jecel

38 ms·

421.
by jecel 6y ago
There was an article in 1975 and two in 1977, but they were about Smalltalk-72 and didn't have too many details. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_ACK_Pisa_1975.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m1977001_d
422.
by jecel 6y ago
ParcPlace spun off from Xerox to sell the original Smalltalk in 1988 but they sold that to Cincom in the late 1990s: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/visualworks/ Cincom had previously tested the
423.
by jecel 6y ago
In 1978 the Smalltalk group at Xerox tried to build a computer that people could buy. The Notetaker used several 8086 processors in a sewing machine form factor (like the later Osborn I) so you could carry around a computer with floppy disk
424.
by jecel 6y ago
The title of the blog post is from the "green book" that describes the efforts of the companies Xerox first licensed Smalltalk to: http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/BitsOfHistory/
425.
by jecel 6y ago
Is Youtube really better at identifying the music? For one video my father posted we got a complaint that some company owned the song for the part where my sister was playing the piano and singing. It offered the option of muting it or allo
426.
by jecel 6y ago
I don't think it is an issue of complexity since in both text and graphics you can encapsulate parts into a hierarchy of sub-blocks. Having to break things up from a single level into little pieces because of the screen size and letter
427.
by jecel 6y ago
Here is a nice book his friends wrote for him on his 70th birthday: http://vpri.org/pov/
428.
by jecel 6y ago
The LaserWriter had to run the Postscript interpreter, which required a lot more CPU power than just generating Postscript files like the Mac did.
429.
by jecel 6y ago
SOL does indeed mean "Sun", but was actually an acronym for "Simple Object Language". It in turn was the successor to DEL (defined as a "dialog specification language", but that would be DSL in English or LED i
430.
by jecel 6y ago
If you want to implement a complicated computer you have two choices: you can create a complicated logic circuit that does what you need (this is called "hardwired") or you can create a far simpler computer and program it to emula
431.
by jecel 6y ago
They were right! The Sun would have to be more than 8 times more massive to be burning coal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-burning_process
432.
by jecel 6y ago
In 1983 I and Fabio Cunha designed a Logo computer with the 6809 processor: http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/pegasus.html The project evolved into a more advanced 68000 based Smalltalk computer, but I regretted not finishi
433.
by jecel 6y ago
Guy Steele's "Tree" poem: http://prl.ccs.neu.edu/img/gls-trees-poem-1979.pdf
434.
by jecel 6y ago
The terminals connected to my university's Burroughs 6700 mainframe in 1981 had a 8080 processor in them and there was an escape sequence that allowed you to type some hex code into the input buffer and run it. So of course I did Life.
435.
by jecel 6y ago
To make things even more confusing, the Z80's ALU operates on 4 bits at a time while the 68000 has 3 16 bit ALUs and so can crunch 48 bits per clock. Half of the early ads for the 68000 called it a 16 bit processor and the rest 32 bits
436.
by jecel 7y ago
When I was testing a Logo implementation that had been released, I called my much younger cousin to look at it since he had been so good at Logo back in school that they had made him the "class monitor" the following year. I quick
437.
by jecel 7y ago
I have just found this page, but it looks very promising: https://ethw.org/Category:Computing_and_electronics
438.
by jecel 7y ago
Stan Veit opened one of the first microcomputer stores and saw many interesting things in the 1970s to early 1980s: https://www.pc-history.org/
439.
by jecel 7y ago
Frame pointers help Pascal. While C can also used them to make nicer assembly code (a given variable always has the same offset) it can work well without them. RISCs are very good C processors, but it is possible to do even better: https:&
440.
by jecel 7y ago
The other way around - Scratch is the original (though inspired by the earlier Etoys and other systems) and has become the standard to be copied by other block based languages (not counting those directly derived from it like Berkeley'
441.
by jecel 7y ago
I doubt anybody ever bought a 16KB tape-only IBM 5150 to hook up to their TV, but it was indeed the entry level configuration. It probably just existed to make the machine's price look good - even today all articles quote that configur
442.
by jecel 7y ago
Actually, the original ASCII proposal did include an up arrow and a left arrow. The final version a few years later replaced these with ^ and _ respectively. Some companies adopted the original ASCII. When Smalltalk-80 was developed it repl
443.
by jecel 7y ago
When Sun killed Self in favor of Java the justification was that Self needed a 24MB workstation at a time when most clients still had 8MB machines. Java was tiny in comparison. I complained that Java didn't do much beyond animating an
444.
by jecel 7y ago
The processor described in this thesis, SOAR (Smalltalk On A RISC), has been retroactively renamed RISC-III to explain why the current version is RISC-V.
445.
by jecel 7y ago
It has the functionality of the first Connection Machine, except with no network to exchange values between columns (as another comment pointed out). You can do 64K logic operations, each on one bit, at a time. You still need an external co
446.
by jecel 7y ago
Classes have several roles. They can indicate type. They allow meta programming (where a car is seen not as a car but as a bunch of stuff in the computer's memory). They allow shared state for their instances. With objects that can dir
447.
by jecel 7y ago
PS and HPS did indeed implement the dynamic compilation technologies created by L Peter Deutsch and Allen Shiffman at Xerox Parc. Self 1 and 2 were even fancier JITs by Craig Chambers, but Self 3 (and 4) by Urs Hölzle implemented adaptive c
448.
by jecel 7y ago
Actually, Self was one of the three proposals for the Smalltlak-86 project described in this page. David Ungar (from Stanford) joined forces with Randy Smith (Xerox Parc) who had done ARK (the Alternate Reality Kit). ARK had the visual equi
449.
by jecel 7y ago
Not Sun but Sun Labs. Ivan's Sutherland, Sproull and Associates was bought by Sun in 1990 to become the seed of the new Sun Labs. About register windows, overflows and underflows generated traps to the operating system, and for the com
450.
by jecel 7y ago
The Computer History Museum has just posted the video of a four hour interview with Bert from 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZJxwzVx5BY

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