larsbrinkhoff (u/larsbrinkhoff)

larsbrinkhoff commented on Lisping at JPL (2002) flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.... · Posted by u/adityaathalye

ssrc · 3 months ago

'Was' is more likely. The list is from 2003, and if FORTH Inc, the (only? biggest?) remaining forth company hasn't updated it...

larsbrinkhoff · 3 months ago

I read a comment on /r/Forth the other day from someone at NASA, implying that Forth was still actively used for something.

larsbrinkhoff commented on Lisping at JPL (2002) flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.... · Posted by u/adityaathalye

lisper · 3 months ago

It's a little more complicated than that, and I can't fully explain it in an HN comment. I'd have to give you a crash course in compiler design. But the TL;DR is that if you're building a custom language, Lisp gives you the AST (abstract syntax tree -- look it up if you don't already know) for free. You can also sometimes leverage parts of the Lisp compiler depending on what machine you're targeting, though for the 6811 that was not the case.

larsbrinkhoff · 3 months ago

I imagine - though I don't know - it might have some similarities with GOAL, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp and https://opengoal.dev/docs/intro/

larsbrinkhoff commented on 32 bits that changed microprocessor design spectrum.ieee.org/bellmac... · Posted by u/mdp2021

jandrese · 3 months ago

The article handwaves over why the chip wasn't a success, which makes my first thought of "how much did each chip cost" all the more relevant. This is such an uplifting story until you think about how the 8086 is just about to wipe it off of the map.

larsbrinkhoff · 3 months ago

The Motorola 68000 was already available before the Bellmac-32. The 68000 programming model was mostly 32-bit, although internally it was limited to 16 bit data and 24 bit addresses. This was fixed by later models in the family.

larsbrinkhoff commented on 32 bits that changed microprocessor design spectrum.ieee.org/bellmac... · Posted by u/mdp2021

zik · 3 months ago

The Bellmac-32 was pretty amazing for its time - yet I note that the article fails to mention the immense debt that it owes to the VAX-11/780 architecture, which preceded it by three years.

The VAX was a 32-bit CPU with a two stage pipeline which introduced modern demand paged virtual memory. It was also the dominant platform for C and Unix by the time the Bellmac-32 was released.

The Bellmac-32 was a 32-bit CPU with a two stage pipeline and demand paged virtual memory very like the VAX's, which ran C and Unix. It's no mystery where it was getting a lot of its inspiration. I think the article makes it sound like these features were more original than they were.

Where the Bellmac-32 was impressive is in their success in implementing the latest features in CMOS, when the VAX was languishing in the supermini world of discrete logic. Ultimately the Bellmax-32 was a step in the right direction, and the VAX line ended up adopting LSI too slowly and became obsolete.

larsbrinkhoff · 3 months ago

> introduced modern demand paged virtual memory

Didn't Multics, Project Genie, and TENEX have demand paging long before the VAX?

larsbrinkhoff commented on I learned Snobol and then wrote a toy Forth ratfactor.com/snobol/... · Posted by u/ingve

quasidasimagasi · 3 months ago

I guess this is supposed to be some kind of trolling, nonetheless: mecrisp is great and definitively no toy.

larsbrinkhoff · 3 months ago

In fairness, there's an over abundance of toy Forths. And I say that as a fan and professional Forth programmer.

larsbrinkhoff commented on I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today codeberg.org/luciofstars/... · Posted by u/LuciOfStars

hsnewman · 5 months ago

Gates and Allen used (stole computer time) at Harvard's PDP-10 and other computer resources in developing this proprietary code.

larsbrinkhoff · 5 months ago

Some of those other computer resources were at University of Washington.

larsbrinkhoff commented on I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today codeberg.org/luciofstars/... · Posted by u/LuciOfStars

LuciOfStars · 5 months ago

No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape, I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!

larsbrinkhoff · 5 months ago

You're not an idiot. I have transcribed several listings manually. I also tried OCR. In my experience, fixing OCR mistakes take at least as much work as just typing the whole thing.

I recruited a team to transcribe a particularly important document, and I had us type each page to catch typos.

larsbrinkhoff commented on Knight TV Resurrection (2018) pdp-6.net/knight-tv/knigh... · Posted by u/rbanffy

larsbrinkhoff · 9 months ago

This has now reached the masses with the sale of over 9000... I mean 800 PiDP-10 units. Oscar is kind of pushing ITS as the premier PDP-10 operating system.

larsbrinkhoff commented on They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard kevinboone.me/dx7.html... · Posted by u/ingve

larsbrinkhoff · 9 months ago

FM synthesis was developed by John Chowning on the Stanford AI lab PDP-6 and PDP-10.

larsbrinkhoff commented on Creating a QR Code step by step nayuki.io/page/creating-a... · Posted by u/D4Ha

Timwi · 9 months ago

Unfortunately it seems that every online explanation of QR codes always leaves out the Reed-Solomon error code calculation. The author here describes it as “long, tedious, and not very interesting”, but since everyone seems to think that, it is now very hard to find.

larsbrinkhoff · 9 months ago

These two tutorials explain the error code calculations:

https://www.thonky.com/qr-code-tutorial/error-correction-cod...

https://dev.to/maxart2501/let-s-develop-a-qr-code-generator-...