jonjacky

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391.
by jonjacky 6y ago
No comments -- !? This is a remarkable project! The author reverse-engineered the original Turbo Pascal compiler, which was written in assembly, and wrote an equivalent compiler in Turbo Pascal itself! He writes: "I am a big fan of
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by jonjacky 6y ago
In addition to the OS itself, the Oberon book [1] includes network, file and print servers, a mail server, a text editor, and a graphics editor capable of drawing circuit schematics. [1] https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth&#x2F
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by jonjacky 6y ago
See also this humorous but nevertheless very telling dictionary from the same era (1990) compiled by the notable IBM programmer Mike Collishaw: IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary Tenth Edition http://www.comlay.net/
394.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Reminds me of Phil Och's song from 1969, 'Pretty Smart on My Part' on Rehearsals for Retirement : "I can see them coming / They're training in the mountains / And they talk Chinese / And they spread
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by jonjacky 6y ago
it is easier to just virtualize the whole damn computer IBM did this starting in the 1960s as a way of providing time-sharing. It became their VM/CMS OS product line (VM - hypervisor, CMS - single-user guest OS - but any OS could be
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by jonjacky 6y ago
Demo begins at 27:26
397.
by jonjacky 6y ago
A friend was seeking information about StripX, a product for stripping insulation from wires. I heard him say, "Note to self - do not type 'strip x' into Google in a family environment."
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by jonjacky 6y ago
See my post above.
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by jonjacky 6y ago
What sort of things could/can VMS do that Unix couldn't? (Dec 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13205419 Old VMS programmer here. In addition to the above, the thing I remember is that there was more of
400.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Most of the volume of the dishwasher-sized 11/23 was the two 14" removable hard disk packs - much higher capacity than the floppy disks of the day. I recall the circuit board with the LSI-11 on it was quite a bit smaller than an I
401.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Is that a Heathkit H-11 ? (with an LSI-11 processor) With 8 inch floppy disks? Does it still work?
402.
by jonjacky 6y ago
We had one of those - a PDP11/23 - it ran our cyclotron. Handled about a thousand inputs and outputs, using RSX, a DEC real time OS. Ran almost continuously for about 30 years. I say again, it ran our cyclotron almost continuously
403.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Yes, I am about midway through right now and I do like it. Imagine my reaction this morning when I saw that the top story on HN was about Pinkerton union busting - reported by a writer named Gurley!
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by jonjacky 6y ago
Another echo from those old days: this news about Amazon was broken by a writer named Lauren Gurley. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a famous union organizer who fought the Pinkertons more than a hundred years ago. Coincidentally, the new novel
405.
by jonjacky 6y ago
I recently ran across a review (from 2013) of Kurt Vonnegut's collected letters. He was working in public relations for General Electric (in the early 1950s, I gather) when he sold his first story to Collier's (a large-circulation
406.
by jonjacky 6y ago
From 2011 - that's when the book was copyrighted. As the book explains, this was the 100th anniversary of the formation (by merging three smaller companies) of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording-Company, later renamed IBM.
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by jonjacky 6y ago
In The Autobiography of Malcolm X , he tells how he learned to read and write by copying out, by hand , the entire dictionary from the prison library, copying a page a day. (It's in chapter 11 of the Autobiography ).
408.
by jonjacky 6y ago
The author of this proposal has many books and shorter documents in this format linked here: https://www.cs.ru.nl/~freek/books/ Each link is accompanied by its first sentence, to encourage browsing.
409.
by jonjacky 6y ago
At that time, most people programmed in static, compiled languages like Fortran, C, or Pascal. If you wanted a powerful dynamic language with an interactive REPL and garbage collection, Lisp was almost the only choice. Since then, those
410.
by jonjacky 6y ago
2002, apparently. That's the most recent item in News.
411.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Here are Lampson's brief descriptions of many many hardware and software systems he has worked on, starting in the 1960s and continuing into the 21st century. http://bwlampson.site/Systems.htm
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by jonjacky 6y ago
The PDP-8/S was a bit serial version of the popular PDP-8 minicomputer. It was introduced in 1966 and is said to be the first computer sold for under $10,000. It used discrete transistors, no integrated circuits. It was slow, with
413.
by jonjacky 6y ago
The Z ("zed") notation -- but that is a non-executable specification language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation
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by jonjacky 6y ago
You can't understand the logos out of context. Rand's IBM logo (and probably many of his others), was designed along with everything from the architecture of the buildings, through the computer cabinets, to the letterhead station
415.
by jonjacky 6y ago
Multics (begun 1967) preceded Unix (begun 1969) and influenced it very much. Here is a list of Multics commands: https://multicians.org/multics-commands.html In Multics, cwd was change_wdir , like Unix cd . There was a
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by jonjacky 6y ago
There is a whole book online about IBM's design in that era: The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945 -- 1976 by John Harwood https://muse.jhu.edu/book/24792
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by jonjacky 6y ago
I just checked the book. No IBM visit, not even California, just Washington DC and New York. Still well worth reading.
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by jonjacky 6y ago
On IBM's architecture around the world, see chapter 3 in The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945 -- 1976 by John Harwood. The book is about how architects and designers Eliot Noyes, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., Pau
419.
by jonjacky 6y ago
The novel Red Plenty by Francis Spufford has an account of Kruschev's visit to the US. It includes his visit to California but I can't remember if it includes the IBM visit . It's fiction, but Spufford took pains to be a
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by jonjacky 6y ago
The aftermath of the STEPS project and its code is discussed in this thread by one of the STEPS authors/developers and others: https://github.com/damelang/nile/issues/3 This HN post has links to many of

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