jecel

47 ms·

481.
by jecel 8y ago
The Sparc V8 running Solaris took hundreds of clock cycles to handle traps, so some languages actually performed better by ignoring the register windows and avoiding the overflow/underflow traps. This one bad implementation hurt the re
482.
by jecel 8y ago
When the original Smalltalk-80 "blue book" came out in 1983, it included a complete listing of a reference implementation of the virtual machine. http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/ Instead
483.
by jecel 8y ago
Thanks for mentioning my project! I am still working on the design of Smalltalk hardware, but this year I have expanded that a bit to include efficient emulation of other machines (such as x86 or ARM) and not just the Smalltalk VM. Note tha
484.
by jecel 8y ago
Squeak was ported to the iPhone in 2008, but has never been allowed in the app store. So you have to be a developer and download it and compile it yourself just for your own device, which is kind of the point of the article. Note that appli
485.
by jecel 8y ago
To reinforce your point: Alan Kay majored in both Computer Science and Molecular Biology and the cell membrane was a significant inspiration for objects. It completely isolates the inner chemical functions from the rest of the world. So enc
486.
by jecel 8y ago
Note that IBM introduced a 68000 machine just over a month before the PC came out, which caused some confusion at that time. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=623 But 1981 was just too early f
487.
by jecel 8y ago
You might be thinking of the ARM printed on plastic as thin film electronics: http://armdevices.net/2017/05/21/0-01-flexible-plastic-arm-p...
488.
by jecel 8y ago
Some of us still use Smalltalk, as you might imagine (the language is hardly in the top 10 but is far from dead). Dan Ingalls, the author of that article, has been using Javascript for the past decade or so to create a Smalltalk-like enviro
489.
by jecel 8y ago
Actually, Sun tried to license Smalltalk from Parcplace to use in embedded devices. At that time Parcplace was quite happy to charge $3000 per seat and didn't make a reasonable offer to Sun, so the Oak (now Java) project was started in
490.
by jecel 8y ago
I think that the creators of the 1996 Squeak Smalltalk were aware of the previous project. They also named their subset of Smalltalk which could be translated to C "Slang", which is a name that had already been used a couple of ti
491.
by jecel 8y ago
The very last version of the Symbolics machine wasn't hardware but instead was a virtual machine running on the Alpha processor. So I would say it was a road that was taken, though it was not a success (probably bad timing since I agre
492.
by jecel 8y ago
The Lisa had a very bad start, but by the time it had become the Macintosh XL it was way more competitive. The fact that you needed one if you wanted to develop for the Macintosh initially made it sure it couldn't be a complete failure
493.
by jecel 8y ago
Actually, the iAPX432 came first in 1976. When it became obvious that this project was going to take longer than expected (it was only launched in 1981) Intel did a quick extension to the 8080 to keep customers from going to the competition
494.
by jecel 8y ago
All your points are valid, but I think that the RISC-V workshops are creating a bit more of a community than there has been up to now. And those involved in bleeding edge CPU designs have been meeting at Hot Chips once a year. https:/
495.
by jecel 8y ago
He actually helped with the remakes, like https://www.specnext.com/about/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum_Vega%2B
496.
by jecel 9y ago
And Alan Kay would also cite John McCarthy's Advice Taker as a reference for such a project, which this article didn't do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_taker
497.
by jecel 9y ago
I am a big fan and consider it to have been a success, though not what Negroponte hoped for. Back in 2006 I helped them out (they even gave me a machine as thanks) but the advice I gave them was ignored. I told them at least Brazil and Indi
498.
by jecel 9y ago
> The people at Xerox were perfectly capable of designing and building low-cost computers with third party components. Xerox never entered the low-cost personal computer market. In the early 1980s Xerox sold high-margin workstations to l
499.
by jecel 9y ago
The goal of block based languages like Scratch is to allow beginners to be able to worry about logical errors without wasting nearly all of their time on syntax errors instead. Sinclair was able to get the same effect on his machines with h
500.
by jecel 9y ago
The two big waferscale efforts of the 1980s were by Gene Amdahl and Clive Sinclair. Amdahl did run into technical problems connecting multiple wafers to build mainframes and using lasers to swap out bad subparts (both currently solved probl
501.
by jecel 9y ago
It was rewritten in Flash and now is being rewritten in Javascript. An independent project created an extended Scratch clone in Javascript called Snap!.
502.
by jecel 9y ago
Actually, a bytecode to text decompiler is a very important part of the typical Smalltalk IDE. In Squeak or Pharo, for example, you give the virtual machine a binary file like "work.image" to start the system and it looks for text
503.
by jecel 9y ago
A bit picky, but fair enough. One interesting thing about the original plan is that Unix was essentially text only back then. Part of the idea of making it more Lisp Machine-like was to have a GUI, so when Unix got that (with X11 eventually
504.
by jecel 9y ago
I fully agree that GNU/Linux is nothing like a Lisp Machine, but that is because things didn't go according to the original plan (otherwise we would be talking about GNU/Trix).
505.
by jecel 9y ago
How is that a joke? The third paragraph of the 1983 GNU project announcement ( https://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.en.html ) said: "GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix.
506.
by jecel 9y ago
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538966/what-is-the-oldest...
507.
by jecel 9y ago
That display was originally created for the One Laptop Per Child project and then was sold commercially by a spin off company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi It got designed into a couple of product, like the N
508.
by jecel 9y ago
It isn't clear to me what the problem with projecting into the future is. You just simulate the system or just let it execute normally (but under the control of some kind of "harness"). This will give you the correct result u
509.
by jecel 9y ago
RISC-V is defined by two standards. The older user level one is pretty stable but the newer supervisor level one is still changing so many existing RISC-V systems don't implement it. That doesn't necessarily keep you from running
510.
by jecel 9y ago
Either my understanding of genetics or most people's understanding is wrong. Suppose you have a woman with roughly 100% African genes and a man with roughly 100% German genes and they have a daughter. She will have 23 chromosome pairs,

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