vincent-manis

6 ms·

61.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
I am very grateful to the Linux folks for including Copilot key support in recent kernels, that way you can remap the key to something useful.
62.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
No, recursion still works well without TCO (though as a Schemer, I love TCO). I was programming in BCPL in the early 1970s, and it handled recursive procedures with aplomb. The big revolution was realizing that, if you don't allow acce
63.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
I recently custom-built Guile for my Arch system, and found that it won't build with GCC 15, but will with 14, which is the only other version in the Arch repository. I think that the Guile maintainers will need to get busy fixing the
64.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
The terminal in the video was a rebadged KSR-33, which was common as a computer console. A few people at MIT and Bolt Beranek and Newman had them at home at that time. A KSR-33 went for about $1000, according to Perplexity. There were few v
65.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
I had one of those, dunno what happened to it...fun story, I was living in Boston at the time, and there was too much line noise on the phone system for 300 baud, but 110 baud worked like a charm.
66.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
And was a gag in the ancient Dick van Dyke show, where Dick's character gets a painting signed by `Artanis', and thinks it worthless, until someone spells it backward.
67.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
Sorry, I wouldn't be caught dead using Word. I use quotation marks because that is the correct punctuation.
68.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
“Lurk's distinguishing feature relative to most programming languages is that the correct execution of Lurk programs can be directly proved using SNARKs.” Do these proofs involve boojums?
69.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
Actually, the PDP-10 didn't have any byte size at all, it was a word-addressed machine. (An early attempt to implement C on this machine came a cropper because of this.) It did have a Load Byte and a Store Byte instruction, which allow
70.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
Oh, I forgot Lynn Conway (computer architecture)
71.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
Or Jean Sammet (author of a very comprehensive book on programming languages in the 1960s), or Lois Haibt (involved in development of original Fortran compiler) or Frances Allen (did key work at IBM on optimization in Fortran compilers), or
72.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
By contrast, my parents were high school dropouts. When I was little, my mum would read to me, with her finger following the text. I somehow got the idea, and started to sound out the words with her. By kindergarten, I was reading at a Grad
73.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
I take neither side in a dependencies vs NIH war. I like using SQLite as a database, and I use Tk (of Tcl/Tk) as my user interface toolkit, for example. Neither of those is going anywhere, they are both maintained, and I build them mys
74.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
This is the latest in a very honourable tradition. My first encounter with it was with Martin Richards's BCPL system in 1972. The compiler generated a hypothetical ISA called OCODE, from which backends generated pretty good native code
75.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
You undoubtedly were in my class if you did it in 1985, and I am glad you got value from it.
76.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
There is one very BIG thing that Cobol pioneered: the requirement that not only the programs, but also the data, must be portable across machines. At a time when machines used different character codes, let alone different numeric formats
77.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
One of the Hennessy/Patterson books has coverage of GPUs. But the definitive description of GPUs at a conceptual undergrad level has yet to be written, I think. As for microarchitectures, for the most part those have evolved over the l
78.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
Yes i did.
79.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
Quick answer: is our software any more usable, any more reliable, than it was 50 years ago? The more code you write, the more dependencies you require, the more opportunity for bugs and design errors to creep in. I get the impression that m
80.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
An addendum...Back in the 1960s, IBM didn't grok time-sharing. When MIT/Bell Labs looked for a machine with address translation, IBM wasn't interested, so GE got the contract. IBM suddenly realized that they had lost an oppor
81.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
I don't do web stuff at all, but I really enjoyed this article. I am convinced that software engineers (not to mention others) have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our brave new world of 32GB memories and fibre-optics. By all
82.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
This is why the old-fashioned university course on assembly language is still useful. Writing assembly language (preferably for a less-complex architecture, so the student doesn't get bogged down on minutiae) gives one a gut feeling fo
83.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? -- Henry the Fourth, Part 1
84.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
Untergrundbahnhofzeitschriftsplatz: Subway station newspaper stand
85.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
The “atomization” issue is one of my biggest bugbears, which I often comment on here. If your project's documentation is a website with many small documents all linked together in multiple ways, don't expect me to spend time tryin
86.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
OS/360 was a victim of over-ambition. Originally, it was to run on all models of System/360 (maybe not the Model 20, which implemented only a subset of the ISA), and it was complex enough that there were challenges in building it.
87.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
I haven't written a PL/I program since about 1985, but I still have a certain affection for the language. It was a genuine attempt to create a new language that would be better than Fortran and Cobol (and Algol, for that matter).
88.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
Amongst my friends who are non-tech people it is a common belief that Y2K was a big scam, and that it all just went away when the calendar turned. I have to point out over and over again that it all “went away” because organizations spent b
89.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
If I were asked this question, except as a piece of trivia exchange, I wouldn't want to work for them. There are arguments in favour of many OSes (including those that I used in the long-ago past on long-forgotten iron), and many again
90.
by vincent-manis 1y ago
My teenage dream machine was a PDP-8 (the original) and a Teletype ASR-33. Fortunately, I never got it.

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