jonjacky

45 ms·

511.
by jonjacky 8y ago
Aren't Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and other free software authors and organizers 'people like that'? Those two, and others as well [1], have been very productive and more influential than most rich entrepeneurs. 1. ht
512.
by jonjacky 8y ago
The title is History: Fiction or Science
513.
by jonjacky 8y ago
That book might be History: Fact or Fiction by Anatoly Fomenko, originally published in Russian [1]. It sounds pretty wacky. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Ken Thompson once said he wished he spelled the 'creat' system call with another 'e'. Seriously, see these slides by Rob Pike from his talk in 2001: "The good, the bad and the ugly: the Unix legacy": http:&#x2
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by jonjacky 8y ago
He is making the point that in your lifetime you experience a long procession of politicians and other celebrities who are thought important for a while and are then forgotten. That is why, as he says later (twice), he is not interested i
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by jonjacky 8y ago
McCarthy himself said, "Pure Lisp was a discovery, everything that has been done with it since has been an invention." He said this to a class at Stanford in 2008, reported in HN! [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com&#x
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Robert Strandh's LispOS proposal [1] has a single-level object store as an alternative to a conventional file system. See especially [2] and [3] [1] https://github.com/robert-strandh/LispOS [2] https:/&#x2F
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Same paper as PDF, not HTML: http://history-computer.com/Library/AHI.pdf
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by jonjacky 8y ago
I would add Maciej Ceglowski http://idlewords.com/talks/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maciej_Ceg%C5%82owski
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Well OK, but that Wikipedia article warns, "Many programs, including text editors such as vi and GNU Emacs, still use termcap or terminfo, or use libraries such as curses that use termcap or terminfo, and thus in theory support non-ANS
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by jonjacky 8y ago
The UCSD P-system OS (from the 1970s) always had a single line menu bar across the top of the screen, whose entries might change when different applications ran. I have always suspected that was the inspiration for the Macintosh menu bar.
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Most of these escape sequences have been standardized for ages in ECMA 48 (1976), ANSI X3.64 (1979), and ISO/IEC 6429 (early 1980s?) [1]. According to [1], the code for smcup given in the article, ESC[?1049h, or 'Enable alternativ
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by jonjacky 8y ago
When I was at Caltech, students organized a day-long shutdown in Spring 1970 to protest the Vietnam war, prompted by Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. This was about the same time as the Kent State killings etc. Possible outcome of the St
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by jonjacky 8y ago
"Cyc is the world's longest-lived artificial intelligence project ... Douglas Lenat began the project in July, 1984" [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
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by jonjacky 8y ago
You might find the computer hobbyist magazine BYTE special issue on Lisp from August 1979 vol 4 no 8 to be interesting. It is linked here, with lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033439 I don't
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by jonjacky 8y ago
A memorable appreciation of this book appeared here a while ago: "Whenever I read this book again, I am reminded of how much UNIX know-how is probably being lost to new generations that are steered away from learning the foundations t
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Davis demonstrated that it is possible to build a complete system from scratch that expresses your own philosophy and preferences, no matter how eccentric. He showed you can build a complete system just for yourself with no compromises ari
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly et al. has some interesting chapters on pre-computer data processing in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Yes. Part of the motivation for RISC-V was to enable designers to do one-off experiments like this or small production runs with custom ISAs based on RISC-V, without having to worry about licenses or intellectual property issues. RISC-V e
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Some Fundamental Theorems in Mathematics by Oliver Knill - Linked PDF is a survey of modern math in 133 pages, in the form of the "fundamental" theorem in each of 135 areas, all in the first 62 pages! Followed by rationale
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by jonjacky 8y ago
The Devils' DP Dictionary by Stan Kelly-Bootle. From the 1980s maybe even the 1970s. I lost my copy long ago but here are a few entries I remember: Programmer: one who conducts informal research on the halting problem. Close: to i
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by jonjacky 8y ago
An accessible quick introduction. This abstract links to a 19-page pdf: From Cbits to Qbits: Teaching computer scientists quantum mechanics N. David Mermin https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0207118 After that, the t
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by jonjacky 8y ago
http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8 http://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11
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by jonjacky 8y ago
At the University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) we are using a DICOM server written in Common Lisp [1]. DICOM is a network protocol used for medical images and other medical data. This was originally developed as part of the Prism
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Then if you really want to get into the details you could begin working through the RFCs: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-index.html in contrast to this, a brief and lively history is the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late by
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Here is an overview from the people who created it: https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br... An internet timeline, 1957 -- 2017: https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet&#x
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9704517
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by jonjacky 8y ago
There is also a jargon file from inside IBM around 1990[1], a very different culture. Many of the entries deal with company traditions and office politics instead of technical matters. 1. http://www.comlay.net/ibmjarg.pdf
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Psycology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg, from the early 1970s, lots of anecdotes. Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, long opening setion on MIT in the 1950s - 1980s, another section on the beginning of t
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by jonjacky 8y ago
I found this excerpt from section 1 a very telling indicator of how times have changed since 1978: "This memo is aimed at users unfamiliar not only with the Emacs editor, but also with the ITS operating system. ... Emacs runs on t

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