musicale

43 ms·

931.
by musicale 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure And the 2023 graphical remake (from Ken and Roberta Williams [King's Quest, etc.] no less): https://colossalcave3d.com
932.
by musicale 2y ago
Has anyone tried any of the PLATO courseware, either in its original form or the TI-99/4A versions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/software&
933.
by musicale 2y ago
These are wonderful illustrations, and (in addition to the marketing, metaphors and puns) they emphasize that the PC is a handy tool that can be useful in many contexts - home, work, school, recreation - but the context and the people (er,
934.
by musicale 2y ago
"I must admit that when my friend first told me of his plan I was sorely tempted drop off an anonymous tip recommending that the Archduke postpone his trip to Sarajevo..."
935.
by musicale 2y ago
> a fully-fledged operating system with a hardware abstraction layer, preemptive multitasking, permissions, a registry, proper device drivers etc. Windows NT, which was developed by people (Dave Cutler et al.) who knew how to design and
936.
by musicale 2y ago
> userland abi is stable The system call interface per se is relatively stable. Then there's all that stuff that has been dumped into /proc...
937.
by musicale 2y ago
> The solution is simple: build a business environment that would allow a home-grown alternative to have developed over the last 40 years. Time travel is a simple and elegant solution to many problems. (Ignoring unintended consequences a
938.
by musicale 2y ago
Contempt for stable kernel data structures and APIs (and forget about any sort of kernel ABI) might make things easier for certain kernel developers, but it offloads a constant maintenance burden onto many other people, such as eBPF, driver
939.
by musicale 2y ago
The self-teaching guide is impressive. The programmed instruction format is a great way to learn, and it works both in print and online. I wish there were entire curricula available this way. Edit: It seems that Wiley has published a number
940.
by musicale 2y ago
Probably similarly to Dartmouth BASIC, which seems to have invoked the compiler when the user entered RUN. http://dtss.dartmouth.edu
941.
by musicale 2y ago
Dreams are like this alternate/double life. It's weird how they occupy memory as well, though they seem to be most easily accessible to me around (or during) sleeping hours.
942.
by musicale 2y ago
Dartmouth BASIC was designed for teletype-style, hard-copy printing terminals, rather than video displays. Conveniently your whole session was printed out, so you could take your email and program listing home with you. Line-by line editing
943.
by musicale 2y ago
I like the "Play BASIC Games in the Browser" link. All of these games should be collected into a browser-playable archive, along with the books and appropriate documentation.
944.
by musicale 2y ago
I think "C wannabe" is a complaint about some modern BASICs trying to be too much like C. Dartmouth BASIC and timesharing were remarkable achievements: a simplified version of Fortran that could be learned in an afternoon but coul
945.
by musicale 2y ago
Dartmouth BASIC had a renumber command. I believe that line renumbering commands and/or utilities were commonly available for microcomputer BASICs as well.
946.
by musicale 2y ago
I wish modern computer companies to hire people to create material like this, the way DEC apparently did. Unfortunately computers aren't really programmed by end-users anymore. Arguably there's no need to between a million apps on
947.
by musicale 2y ago
I'm greatly inspired by the kind of utopian visions of computing that seemed to be common from the BASIC era to the PC era to the pre-Facebook Internet era. I'm somewhat disenchanted with commercial computing from the social media
948.
by musicale 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Albrecht http://www.svipx.com/pcc/
949.
by musicale 2y ago
> "some stuff you just won't understand the beauty and the joy until you've at least put 100 hours in it" Terrific quote and advice. 100 hours seems doable for a lot of things (even if it's not enough time.) If y
950.
by musicale 2y ago
Good idea. I'd much rather write do concurrent (i = 1:n) y(i) = y(i) + a*x(i) enddo and then let the a compiler translate it into std::transform(par, x, x+n, y, y, [=](float x, float y){ return y + a*x; }
951.
by musicale 2y ago
Sandboxing means you can limit network access. For example, on Android you can disallow wi-fi and cellular access (not sure about bluetooth) on a per-app basis. Network access settings should really be more granular for apps that have a leg
952.
by musicale 2y ago
Great reference. I didn't realize the FAT filesystem was from Microsoft Disk BASIC (though I knew it was different from CP/M's) so I guess it came back full-circle with DOS. (Though perhaps not directly compatible with Disk B
953.
by musicale 2y ago
> I think virtually all of its major design decisions were mistakes, except for the BIOS/BDOS split, though not such serious mistakes as to make it completely unusable. I'm interested to hear why you disagree so strongly. &quo
954.
by musicale 2y ago
> Alas, CopyLeft had not yet been invented, the UC sold the P-System and we lost legal access to the code we'd written. Compare with UC Berkeley's BSD UNIX, which was originally open sourced in 1988 (though hamstrung from 1992-
955.
by musicale 2y ago
ScummVM seems to support several game VMs in addition to SCUMM. Another World seems to have been considered but determined to be out-of-scope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScummVM
956.
by musicale 2y ago
I like the idea of modern machines as universal systems that can seamlessly run whatever software you might like to run. When you switch to a new machine, all of your old software and files are still usable. Note that old software is likely
957.
by musicale 2y ago
> When a vibe coder inevitably needs to debug something, if they have no idea what any of the code does, or why it is the way it is, they are not going to have a good time Kernighan's law still applies. https://www.laws-o
958.
by musicale 2y ago
RIP
959.
by musicale 2y ago
> reading two documents side by side while looking for errors is much more draining than just reading the original letter and typing it in Validating LLM-generated text seems to be a hard problem, because it requires a human-quality read
960.
by musicale 2y ago
> Or "common sense" may be something that's out of reach for a machine without life experience Maybe Doug Lenat's idea of a common sense knowledge base wasn't such a bad one.

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