kens

60 ms·

1. 901.▲
   by kens 4y ago

   Thanks, I've fixed the post.
2. 902.▲
   by kens 4y ago

   Intel's decision to use a 40-pin chip was mainly because Intel had a weird drive for small integrated circuits. The Texas Instruments TMS9900 (1976) used a 64-pin package for instance, as did the Motorola 68000 (1979). For the longest
3. 903.▲
   by kens 4y ago

   Hopefully that's not my bug :-) Before my code [1], small ellipses looked terrible: a small circle looked like a stop sign and others looked corrugated. [1] I can't take much credit. The code was Bresenham's algorithm, as exp
4. 904.▲
   by kens 4y ago

   I was an intern in the summer of 1988. Instead of staying, I went back to grad school which in retrospect probably cost me a fortune :-)
5. 905.▲
   by kens 4y ago

   According to Steve Morse, the 8086 designer: "Various alternatives for extending the 8080 address space were considered. One such alternative consisted of appending 8 rather than 4 low-order zero bits to the contents of a segment regis
6. 906.▲
   by kens 4y ago

   Strangely enough, I haven't written 8086 assembly since 1988, when I wrote the ellipse-drawing code used in Windows.
7. 907.▲
   by kens 4y ago

   You mean the 8086, not the 8-bit 8080, right? The 8080 wasn't microcoded.
8. 908.▲
   by kens 4y ago

   I got it fixed just before your comment :-)
9. 909.▲
   by kens 4y ago

   Historically, microcode was invented around 1951 and was heavily used in most of the IBM System/360 computers (1964). Once your instruction set is even moderately complicated, using microcode is a lot easier than hard-wired control cir
10. 910.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    Oops, thanks.
11. 911.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    I would put most of the popularity for word lengths that are powers of 2 on the IBM System/360 (1964), rather than the PDP-11 (1970). The enormous popularity of the System/360 is what made computers standardize on bytes, along wit
12. 912.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    Author here for all your 8086 questions :-)
13. 913.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    You might like the book "When computers went to sea", which discusses the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) in detail. Univac plays a big part in this and Cray has a smaller part. The NTDS was a huge project in the 1950s and 1960s
14. 914.▲
    His software sang the words of God, then it went silent(inverse.com)

    440 points by kens 4y ago|212 comments
15. 915.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    Aerospace computers don't get any respect. The SR-71's DAFICS (Digital Automatic Flight and Inlet Control System) is a digital computer system with triple-redundancy. I bet your computer doesn't have that :-) https:/&#x
16. 916.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
17. 917.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    This reminded me of a story I heard many years ago at Microsoft about a memory-corruption bug that flipped two bits and turned the text "WINDOWS" into "SINDOGS". This caused a few customers to freak out that Windows was
18. 918.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    I was curious so I investigated a bit. Commander Lovell called Apollo 13 a "successful failure" in 1970. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19710038390 NASA also listed Apollo 13 as a "successful failure&qu
19. 919.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    This is an ideological question disguised as a technical question disguised as a linguistic question. As a linguistic question, it depends how you define "programming language". Some people consider anything that tells a computer
20. 920.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    I concur, Command and Control is a very interesting book. Also, while the Damascus Titan missile explosion is well known, there was also a horrific fire in a Titan silo in 1965 that killed 53 workers. (Weirdly, the missile present at the
21. 921.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    This history seemed dubious, so I looked up a random 1989 allergy journal: "Peanut allergy is one of the most common food allergies and probably the most common cause of death by food anaphylaxis in the United States." https:&#x2
22. 922.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    I agree. The guide is ostensibly written to explain to people how they should ask questions but a "newbie" is unlikely to read this 11,000 word epic. The real purpose of this guide is telling hackers how they should behave, prom
23. 923.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    I think the Fairchild Microflame works better for barbecue :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_9440
24. 924.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    Thanks! I've fixed that.
25. 925.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    AAD is lower on the list since it is both complicated and kind of obscure. Also, it depends on multiplication and division, so I want to cover them first.
26. 926.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    I've been vaguely thinking about a book on the 8086 die. I'm sure I could sell at least 5 copies :-)
27. 927.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    I'm retired, so I have time for various vintage computer projects.
28. 928.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    The IBM System/360 (1964) had instructions to convert a character string to packed decimal, and to convert packed decimal to binary. This was motivated by the large amount of punch-card data that was handled back then, with all the num
29. 929.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    Author here. I'm without electricity but can discuss the 8086 if anyone has questions :-)
30. 930.▲
    by kens 4y ago

    The "Self-experimentation in medicine" page has a lot of wild stories that I recommend reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medici...