A fascinating learning machine without a computer.
Readit Newssatiated_grue commented on Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat... · Posted by u/satiated_grue
> It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable.
Not old enough to have this kind of knowledge or confidence. I wonder if instead one day I'll be helping some future generation read old floppies, CDs, and IDE/ATA disks *slaps top of AT tower*.
Take a look at floppy disk controllers like the AppleSauce, Greaseweazle, and Kryoflux for preserving floppies by recording at the flux-transition level.
satiated_grue commented on The seven second kernel compile es.tldp.org/Presentacione... · Posted by u/guerrilla
make config &&
make depend &&
make modules &&
make zImage &&
lilo
satiated_grue commented on 1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022) troypress.com/1973-implem... · Posted by u/msephton
DEC the company, not Dec the month. @dang
Why did the programmer set up his Christmas tree on Halloween?
Because OCT 31 == DEC 25
There are in fact two sided floppies! IIRC they behave a lot like the two sides of a cassette tape, the floppy reader only reads from one side at a time.
A fun fact in that regard: the game Karateka (an actual game for the Apple II) had an easter egg, where the team realized that their game entirely fit in the capacity of one side of a floppy, so they put a second copy of the game on the other side, but set up so that it would render upside-down.
I'd not be surprised if the inclusion of that detail in this post was directly inspired by Karateka.
The Apple II had a non-linear layout of video memory, so programmer Jordan Mechner used a layer of indirection where he had an array of pointers to rows of screen memory.
They realized that inverting the screen was as simple as inverting the row-pointer array. Then they managed to convince Broderbund to ship a double-sided floppy with that change in the software.
"Video card" was the more general word. "VGA" is one of the IBM video cards for PCs that later became a de facto standard, as its behavior was cloned by other companies. It's sometimes used descriptively to talk about the 640x480 resolution, or the DE-15 connector that remained a standard connection for analog video output on personal computers for a long time.
There were a series of graphics adapters that started with the IBM PC:
MDA = Monochrome Display Adapter (text only) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Monochrome_Display_Adapter
CGA = Color Graphics Adapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter
EGA = Enhanced Graphics Adapter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter
VGA = Video Graphics Array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array
With some others like the Hercules which was MDA upward-compatible and did graphics as well as text.
They didn't really do any graphics "processing"; just displaying memory-mapped pixels in various formats.
They were memory-mapped, and the MDA used a different memory block than the CGA/EGA/VGA, so you could have two separate monitors simultaneously, doing things lke running something like Turbo Debugger on the MDA text display.
On the tic tac toe topic, MENACE is just startlingly cool:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...
satiated_grue commented on The Programming Languages Zoo plzoo.andrej.com/... · Posted by u/alabhyajindal
Programming languages are more a UI problem than a mathematical problem. Not sure how it will evolve if coding agents are becoming the “middlemen”.
What might a programming language designed specifically as a UI for coding agents look like?
Serious (germ of a) question.
I don't think you're allowed to have living people on a US coin
Neil Armstrong (technically his spacesuit, presumably with him inside) was on the 2002 Ohio quarter.