Yeechang Lee wrote on Tue, 28 Sep 2021 10:36:15 -0700
> The US industry thought that the $99 price point needed to be reached, in
> part because of the Timex/Sinclair 1000's example; besides the 99/2 and
> Commodore 16, the TRS-80 MC-10 is another example of the ultra low-cost
> "Sinclair fighter".
While the American public were very ignorant of Sinclair's achievements,
the US home computer makers were very worried about them. In 1983 both
Commodore and Texas Instruments were working on their "ZX81 killers".
https://www.99er.net/992.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_16
-- Jecel
Fred Cisin wrote on Sat, 18 Sep 2021 13:45:04 -0700 (PDT)
> On Sat, 18 Sep 2021, dwight via cctalk wrote:
> > Of course, Busicom was the first programed microprocessor driven
> > calculator, it wasn't the first calculator using calculator ICs. That is
> > what Busicom was trying to compete with,
Jay Jaeger wrote on Sun, 26 Jul 2020 19:24:24 -0500
> So, either he mis-entered something, or possibly the result of a
> different state of a random number generator somewhere?
He dumped the full state of the simulation to paper with six digits
after the decimal point even though the internal calc
ben wrote on Sat, 27 Jun 2020 19:15:25 -0600
> It would be nice if one could define a new language for problem
> solving and run it through compiler-compiler processor for interesting
> problems.
That is what Alan Kay's group did a few year ago in their "STEPS"
project. They wanted to implement a
Liam Proven wrote on Fri, 29 May 2020 14:20:53 +0200
> And I have had earnest youngsters on Twitter and elsewhere very
> seriously tell me that _no_ language could even theoretically be
> immune to the problems of C, because _all_ languages are implemented
> in C at the lowest level.
The modern va
Jim Brain wrote on Thu, 28 May 2020 18:15:19 -0500
> On 5/28/2020 1:24 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> >
> >> . Evidently, there exists a lower bound of functionality
> >> of computing capability in the US, and the little wedge just didn't make
> >> it.
> > No no. It wasn't that. It was _money
Jim Brain wrote on Thu, 28 May 2020 15:54:10 -0500
> On 5/28/2020 12:38 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> > ? TRS-80 Colour, AKA CoCo -- 6809
> Started life as a farming-related Videotex terminal. Pics will show the
> amazing similarity. Was a joint venture between Motorola and Tandy, and
>
Alan Perry wrote on Wed, 27 May 2020 20:02:06 -0700
> That wasn't an option for most folks. They told me that they didn't accept
> items on loan.
>
> alan
>
> > On May 27, 2020, at 19:33, Chris Hanson wrote:
> >
> > This is why people should avoid donating equipment directly to institutions
>
Fred,
> Quite true that Gary did not have the ruthless personality to compete.
> If the roles had been reversed, Gary would NOT have become a bill Gates.
> Yes, the final outcome was inevitable, although the one incident set the
> path. It is fairly commonly believed that MS-DOS would not have
Fred,
> To me, the culture clash aspect makes it one of the greatest stories of
> the time.
> Was Gary not taking the meeting seriously enough to be there on time, and
> as a consequence, ending up being $80B behind Bill Gates, the stupidest
> mistake anybody has ever made?
> Or the bravest thi
Fred Cisin advised on: Sat, 23 May 2020 20:29:28 -0700 (PDT)
> But, read carefully the corrections that others made!
Some things are easy to check, like the fact that the Z80 came out in
1976 when Woz was already finishing the Apple II so he couldn't have
considered using it for the Apple I. Note
We celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Internet less than 2 years
ago:
> https://computerhistory.org/blog/born-in-a-van-happy-40th-birthday-to-the-internet/
The ARPAnet was a WAN (wide area network) and not an Internet, but it
was one of the three networks involved in that first test on Novemb
Ben wrote on Tue, 6 Aug 2019 13:47:59 -0600
> It was too bad the 6809 did not have a pin to indicate Instruction or
> Data memory bank in use. That would of given a real unix system in the
> 8 bit world, as by then (late 70s) 64kb was proving just to small for
> any real use.
I added a circuit to
Adam Thornton wrote on Fri, 5 Jul 2019 11:38:56 -0700
> I have an Apple /// that I've had for many years; it's never worked.
>
> When you power it up, you get a checkerboard screen, where half the squares
> are solid white, and the other half have a little mosaic pattern in them.
>
> Looks like t
Alan,
> I especially appreciated he not only offered an opinion - his specific
> ideas on where the boarder between RISC and CISC was - but then provided
> an analysis of a bunch of processors based on those criteria and an
> analysis of the outliers that challenged his criteria. It's a well
Jim Manley wrote about a professor's experience in the iAPX432 team.
Didn't at least part of the team continue the project as the BiiN /
960MX?
-- Jecel
Josh Dersch wrote on Tue, 23 Oct 2018 07:25:41 -0700
> I've never seen evidence for any Smalltalk having a desktop metaphor (as in
> the discussion at hand -- icons and folders representing files and/or data,
> not merely windows, etc.). It's certainly possible that the platform was
> used for exp
Chuck Guzis pointed out that the PC was built from 8 bit peripheral
chips, which was where the 64KB problem came from.
When I saw the design, I thought it was really cute how they were able
to use one of the timer channels and one of the DMA channels to
implement a DRAM refresh circuit almost "for
Chuck Guzis wrote on Wed, 11 Apr 2018 11:09:23 -0700
> I thought that Moore's "law" dealt only with the number of transistors
> on a die. Did Gordon also say something about performance?
That is correct. The observation that transistors would be faster and
use less power as they became smaller i
Jay West wrote (among other things):
> On a technical list with adults, I believe that when someone posts something
> on-topic which has portions you do not personally like that perhaps the adult
> thing is to take the points that are in-common and expand on them, leaving
> the points behind that y
Al Kossow wrote on: Wed, 24 May 2017 14:28:19 -0700
> On 5/24/17 12:58 PM, ben via cctalk wrote:
>
> > With typo in VHDL you have hard problem finding that single gate
> > error.
>
> The world has been debugging 100,000+ gate systems with simulations for
> a few decades now.
>
> Once you've buil
Toby Thain via cctalk wrote on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 19:34:08 -0400
> On 2017-04-13 6:54 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> > So, whence APL today?
>
> Still lives on -- Dyalog, J, K, etc. Recently discovered the #jsoftware
> channel on Freenode for APL fans.
I consider Matlab and Julia to be spirit
Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote on Tue, 11 Apr 2017 18:05:01 -0700
> On 04/11/2017 04:53 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. via cctalk wrote:
>
> > I consider the heart of any modern high performance CPU to be a
> > dataflow architecture (described as an "out of order execution
> >
Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote on Tue, 11 Apr 2017 10:18:00 -0400 (EDT)
> > From: Sean Conner
>
> > I really think it's for *this* reason (the handler() example) that C
> > doesn't allow nested functions.
>
> I wouldn't be sure of that; I would tend to think that nested functions were
Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote on Tue, 11 Apr 2017 09:37:27 -0700
> On 04/10/2017 02:23 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
>
> > When the 432 project (originally 8800) started, there weren't many
> > people predicting that C (and its derivatives) would take over the world.
>
> That's the danger of a too-aggress
Sean Conner wrote two great posts on Mon, 10 Apr 2017 21:43:29 -0400
These are all very good points. I agree I was exagerating by saying the
iAPX432 and 8086 couldn't run C. After all, the language was born on the
PDP-11 and that was limited to either 64KB or 128KB. So any C programs
for that mach
Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote on Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2017 15:21:08 -0700
> Thanks for the list--I was aware of the various Java engines and the WD
> P-code engine, but had never run into the SCAMP.
I just found an academic Pascal microprocessor from 1980 called EM-1 and
described all the way to the c
Sean Conner via cctalk wrote on Mon, 10 Apr 2017 17:39:57 -0400
> What about C made it difficult for the 432 to run?
>
> -spc (Curious here, as some aspects of the 432 made their way to the 286
> and we all know what happened to that architecture ... )
C expects memory addresses to lo
Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote on Mon, 10 Apr 2017 20:59:40 +
> On 4/10/2017 4:42 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> > Were there any microprocessor chips that attempted to mimic the
> > Burroughs B5000 series and natively execute Algol of any flavor?
>
> No, but Western Digital implemented
Geoffrey Oltmans wrote:
> I can imagine that they employed a similar vector generator on the Vectrex.
The 6809 processor had to go through the display list itself. But the
analog design was very clever. To draw a vector you would use the single
DAC to set the start x voltage, then use the same DAC
Jim Brain wrote:
> As a function of "give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man
> to fish, you feed him for all time", I dloaded Logic Friday, and figured
> out a quick way to read the two 16L8 (combinatorial only) PALs on the
> board with my EPROM reader (cue duct tape and baling w
Toby Thain wrote:
> On 2017-01-24 2:46 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
> >[PC emulator on ARM emulator on PC]
>
> Was this a JIT emulator (like Apple's later versions of 68K emulation),
> or a simple interpreter?
It was a simple interpreter. I had been aware of the 198
Chuck Guzis asked on Mon, 23 Jan 2017 22:00:15 -0800
> Is there a "recursive" emulator setup wherein one machine emulates
> another one...where the final emulation is for the original hardware?
In 1988 I designed an ARM2 based computer (my Merlin 4, which was only
built in 1992 when the ARM2 was a
Andy Cloud wrote on Tue, 10 Jan 2017 22:09:52 +
> I thought this would be an interesting question to ask around - What's the
> rarest or most unusual computer-related item do you own?
Stuff that I designed and built myself but wasn't produced is rare,
obviously, but it is likely that this wasn
I wrote:
> The 68000 has three separate 16 bit ALUs: one for DataLow, one for
> AddressLow and another for AdressHigh. DataHigh can be processed by
> either the first or the second one. The first one implements all
> operations while the other two only do add/subtract and some limited
> shifting.
>
The 68000 has three separate 16 bit ALUs: one for DataLow, one for
AddressLow and another for AdressHigh. DataHigh can be processed by
either the first or the second one. The first one implements all
operations while the other two only do add/subtract and some limited
shifting.
See figure 8 of:
ht
Ben,
> I liked Forth when it was still threaded. You got the DOES> feature.
> Do you still have that with the FORTH chips?
All Forth implementations are threaded, but there are several kinds:
direct, indirect, token and subroutine. Initially indirect threading was
the most popular implementation
Sean Conner wrote:on Wed, 27 Apr 2016 16:13:07 -0400
> The 6908 *is* better than either the Z80 or the 6502 (yes, I'm one of
> *those* 8-)
To be fair, the Z80 and 6502 had to compete against the 8080 while the
6809 came out after the 8086 and 68000.
> Citation needed. C derivatives? The onl
Eric Smith mentioned:
> [2901 A, B, and C, CMOS versions]
> [2903 and 29203]
> [Intel 3001 and 3002]
> [MMI 5701/6701]
> [Motorola MC10800]
I'd add the Texas Instruments SN74S481, SN54LS481 and SN74LS481 TTL 4
bit slices. The Schottky version had a 90ns clock cycle and the low
power versions 120ns
Jon Elson wrote on Thu, 24 Mar 2016 10:34:48 -0500:
> What density and format is this tape? Not all drives
> support all densities.
I actually mentioned this detail to his advisor when they were
discussing this topic after his student's defense, but I don't think he
remembers this information. I
A student at the Physics Institute at the University of São Paulo
(Brazil) reimplemented the Manchester DataFlow machine from the 1980s
using modern FPGA technology. His goal is to evolve the project so it
can be used for current applications.
His advisor was at Manchester at the time of the proje
Noel Chiappa wrote:
> It's worth teaching a bit of machine/assembler language, so that students
> understand how computers _actually work_, underneath.
>
> [example of students who wrote octal math for CLU]
Back in 1983 I needed an assembler for the Motorola 6809, so I wrote one
in Lisp on a TRS-
Paul Koning wrote on Sat, 10 Oct 2015 11:44:58 -0400:
> > On Oct 9, 2015, at 5:39 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
> > [noticed voter ID terminal had cable to voting machines!]
>
> That's not the real problem.
Indeed, not *the* problem but just *a* problem I noticed whi
John Robertson asked:
> >After the fiasco about the Deibold machines changing votes during the
> >Bush election of 2000, Brazil opted for them?
To which Alexandre Souza replied:
> Yep. Welcome to the land of the stupid.
Ok, I think we need some facts, here. Note that from the very first time
Just a quick history of x86 implementation styles (from memory, so don't
take this very seriously):
8086: Intel's first pipeline, with separate Fetch and Execution units
iAPX286: borrowed some ideas from iAPX432's protection model, but I
don't know any implementation details
386: traditional CIS
Rich Alderson on Thu, 17 Sep 2015 23:49:59 + wrote:
> From: Paul Koning
> Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2015 9:02 AM
>
> > In any case, I do not believe the original statement. First of all, it is
> > well known that no computer can solve "all problems" (see Gödel). For those
> > it *can* so
I am writing this in Celeste, which is the email app in the Squeak
Smalltalk programming language and system. The way you normally use
Smalltalk is to save a snapshot (called an "image file" in Squeak) of
your full working environment and which you can later restore to have
everything back exactly
Chris Osborn wrote:
>[...] I thought it would be fun to do a challenge where people don't just
> post a picture of their computer, but they display the picture of their
> computer *on* their computer and post that!
Not quite within these rules, but here are two cases of old computers
showing draw
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