jecel

58 ms·

511.
by jecel 9y ago
Note that these problems are not inherent to out of order implementations. Dan Ingalls (who first implemented Smalltalk) said "you can cheat as long as you don't get caught". When speculation fails, all side effects are rolle
512.
by jecel 9y ago
Even the lightest old APL computers I am familiar with, the Ampere WS-1 (Japan 1985) and the MCM 70 (Canada 1974), were giants compared to the Psion 5. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=66 http:/
513.
by jecel 9y ago
Yup: CRISP, Sparc, low power x86 (Transmeta) and now high performance RISC-V. Business decisions (such as Lucent dropping out of the processor market or IBM killing its bulk CMOS fab) have kept his technical achievements from getting the co
514.
by jecel 9y ago
It is a bad idea to reuse project names, though since the older Smalltalk Express (freeware version of Smalltalk V/Win) was from back when the web was new there won't be too many search results about it to get in your way: http:&
515.
by jecel 9y ago
JIT is a generic term that applies both to dynamic compilation (one pass) and adaptive compilation (multiple passes with profiling). While it is pretty normal these days, many people involved in FPGA research only know about static language
516.
by jecel 9y ago
I have worked on this in the case of Smalltalk and the opportunities are there but there are significant problems. The opportunity is in the form of adaptive compilation where you initially use a simple compiler (or even an interpreter for
517.
by jecel 9y ago
Yes, SiliconSqueak is what I have been working on since 2009. It is actually based on an idea I had in 2004 but I didn't work on because I couldn't get the Squeak community interested. The latest description is from early 2015 and
518.
by jecel 9y ago
Do you mean where you can get a Smalltalk computer? I still haven't finished though I have been working on it for a long time. But I am getting pretty close so it should be possible to get one in a few months. Pictures of my previous e
519.
by jecel 9y ago
When people find out I design Smalltalk computers, they often say something like "oh! You probably don't know this, but in the 1980s some people tried to build a computer to run Lisp and it failed completely". My reply is tha
520.
by jecel 9y ago
If you read the original GNU manifesto, RMS was hoping to sucker the Unix community into slowly moving towards something very Lisp Machine-like. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html
521.
by jecel 9y ago
The only "technical superiority" of CP/M that I can think of is having files associated with separate users, though I can't imagine anybody ever used this. The PIP command, copied from DEC OSes, was a lot more awkward th
522.
by jecel 9y ago
My impression is that the 640KB quote started as a huge simplification of the arguments Bill Gates made in an article in an early PC Magazine (might have been a rival magazine instead - it has been 35 years since I read it) defending IBM&#x
523.
by jecel 9y ago
I was confused about [and after 250 pages of thinking through a “reactive engine,” it culminates in a “handbook” for an imaginary “Flex Machine”: a first iteration of a set of ideas that culminated a few years later in Kay’s vision for a “D
524.
by jecel 9y ago
An option is to use the BITBLT instruction which could be called from BCPL: ftp://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/xerox/alto/BitBLT_Nov1975.pdf Dan Ingalls showed how to implement the Game of Life and
525.
by jecel 9y ago
Actually, the PARC guys stole all of the io instruction space for other things on the Alto. Only the math and load/store instructions are compatible with the Nova.
526.
by jecel 9y ago
It was pretty easy to use 8080 peripheral chips with the 8086 and some very few clones did just that. IBM itself had to deal with the problem on the PC AT which had the same i/o chips but a 286 processor. It needed to replicate externa
527.
by jecel 9y ago
Actually, a pure 16 bit processor (like the TMS9900, MSP430, Z8000, etc) can only address 64KB (with byte addresses) or 128KB (with word addresses). Just like a pure 8 bit processor (like the Kenbak-1) can only address 256 bytes. The soluti
528.
by jecel 9y ago
Monte Carlo simulations are particularly important for the Monaco GP ;-)
529.
by jecel 9y ago
Here is a recreation of the change that Dan Ingalls did to Smalltalk-78 to address Steve Jobs' objection that scrolling wasn't smooth enough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEz08IlcNMg
530.
by jecel 9y ago
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsd... Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert This was kindly made officially available online after his death.
531.
by jecel 9y ago
There is a group of scientists claiming to have done experiments proving the idea of learning styles is false. Without more details, I am sceptical. I went to school in the 1970s and many teachers demanded that all students copy in their no
532.
by jecel 9y ago
The problem is that there are two groups of languages that use "prototypes" and using the same word for slightly different concepts causes confusion. In the original Lieberman paper[1] you created new objects that were empty and i
533.
by jecel 9y ago
I could tell you a lot about tech in Brazil up to ten years ago, but then I stopped paying attention. It would be very shocking if nothing interesting is happening around here at the moment, so I hope someone who knows will comment.
534.
by jecel 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_II_clones
535.
by jecel 9y ago
Logo was supposed to have "a low floor and no ceiling" and while Scratch certainly lowered the barriers to entry (floor) considerably it has a very serious ceiling (limits to what can be done in it). An early graphical Logo called
536.
by jecel 9y ago
One of the design goals for COBOL was that non programmers should be able to understand it with a little training. That would allow non technical managers to have a bit more control over their projects than they would have with Fortran, Alg
537.
by jecel 10y ago
The course at that site is pretty interesting. There is an error that doesn't affect any of the examples but might be a problem for future circuits: what are called OR are actually XOR. It took me a while to figure it out because the n
538.
by jecel 10y ago
Not to be confused with Cog, the Smalltalk Virtual Machine: http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/
539.
by jecel 10y ago
Here is a 68000 machine with an ISA bus I built in 1987: http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/merlin2.html It originally had an Ethernet interface instead of a bus, but since I couldn't get a PC Ethernet board to connect
540.
by jecel 10y ago
Self started life as Smalltalk-86 at Xerox Parc in a collaboration with Stanford, and then got implemented at Stanford before moving to Sun Labs. When Self was killed at Sun (the first time in 1994) part of the group joined forces with the

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