jecel

13 ms·

151.
by jecel 4y ago
The OS (in 20K lines of code) is called "Frank" and in the talks where Alan uses it for his slides at one point he zooms out and you can see a cartoon Frankenstein monster in the top left corner. You might find this list of Kay&#x
152.
by jecel 4y ago
While most RISC-V implementations don't use microcode, it is an option if your priority is not performance. Here are just two examples: https://github.com/gsmecher/minimax https://github.com/brouha
153.
by jecel 4y ago
> Interestingly, Bill Atkinson was sure he'd seen > something cool at the demo that he liked, so he > implemented it. It turned out that he hadn't > actually seen it. In a little more detail: the Smalltalk MVC (model-v
154.
by jecel 4y ago
At the end of a talk at the EE380 course in Stanford with L Peter Deutsch, Allan Schiffmann tells a story about being at the launch of the Xerox Star. As more and more things were demoed, the guy behind him kept cursing very loudly. Allan g
155.
by jecel 4y ago
I learned Smalltalk-80 from the blue book after getting the basic ideas from the August 1981 issue of Byte magazine. The book has four parts: 1) the basic ideas behind the language 2) a reference for all the classes 3) a detailed example i
156.
by jecel 4y ago
All Smalltalk history talks mention that APL was a major influence, and it didn't have operator precedence either. In addition, the Smalltalk-72 scheme of "parse as you go" would make implementing precedence really awkward. S
157.
by jecel 4y ago
An important part of C history is that in the early 1980s the IBM PC and clones became the most popular computer in the world and it was not really compatible with C. You could say your program was "tiny" and limit it to 64KB or f
158.
by jecel 4y ago
Everyone I have talked to that remembers the movie as well as reviews I have seen think it is about genetic engineering. The only thing the movie actually shows is genetic selection. The scientist tells Vincent's parents that only thei
159.
by jecel 4y ago
This list of Basic/keyboard expansions for early videogame consoles mentions Mattel getting fined by the Federal Trade Commission until it delivered the promised computer module to clients: https://lady-eklipse.livejournal.c
160.
by jecel 4y ago
"immediately lost control of it because all its components except the BIOS were COTS" is also a good description of the Apple II, but Apple was able to mostly keep clones at bay in their key markets. I believe IBM could have as we
161.
by jecel 4y ago
The term "dynamic compilation" was popular in the Smalltalk community due to the 1984 paper by Deutsch and Shiffman that described what became the ParcPlace Smalltalk. In Self 1 and 2 we also used dynamic compilation and we got ad
162.
by jecel 4y ago
That already went to the Moon (sort of - see the difference between Block I and Block II AGCs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
163.
by jecel 4y ago
The software fad of the late 1970s was modular programming as seen in Ada or Modula-2. Intel supported that with its 286 and it was a key feature of the National 32016, so Motorola couldn't be left behind and added support in the 68020
164.
by jecel 4y ago
Intel actually bothered to copyright the mnemonics for the 8080 assembly language, so Zilog used the same binary instructions for its Z80 but different names at the assembly level. They had many more instructions, so having a different nami
165.
by jecel 4y ago
Transmeta announced their first product, the Crusoe processor, in 2000. Before then they were highly secretive and nobody knew what area they would compete in. Intel was indeed worried about the laptop market when the Crusoe came out, but q
166.
by jecel 4y ago
Thanks for the correction - I fixed the list. I do note that github lists Dan's project as 81.6% C and 17.1% C++. Yours is indicated as nearly all C++ plus some Lua. This is just a start - there is quite a bit to improve on that list.
167.
by jecel 4y ago
Little Smalltalk is great and I highly recommend it. But it and GNU Smalltalk only give you access to the bare language itself, while Smalltalks with graphical user interfaces given you a very different programming experience. I am trying t
168.
by jecel 4y ago
Are you sure it was Ada and not APL like in the Ampere WS-1 from the ad on this page? https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-05-rescan/pag...
169.
by jecel 4y ago
Digitalk's Smalltalk V was pretty good at this. You got a nearly empty v.exe file which called a bunch of .dll files which contained the various parts of the standard image. Anything you did yourself would be added to v.exe so when you
170.
by jecel 4y ago
Small (and not important) correction: the original Mac floppies were 400KB and went to 800KB in the Mac Plus. The Apple II floppies were 140KB.
171.
by jecel 4y ago
AppletTalk was 0.23 Mbps. Arcnet was a token bus (like IEEE 802.4 from General Motors' MAP) and not a token ring (like IEEE 802.5 from IBM's Zurich research).
172.
by jecel 4y ago
And also in the old Animated Series. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Yesteryear_(episode)
173.
by jecel 4y ago
I am familiar with that as "The Law of Recapitulation" based on a discarded idea from Biology. I can't find any references now, but the idea was that the evolution of mainframe computers (memory sizes, features such as caches
174.
by jecel 4y ago
While you can implement message passing on top of any language, as you said, I was talking about doing message passing under Smalltalk-80. There are non messaging parts in Smalltalk-80, like assignment. The Self variant of Smalltalk goes qu
175.
by jecel 4y ago
As a counterpoint, I would suggest looking at Jeff McAffer's CodA project. It defined a group of 7 metaobjects to define the behavior of each object, six of them for message passing and one for accessing state. He couldn't patch t
176.
by jecel 4y ago
The original name for Smalltalk was "Slogo" for "Simulation Logo" (like Simula was for simulation in Algol). It also reflected the expected performance of the first implementations. http://worrydream.com/
177.
by jecel 4y ago
Actually, all of the open shuttles have been full with the last few oversubscribed by larger and larger margins (about 100% for MPW6 if I remember correctly). It was the commercial shuttles, called ChipIgnite, that have had space left over.
178.
by jecel 4y ago
Unless I am remembering C wrong, this would work but the for (size_t i = length; i-- > 0 ; ) ... that several other people posted would not execute for index 0. Shouldn't it be this instead? for (size_t i = length; --i
179.
by jecel 4y ago
Just a guess, but before everybody adopted ARM the ST20 that was inherited from Inmos was ST's high end microprocessor, though they had a bunch of other families with 8 bits and such.
180.
by jecel 4y ago
An interesting experiment would be to re-implement the iAPX432 with the same resources as today's high end processors (caches, branch prediction, out of order execution, etc). A simulation would be good enough to run some benchmarks (t

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