On AD 2007 December 19 Wednesday 11:19:51 PM -0700, Charles Curley wrote: > On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 10:44:16AM -0700, Nathan Blackham wrote: > 20 years ago, I had a compiler, interpreter, operating system, and > maybe an assembler, all in 8 Kb. 12 Kb on 32 bit processors. It ran in > as little as 16 Kb, but I preferred 24 Kb. I could port it to a new > processor in a few weeks, and once I had the processor down I could > put it on a new computer in as little as an hour. The source code fit > on a DSDD floppy, along with editors, assemblers, the cross compiler > (it was self hosting), decompilers, single steppers, disassemblers and > other tools. Oh, and a few games. And an IDE.
That sounds awesome. Do you have the source code online somewhere? Why don't we program like this anymore? I think Alan Kay has some vision for reducing computing environments back to these wholesome proportions. <quote> The other thing is a recently funded NSF project that will take a couple of giant steps, we hope, toward reinventing programming. The plan is to take the entire personal-computing experience from the end user down to the silicon and make a system from scratch that recapitulates everything people are used to—desktop publishing, Internet experiences, etc.—in less than 20,000 lines of code. It would be kind of like a Moore's Law step in software. It's going to be quite difficult to do this work in five years, but it will be exciting. </quote> http://www.cioinsight.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=200162,00.asp Justin /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
