jonjacky

48 ms·

361.
by jonjacky 5y ago
12, the number of bits in the word of the PDP-8, the famous and influential minicomputer of the 1960s-70s. 4096, the number of words that can be addressed by 12 bits -- so, the size (in 12-bit words) of the PDP-8 memory. There was a whole
362.
by jonjacky 5y ago
I recall being annoyed when Microsoft named its products with completely generic words like ... Word. Or Windows. I was incredulous: Can they really seize a common word for their own use and trademark it? I thought there would be an uproa
363.
by jonjacky 5y ago
But then someone did do a hardware implementation: https://www.jopdesign.com/ https://github.com/jop-devel/jop "Due to the small size of the processor, it can be implemented in a low cost FPGA. .
364.
by jonjacky 5y ago
This is certainly not "one of the first artistic impressions of a computer". For earlier examples, see Boris Artzybasheff's fanciful paintings and drawings from the 1950s and 60s [1]. His Apr 2, 1965 Time magazine cover
365.
by jonjacky 5y ago
George, did you see the Firesign Theatre thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27329497 (George Tirebiter was a character in a Firesignt Theatre routine.)
366.
by jonjacky 5y ago
Aw, c'mon, some compromises are necessary to make this feasible at all with technology available now. It is really quite impressive!
367.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Not at all. Before the Internet -- up through the 1970s and 80s, this isn't ancient history -- people moved around all the time, stayed in touch with people near and far, went out for all kinds of entertainment and events. Nobody sai
368.
by jonjacky 6y ago
See Rob Pike's talk from 2001, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: the Unix Legacy" http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/good_bad_ugly/slides.pdf "What makes the system good at what it’s good at is als
369.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Also: Why do we need modules at all? by Joe Armstrong http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...
370.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Yes, and it's helpful to remember why it's a distributed system. Plan 9 was created to support people working together in groups at the project or department level. The Plan 9 creators - the original Unix guys - liked the idea
371.
by jonjacky 6y ago
An advantage is, you don't need any API or function calls. You can inspect or manipulate anything from the shell ad lib using cat, echo, and the usual commands. Plan 9 doesn't have ioctl() calls because it's not meaningful t
372.
by jonjacky 6y ago
What I found amusing at the time was, after years of touting the Mac point-and-click interface as a great improvement over the old-fashioned hard-to-learn obscure command line, they switched to touting the unprecedented power and versatilit
373.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Yes, I do. I recall they had ads where they showed the amazing things you could do with one-line commands at the shell - they had examples of pipelines including grep and awk etc. I remember being amused that these familiar idioms that ha
374.
by jonjacky 6y ago
TCP Implementation in Linux: A Brief Tutorial [1] is a two-page explanation about the 2.6.19 kernel, with diagrams. I don't know how relevant it is now. I haven't seen anything this brief about more recent kernels. [1] http:
375.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Pascal, even Wirth's Pascal, was a huge improvement over the other languages commonly used at the time . In Pascal's heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s, most programmers came to Pascal from BASIC or old FORTRAN (FORTRAN II or
376.
by jonjacky 6y ago
You could do just that, but the usual way was to put a single "control card" that invoked the FORTRAN compiler before you own code. This invoked a compiler that was already stored in the system, on tape or disk. The computer cen
377.
by jonjacky 6y ago
> ... I wish I had a 19th century typewriter, hook it up to a Raspberry Pi and make a dumb terminal ... I just wish I could make a mechanical computer from woods ... Something like this? "A digital typewriter based on a Raspberry
378.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Fred Brooks led IBM 360 software development. From his oral history at the Computer History Museum [1] (on p.33 of 49): That’s the worst mistake we made was JCL. Yeah. Well the existence of JCL was a mistake. Building it on a card format
379.
by jonjacky 6y ago
This cycle was called the "Wheel of Reincarnation" in this 1968 paper by Myer and Sutherland about display processors. http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...
380.
by jonjacky 6y ago
An unusual historical paper from Niklaus Wirth, about many "good and original ideas (that) turned out to be less brilliant than they first appeared." http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/wirth/Good%20Ideas
381.
by jonjacky 6y ago
This was linked on HN a few days ago, contains links to dozens of classic papers back to the 1930s: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/34992/assignments/syllabu... - Classics of Computer Science and that page
382.
by jonjacky 6y ago
See also Bret Victor's talk, "The Future of Programming". The conceit: it's 1973, he describes (with an overhead projector and transparencies) some then-innovative ideas that he hopes will be adopted in the future. htt
383.
by jonjacky 6y ago
>>Aside: I’d also like to see a command line shell which runs outside the terminal emulator rather than inside it. Plan 9 did something like that with its rio windows (that replace the terminal emulators) and its rc shell. https:
384.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Here is a recent C program in a similar compressed style, a Scheme compiler: https://c9x.me/qscm/data/qscm.c via this page which was recently linked on HN: https://c9x.me/qscm/
385.
by jonjacky 6y ago
> I wish there was a nice wrapper dedicated to abstracting hardware support There is NopSys, about 3500 lines of C and 600 lines of assembler for booting, accessing device registers, and responding to interrupts. So you can write the r
386.
by jonjacky 6y ago
... and when you could invite random strangers from the Internet (well, the Arpanet) to play around on your system: This memo is aimed at users unfamiliar not only with the Emacs editor, but also with the ITS operating system. ... Emacs ru
387.
by jonjacky 6y ago
170 answers here, some in college but most elsewhere: https://ask.metafilter.com/300100/How-did-you-meet-your-sign...
388.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Invented things --- like punk music -- according to the author Mark Fisher: "... to the detriment of innovation, boredom itself has been has been radically transformed by the advent of digital media. Today the slightest hint of restle
389.
by jonjacky 6y ago
This is a 'literate program' - most of the contents of the single file are explanation, not code. It includes an introduction to Lisp and an introduction to ARM assembly!
390.
by jonjacky 6y ago
There was shampoo, an emacs mode for Smalltalk. It's still on github [1] but the old project home page [2] is now gone. I recall that homepage had a convincing screenshot. [1] https://github.com/dmatveev/shampoo-e

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