A 202x version of the untyped, word-oriented #B language that preceded C, for use on the 32-bit #PDP-8/X. #retrocomputing
#Romania has free university #schooling for some students
a toy programming language article that 94 people liked. in Python, called “my”, pop infix syntax with shift-reduce precedence parsing, but no control structures or subroutines. #compilers
discussion of Miguel Grinberg's #My language
hey, you can still get a #68000 from Motorola/Philips/NXP, a ColdFire that runs on 50 milliwatts. #microcontroller #hardware
the VT78 was a #PDP-8 (2.2MHz Intersil 6100) crammed into a #VT52, shipped in 01977; it was succeeded by the DECmate and the DECmate II.
#video from 01987 about the #Acorn #Archimedes and the origin of the #ARM, including an #interview with Sophie Wilson featuring the term “order codes”, and some machine specs for the 305, 310, 410, and 440. It comes with optional built-in “Econet”, which turns out to be 800kbps RS-422. Features footage of PCB rework, pick-and-place machines, and “flow soldering”, which I think is not quite wave soldering. Inspiring examples of what you can do with 4 MIPS, 1 MiB RAM, and I guess a TrueColor display, including real-time 3-D with hundreds of flat-shaded polygons. #manufacturing #history #retrocomputing
"NABU" #retrocomputing on a #Z80: 2200 new-old-stock machines from 01983 are now in the hands of hobbyists for US$60–100 each, though on HN they report US$180: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36567876
#LLM based code-completion engine work: StarCoder? WizardCoder? replit-code? ggml-code? #neural-networks
Stonebraker’s 02013 talk about how everything you know about #databases is wrong (because it's obsolete); instead he argues that star-schema data warehouses should use #column-stores like MonetDB and Vertica (because they’re 50–100× faster when you have 50–100 columns but only look at 4–5 attributes and always do SQL aggregates), while for OLTP databases “NewSQL” systems are “wildly faster”, about 100×. Explains column stores using Vertica as an example, explaining that segments of rows get buffered in main memory and then written out as “slabs” of compressed column “chunklets” which are later merged into larger segments (LSM-tree style, I suppose). Explains that #OLTP databases are almost never over a terabyte, which was US$30k of RAM at the time (64 gigs in each of 16 servers). “Data warehouses are measured in petabytes, but not OLTP,” but conventional databases waste a lot of time encoding and decoding it, maintaining LRU lists, doing record-level dynamic locking, latching B-tree pages, latching the lock table, and logging transaction recovery records. So H-Store and VoltDB statically partition main memory among cores and run one thread on each core to eliminate latching and locking. This makes it seem like maybe software transactional memory might be an interesting way to implement an in-memory OLTP database. Unsurprisingly #Stonebraker is very much not a fan of #eventual-consistency. He argues that replication via log shipping will inevitably result in a 3–6× slowdown over the optimal case because it commits you to writing a write-ahead log so you can ship it, so it's better to just duplicate the computation of the transaction on each replica, and similarly use "command logging" for durability. He says this requires you to use timestamp ordering (or some other deterministic scheme) rather than MVCC. #Video is loaded from YouTube misleadingly: it's 1h12m33s, not 12m33s. I guess Stonebraker must really hate Postgres for some reason because he never mentioned it once, while mentioning almost every other SQL database!
Summer Research Institute at #EPFL Lausanne in 02010-02013.
#lead chloride #electrolysis in #molten-salt at 320° with 34 mol% LiCl, 39 mol% KCl, 27 mol% PbCl₂, Bureau of Mines Report of Investigations 8166: “Recovery of Lead From Lead Chloride by Fused-Salt Electrolysis”
Dan Murphy is the original author of #TECO, perhaps the second of all text #editors after Expensive Typewriter, and this is his home page with notes on TECO. #history #retrocomputing
Dan Murphy's #PDF #paper on the #history of #TECO. #retrocomputing #editors
#history of #Erlang and how #Ericsson open-sourced it on 01998-12-02, and how #WhatsApp was losing US$138 million a year with only US$10 million a year in revenues on 400 million users. How do you spend US$138 million a year on only 35 engineers?
Prashanth Sadasivan says #SEO is ruining Google search results for programming questions in 02020
another “by the Blue Book” implementation of #Smalltalk under the free-software MIT license
#C preprocessor trick of defining data structures as higher-order #macros
#generative terrain in #Minecraft with #biomes and #Perlin-noise (well, #simplex-noise) #mapgen #games
Yossi Kreinin’s “I can’t believe I’m praising Tcl”, on the design of command languages as opposed to programming languages. #Tcl
#Apple //e ROM monitor #asm listings. #retrocomputing #history
aap's homepage. #retrocomputing
thermodynamic properties of aluminum phosphate. #materials
MIDAS #asm source code for PDP-6 DDT. #retrocomputing
building a hash table in MIDAS #asm #macros for PDP-6 Lisp. #retrocomputing #hashing