jecel

53 ms·

541.
by jecel 10y ago
People should not become professional writers if they are not really passionate about it. This doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage everyone to learn how to write. Same thing for programming. Of course, this is very different than
542.
by jecel 10y ago
When switching from a KDE based Linux to a Gnome based one many years ago I had to find a replacement for KMail. Since I design Smalltalk computers, it seemed silly not to use Celeste even if I had to put up with some limitations and add a
543.
by jecel 10y ago
Even when it isn't what the lab guys were expecting: http://www.startrek.com/article/trouble-keeping-her-green
544.
by jecel 10y ago
The following table describes ASCII-1965, the version in use today. It used to be common knowledge that the original 1963 ASCII had been sightly different (lacking tilde and vertical bar) but that version went completely extinct after ASCI
545.
by jecel 10y ago
For most Smalltalks I am familiar with, using uppercase for globals and pool variables and lowercase for local variables is just a convention. The Smalltalk and C code are not equivalent. The C code version of the Smalltalk would be:
546.
by jecel 10y ago
A group of students did build a TTL version of the Beta processor many years ago. Unfortunately, the web being what it is I can't find stuff about previous years of the 6.004 course so I can't give a proper reference. Anyway, this
547.
by jecel 10y ago
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-06 has a very good description of Xenix starting on page 248. This was just before the IBM PC was announced. In page 286 of https://archive.org/details&#x2
548.
by jecel 10y ago
Jan Gray stuffed 400 RISC-V cores into a Xilinx Kintex UltraScale KU040 FPGA (and the KU115 is three times larger, not to mention the Virtex UltraScale range). http://fpga.org/grvi-phalanx/
549.
by jecel 10y ago
In Smalltalk-72 and -74 the assignment (left arrow character) was a message just like any other. This became a special case in Smalltalk-76 and later and became just a message again in Self, where you wrote i: (j + 1) meaning sel
550.
by jecel 10y ago
Messages were clearly not fancy subroutine calls in Smalltalk-72 and -74: they were a stream of tokens between the sender and the receiver. This was optimized away in Smalltalk-76 (and so -78 and -80) so that messages no longer seemed like
551.
by jecel 10y ago
Boxer was the nicest Logo I used. I don't know where you would get it today and you would probably need an emulation of a classic Macintosh to run it. People wanting to extend Scratch should take a look at Boxer because the real proble
552.
by jecel 10y ago
Two funny stories about Portuguese and programming language books: 1) my father once brought home from work a book about programming with dBase-II. The problem was that they had not only translated all of the text but the program listings a
553.
by jecel 10y ago
I first noticed this issue when I saw a guy struggling with an English-Portuguese dictionary to try to understand the error messages that the university's Burroughs B6700 Fortran compiler had added to his program listing. Soon after th
554.
by jecel 10y ago
A very good timeline for the Lisa using screen captures is: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.t... This contradicts some accounts which say that the Lisa was a text based minicomputer before the Xer
555.
by jecel 10y ago
The first Altos used early dynamic RAM chips which required some really oddball chips to talk to TTL. I imagine that both the memories and the interface chips are probably very hard to find these days. But this particular Alto is five years
556.
by jecel 10y ago
The first Smalltalk-80 tape was delivered to Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC on February 17, 1981. So in a way, they all had licenses at this point though it was more a contract to review the system and the book that was being written as well
557.
by jecel 10y ago
Xerox did license Smalltalk-80 to Apple. It was one of the products promised at Lisa's launch, but it was never delivered. It was ported to the Mac and became available to registered developers (I got version 0.7 through a friend who w
558.
by jecel 11y ago
The article gives the impression that they interviewed me, but they really copied fragments from http://merlintec.com/lsi/mac512.html
559.
by jecel 11y ago
Alan Kay's group got $5M from NSF to "reinvent computing". The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called "Frank") of a complete personal computing system in only 20K lines of code.
560.
by jecel 12y ago
There are many options. Some of the cheaper ones have little or nor external memory, which might be an issue for some projects even though the internal memories in modern FPGAs are getting reasonably large. Some interesting vendors: http:&
561.
by jecel 13y ago
Besides the Sketchpad, Alan always mentions Grail (GRAphic Input Language), designed by Thomas Ellis and programmed by Gabriel Groner and others at the Rand Corporation. That was from 1964. As far as I know, Alan also greatly admires the wo