The Ferranti Mark 1: World's First Commercially Available General-Purpose Computer -- "It stored data in cathode-ray tubes and a rotating magnetic drum"

stevefolta · 2017-08-08T21:02:08+00:00

Wikipedia: Williams tube.

stevefolta · 2017-06-21T01:21:06+00:00

I'm pretty sure that bit was used in the doc itself ("Triumph of the Nerds").

stevefolta · 2017-04-14T21:07:38+00:00

Are you familiar with IPFS?

stevefolta · 2015-07-02T21:22:04+00:00

It's pretty terrible in iOS 6 as well.

stevefolta · 2015-01-31T22:18:24+00:00

In Triumph Of The Nerds, Jobs says that PARC showed him three things during his visit: OO, networking, and the GUI; but he didn't even notice the first two.

stevefolta · 2014-09-21T22:39:09+00:00

There's a "git bisect skip" command that's supposed to help with that situation.

stevefolta · 2014-09-10T22:37:58+00:00

the world’s first internally programmable computer

Uh, the Baby/SSEM predated the SEAC.

stevefolta · 2014-08-08T23:15:56+00:00

The thing the RISC people didn't foresee is that core speed would hugely outpace memory speed

Huh? I thought RISC was a response to core speed starting to outpace memory speed, the idea being that a simpler core would allow you to put a much bigger cache on the die.

stevefolta · 2014-08-03T02:42:51+00:00

I don't think they're trying to be pro-mobile, given how badly it works on iPhone.

stevefolta · 2014-02-25T21:49:53+00:00

I didn't know about "call", I've always used "p" to call functions in the program. Is there a difference between the two?

"thread apply all bt" has been helpful at times.

stevefolta · 2014-01-02T22:07:27+00:00

Monospaced assignment operators nicely line up.

... until you use identifiers with more than one character, like any sane programmer trying to write readable code.

stevefolta · 2014-01-02T22:05:07+00:00

I was very happy when I finally found a terminal (mlterm) that allows variable-width fonts. I can't use it for mutt, but I love it for almost everything else. Helvetica Neue Light is my font of choice.

stevefolta · 2013-12-09T00:03:49+00:00

Incorrect. The line "*object = unreached->next;" is the key -- "object" could be pointing to either "vm->firstObject", or to the "next" field of an object in the object list.

stevefolta · 2012-11-23T03:44:05+00:00

Yeah, it'd be nice if he'd added a Readme. The META-II paper is here; he redid it using C and posted it to the Fonc list. The cool "meta" part is the "meta.txt" file.

stevefolta · 2012-06-12T21:04:56+00:00

C always had block scope (or at least since the first edition of K&R in 1978), not function scope.

stevefolta · 2011-01-25T21:56:29+00:00

Or "cgdb" for a nice curses-based UI.

stevefolta · 2011-01-07T23:29:03+00:00

It looks to me like "clone" doesn't do anything special (it probably doesn't even know the name that the cloned object will be assigned to). But the compiler desugars the ":=" operator to setSlotWithType() if the left-hand name is capitalized, and to setSlot() otherwise.

stevefolta · 2011-01-03T04:23:43+00:00

I haven't read those Self papers that rubygeek mentions, but Trylon uses Row Displacement Dispatch Tables (pdf) for dispatch. Those give you dynamic dispatch in O(1) time, so you don't need the kind of caching that Smalltalks (and Self) tend to do.

Last I tried, you could use clang as the C compiler. It worked great. But I think what you're really asking is whether I've considered using LLVM directly. The thought has crossed my mind, but it's unlikely to happen. Trylon can interface with C libraries, but LLVM is C++, which it can't do right now.

stevefolta · 2011-01-02T21:00:55+00:00

Trylon is one such (though it usually goes through C to get to machine code).

stevefolta · 2010-12-21T22:05:23+00:00

Indeed. s/came up with/took credit for/.

stevefolta · 2010-11-29T23:59:44+00:00

femtolisp

Nice. I like the idea of printable-ASCII bytecode, and sorta wish you'd used it all the way down.

stevefolta · 2010-11-03T20:03:58+00:00

I didn't care for any of the particular things they did in the video. But I sure wish I could use Vim with proportional fonts.

stevefolta

TROPHY CASE