jonjacky

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271.
by jonjacky 4y ago
The LGP-30 made ingenious, economic use of the technology available in the mid-1950s. Even the CPU registers were on the drum memory. The control panel displayed the register contents on a small oscilloscope - it showed the bits as they ro
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Haskell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(operating_system) Haskell: https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM OCaml: https://mirage.io/ ML: http://dspace.mit.edu/han
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by jonjacky 4y ago
How To Solve It by G. Polya [1,2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It 2. https://archive.org/details/howtosolveitnewa00pl
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Here are some sites that provide instructions and examples for building operating systems: [6.S081]( https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2019/index.html ) (MIT, xv6 RISC-V, 2019), [6.828]( http://pdos.csail.m
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by jonjacky 4y ago
The "ancient computer" is a Ferranti Argus 500 computer from the early 1970s.
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by jonjacky 4y ago
"I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already." -- Ni
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Previously, Jun 2020, 158 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23391380
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by jonjacky 4y ago
The thing is that Unix(of the day)'s source wasn't full of 100s of pages of vax assembly code ... VMS wasn't all vax assembly either. VMS and a lot of VAX system software was mostly written in BLISS [1], a high level lang
279.
by jonjacky 4y ago
Time Out Of Joint [1] by Philip K. Dick -- from 1959! -- has the classic example of a character discovering he lives in a simulated reality. But it only has one level of simulation. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Here are some miscellaneious links to Ask Metafilter that I saved. (Sorry about the poor formatting, but the links appear to work.) <a href=" http://ask.metafilter.com/home/popularfavoriteall "> <a hr
281.
by jonjacky 4y ago
This 1981 paper by Stonebreaker, Operating System Support for Database Management [1], explains why conventional file systems are not a good foundation for databases. He writes: "The bottom line is that operating system services in man
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Good article, strange title. It's a description of the Plan 9 operating system, including its rationale, history, availability, contents, and the author's experiences using it. I don't see how it's an 'exercise
283.
by jonjacky 4y ago
A recent start on this could be the NopSys/CogNos project, which built a standalone Smalltalk system on x86 a few years ago. There are GitHub repos[1,2,3] and a paper [4] where the authors write "there would certainly be much mo
284.
by jonjacky 4y ago
...(Nelson) never actually made something that actual people actually use. Actually, he did. He wrote and self-published the big book Computer Lib/Dream Machines , which was ubiquitous and influential in the 1970s. More about that
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Yes, check out the mostly non-AI, non-Lisp advice in Norvig's very brief summary in What Lessons are in PAIP? , the next to last section in http://norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html
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by jonjacky 4y ago
PAIP is full of practical programming techniques and advice that are not at all specific to AI or even Lisp. Other commenters here have cited Norvig's retrospective on his book at http://norvig.com/Lisp-retro.html T
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by jonjacky 4y ago
I recall Smalltalk had the first unit testing framework, which became a model for other languages.
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Light Table [1,2] attracted a lot of attention here [3] several years ago. The author went on to make another system called Eve [4]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Table_(software) 2. https://github
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by jonjacky 4y ago
There was indeed often a colored stripe at the top of the card. At computer centers I used, this stripe was used to indicate what JCL (job control language) statement was on the card. So the computer center would have a big stack of pin
290.
by jonjacky 4y ago
Payments, payroll, inventory, invoicing. ... This was widely done with tube computers in the 1950s. The first commercial computer, Univac, was introduced in 1951. Medical imaging gone except for maybe the x-ray. The first commercial CT
291.
by jonjacky 4y ago
You don't need chips for computers. Until the mid-1960s no computers used chips. The early PDP-8 models (introduced beginning in 1965) were desktop minicomputers made entirely with discrete transistors and magnetic core memories. Th
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by jonjacky 4y ago
It happens. See "Milli Violini: I was a fake violinist in a world-class miming orchestra", a review of Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23440333
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Yes! That book was an important contribution in its day. I wrote an appreciation of it here a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176769
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by jonjacky 4y ago
2: Don't use a DB. Use human-readable text files For even faster prototyping -- maybe better called experiments -- skip the text files and do everything in memory. Just use the built-in collection types of the programming language.
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by jonjacky 4y ago
I recall seeing a book once called Science Experiments You Can Do At Home -- But Probably Shouldn't
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by jonjacky 4y ago
To clarify the chronology and background here: Rota was born in 1932, and starting teaching at MIT in 1959. He died in 1999. Rota was not a boomer; he taught the boomers (and the succeeding generation). The students he is talking about her
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Olin Shivers' dissertation advice is also very short and pointful: https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/diss-advice.html
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by jonjacky 4y ago
I am surprised to see so many classic mathematical and scientific books and papers, most from before the 20th century. Modern math and science courses do not teach from these original sources. I have looked at only a few of these and fou
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by jonjacky 4y ago
2010. Interview with Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original which had just appeared then.
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by jonjacky 4y ago
Previously, VW Beetle Owner's Manual (1970). Comments recall experiences with VW Beetles and link to related documents and lore. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9981451

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