- Oh sure, he might have made several, or many, drafts on scratch paper. But even then it is impressive. Many of these are around 12 pages of hand written text and math in ink with no corrections -- he famously used a Mont Blanc fountain pen. How many people could do that at all, even if they were copying from a rough draft? And there are so many -- more than 1300 EwDs!
- Many of these EWD notes are hand written with a lot of mathematical notation, and no corrections. For example:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1063.PDF
I am reminded of Salieri's reaction to Mozart's manuscripts in the movie Amadeus.
- Possibly of interest: 'Linux kernel MicroPython port', last updated four years ago.
https://github.com/Jongy/micropython/tree/linux-kernel/ports...
https://medium.com/@yon.goldschmidt/running-python-in-the-li...
- This makes me sad because I recall seeing many of these at the late lamented Living Computer Museum in Seattle. Here we see its collection being auctioned off piecemeal.
The back story is here:
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=42309025 Ask HN: Why did no one save the Living Computers museum in Seattle? 73 points by superconduct123 on Dec 3, 2024 | ... | 78 comments
- A surprise, from the README:
"HiRTOS is formally specified using the Z notation. The Z specification can be found here [link]."
I used Z years ago. I haven't seen any new work in Z for many years -- but the linked specification is dated in 2024.
Also, "The HiRTOS thread scheduler is formally specified in TLA+/Pluscal. The TLA+/Pluscal specification can be found here [link] It was model-checked using the TLC model checker. The sucessful TLC run [link] took more than 7 hours"
- This same author's Aquinas OS also looks interesting -- although it is not in Latin.
- Very impressive - there is a lot of work here! But why? They explain it in docs/latina.h.md |
In include/latina.h, they use the C preprocessor to redefine the C keywords in Latin. Also, many numeric constants -- instead of 4096 you write MMMMXCVI.
The other files in docs explain each library routine in English, but the code samples are in Latin. The source files - a lot of them! - are in include and lib. The code is all in Latin, including the error messages and comments.
- I understand that they had access to other computer culture, too ... some of the nonsense noises that Dr. Memory makes as Clem hacks into the backend of the ‘President’ are terms that come from the DEC PDP-10 ...
Around 1970, the Firesign Theatre used to do live broadcasts on the KPPC radio station in Pasadena, from a studio in a church basement. On one show they read what was apparently some piece of avant-garde poetry. A Caltech classmate of mine recognized that it was an example from Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, whose Vol.1 had recently appeared.
All I can remember from the "poem" is the repeated phrase "leave system." Sure enough, in section 2.2.5 p. 280 - 295 of Vol 1 in the Second Edition, Knuth presents an extended example that "simulates the elevator system in the mathematics building of the California Institute of Technology." The "poem" quoted the comments in the execution trace shown in Table 1 on p. 284.
- Severo Ornstein called his memoir of the 1950s - 1970s Computing in the Middle Ages. Ornstein worked on SAGE, TX-2, LINC, and the Arpanet IMP among other things, before moving on to Xerox PARC.
https://worrydream.com/refs/Ornstein_2002_-_Computing_in_the...
- Coetzee writes a bit about his early programming career in his autobiographical novel Youth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth:_Scenes_from_Provincial_...
- CuBit is another operating system in SPARK/Ada.
1. https://blog.adacore.com/cubit-a-general-purpose-operating-s...
- Story idea: on one of his many cross-country drives to Los Alamos, von Neumann stops into a remote diner out West where he runs into ... Kerouac and the others on one of their On The Road journeys! They get to talking, and von Neumann tells them about game theory, quantum mechanics, and computers --- which they have never heard of before. Kerouac writes about the encounter in one of his early On The Road drafts but it is removed by the editors who worry they might get in trouble for revealing atomic secrets because von Neumann hinted at plans to build the H-bomb.
- There is Wirth and Gutknecht's Oberon System. It's still available but is older than Visopsys -- it was created around 1990, then updated in 2013. I think it's now considered an historical artifact.
- I gather that the pre-freeway 1940s and 1950s were the great age for road trips in America -- for all kinds of people, including the very non-bohemian.
I read somewhere that the mathematician John von Neumann drove across the country over twenty times in the late 40s and early 50s -- between Princeton and Los Alamos, I would guess. I also read that in the late 40s some of Norbert Wiener's grad students drove from Boston to Mexico City for a cybernetics conference --- they were gone for months!
Earlier, in the 1930s, there was the migration of Oakies from the dust bowl to California, as described in The Grapes of Wrath, which, come to think of it, is another road novel.
In 1957 my family, a young couple with two little kids, moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, driving in our Plymouth station wagon, camping along the way. I was very young but I recall stopping for a flash flood, and another time we had to stop for a cattle drive that was crossing the highway, driven by actual cowboys on horseback! I remember it as one of the great adventures of my life.
- I wasn't planning to use the front panel extensively because, as mentioned in the video, front-panel booting is not a practical way to start a computer.
The next step up is to use a hex keypad to enter 16 bits at a time. Some single board computers from the 1970's provided this. It was marginally practical - I used to enter programs of a couple of hundred bytes into a KIM-1 this way, it only took a few minutes.
Those computers did provide a simple monitor in ROM to support this, but that code was very small - Steve Wozniak's Wozmon monitor for the Apple I was 256 bytes. You could probably design some circuitry not much more complicated than in this article to replace its row of switches with a keypad.
- Don't the Canon Cat "Leap" keys behave like the ordinary incremental search in Emacs? That is, C-s and C-r for forward and reverse search. Can't you recreate the Canon Cat experience in Emacs by editing in a single big buffer, using C-s and C-r to navigate by searching?
Some of us already do something like this by keeping a big ever-growing notes buffer with the date at the beginning of each day's work.
- Here are the Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in the classic 1966 film Blow Up. Beck smashes his guitar while Page looks on.
- Forth was invented around 1970 for controlling equipment in an astronomical observatory, running on a PDP-11, a 16-bit computer with up to 64 Kbytes of memory. Its heyday was the 1970s and 80s, when it was mostly used for small embedded systems on 8- or 16- bit processors with 8 kb -- 64 kb of memory. It was possible to run an entire Forth development system along with the application on these small targets without resorting to a bigger computer for cross-development.
The usual alternative to Forth on those systems was assembly language.
- In 2018 I ran across this:
https://www.fugue.co/blog/2015-11-11-guide-to-emacs.html - Recreates (Jef Raskin's) Archy-like philosophy and workflow in emacs, including some customizations: "Ace Jump Mode ... works a bit like Jef Raskin's Leap feature from days gone by." Explicitly references Archy's predecessor, the Canon Cat
But now clicking on that URL brings up something completely different.
https://jon-jacky.github.io/FLiP/www/
https://github.com/jon-jacky/FLiP/