jonjacky

51 ms·

541.
by jonjacky 8y ago
There is a similar-sounding but apparently different project with the same name: "Interim OS is a radical new operating system with a focus on minimalism. It steals conceptually from Lisp machines (language-based kernel) ... It boots t
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by jonjacky 8y ago
Books: What the Doorknob Said, by John Markoff. From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by Fred Turner.
543.
by jonjacky 8y ago
Very impressive use of modest resources to great effect. From the article: "BKED (pronounced buh-ked, e as in kept) was the de-facto text editor in Vietnam in the 80s-90s. ... BKED runs on MS-DOS and looks just like Microsft Edi
544.
by jonjacky 8y ago
Sure, rock is also directly descended from folk, and other genres too. Musical genres can have several different direct ancestors.
545.
by jonjacky 8y ago
Today's rock/pop music is a direct descendant of classical music. The similarity to baroque sonatas and concertos is the clearest - that is why Bach Handel Teleman etc. make the easiest path into classical music to someone famil
546.
by jonjacky 9y ago
Small git clone in javascript: http://gitlet.maryrosecook.com/docs/gitlet.html Small Lisp interpreter in Python: http://khamidou.com/compilers/lisp.py/ If you are interested in annotation for
547.
by jonjacky 9y ago
Here is a Javascript program that implements the basics of the git version control system. It is a literate program with a prose explanation in side-by-side format: http://gitlet.maryrosecook.com/docs/gitlet.html Here
548.
by jonjacky 9y ago
The Nobel prize winning author J. M. Coetzee worked as a programmer when he was young - he describes it in his autobiographical novel, Youth. The promiment novelist Richard Powers worked as a programmer when he was young - that part of his
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by jonjacky 9y ago
I recently looked at SICP again after first reading it many years ago. I had retained the overall impression that SICP demonstrates how to build many of the celebrated creations of computer science - interpreters, compilers, databases, logi
550.
by jonjacky 9y ago
This 1994 paper (using Scheme) might be pertinent: Fields in Physics are like Curried Functions or Physics for Functional Programmers: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.49.1...
551.
by jonjacky 9y ago
Peter G. Neumann at SRI worked for Howard Aiken at Harvard programming the Mark IV in 1954 [1]. His short biography says he has been a computer professional since 1953 [2] As far as I know, he is still active at SRI in computer security, w
552.
by jonjacky 9y ago
I believe On Thermonuclear War, 1960, by Kahn alone, must be that book.
553.
by jonjacky 9y ago
One of the co-authors here is Herman Kahn, the nuclear strategist. He wrote On Thermonuclear War in 1960, which made him one of the models for Dr. Strangelove - some of the lines in the movie are direct quotes from that book. Later he beca
554.
by jonjacky 9y ago
I graduated from high school in 1968 and I find that media and its contents including the internet are more centralized and homogeneous now than they were then. The internet did not not just add to the mainstream media, it replaced some
555.
by jonjacky 9y ago
An excellent textbook that teaches Parnas' approach is "Software Engineering: Planning for Change" by David Alex Lamb. The chapter Detailed Design is especially pertinent to this thread. The book is from 1988. I once wro
556.
by jonjacky 9y ago
Another excellent Parnas paper: "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It"
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by jonjacky 9y ago
A book cited in this page, ENIAC in Action, has its own pages which are also worth a look: http://eniacinaction.com/
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by jonjacky 9y ago
The main reason the Alto and other Xerox PARC machines provided so much functionality with so little code is the designers were quite ruthless about simplification and providing just one best way to do everything, which all programs then ha
559.
by jonjacky 9y ago
The only API was the machine instruction set, the lower level language was the microcode language used to define machine instructions. For example, the bitblt operation used to move graphics around on the screen was a machine instruction i
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by jonjacky 9y ago
Nobody interviewed me, I was just a high school kid, but here's what I remember. A few years before this poster appeared, normal people wouldn't consider opposing the war or the draft. The effect of this poster (and many other
561.
by jonjacky 9y ago
Late-70s early 80s Xerox "D machines": Xerox Dorado, Dolphin, Dandeline, ...
562.
by jonjacky 9y ago
Regarding payment processing etc -- the Xanadu proposal dates from the mid-20th century so it includes a quaint assumption from that era: people expect to be paid for the work they do. What, people are supposed to spend hours typing at a
563.
by jonjacky 9y ago
That monolith, the remarkable and striking "Monstrance for a Gray Horse"[0], was built in the 1990s by the artist/nuclear engineer James Acord [1]. He and his work got quite a bit of press attention then [2], including a lon
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by jonjacky 9y ago
Roger Kaufman's FORTRAN Coloring Book was published by MIT press in 1978.
565.
by jonjacky 9y ago
'Close to the Machine' by Ellen Ullmann - a memoir about the 90s in SF and SV by a software engineer, a different view of same time, place, and kinds of people as in the Ferguson book. Also her novel 'The Bug', a fictio
566.
by jonjacky 9y ago
Fun but also informative magazine articles from those times by well-known writers: 'The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce' by Tom Wolfe in Esquire magazine, Dec 1983, pps 346-374 about the 60s 70s and early 80s in SV: Fairchild, Intel an
567.
by jonjacky 9y ago
'High Stakes, No Prisoners' by Charles Ferguson is very good on the early 90s and the dawn of the web. Ferguson was a government technology policy analyst who realized very early -- around 1990 -- that the web was going to be a
568.
by jonjacky 9y ago
The UCSD Pascal system, which ran on Apple II and many other computers in the late 70s - early 80s, always displayed a menu (for whatever program was running) across the top line of the screen. I wonder if that was the inspiration for the
569.
by jonjacky 9y ago
Here is a book of case studies of object-capability projects in the 1960s 70s and 80s, including several products from big computer companies: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/
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by jonjacky 9y ago
Kenneth Colby, another Stanford professor, had something like this in the 1970's and 80's. According to the Wikipedia article [1] it was sold as a product. I remember reading a skeptical account of it in a popular book back then

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