“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” — Anatole France Treating people equally does not mean treating them the same…
Oh, and there was a Cobol compiler for the 6600. (Wirth's first Pascal implementation was also for the 6600, as I recall.) My point is that the central processor architecture of the 6600, apart from the large word size,…
Excuse me? No character addressability? The scientific machines IBM was selling in 1963, the 704x/709x, were 36-bit-word-addressible. The 6600 was definitely similar to those, in many ways. And you didn't need character…
When Xerox established PARC, they asked the assembled scientists what computer they wanted. The majority view was a DEC PDP-10 KA10, with the BBN memory management unit that let it run Tenex (the ancestor of DEC…
This reminds me of the apocryphal story of the IBM System/360 running a 1410 emulator that ran an IBM 705 simulator that ran a business-critical application.
The reason for that is that it did arithmetic via table lookup. As I heard from someone who was there, the University of British Columbia wanted to show off its brand new 1620, so they wrote a demo program, and with a…
Back in the early 90s, I ran several procurements for university computer labs. We were under severe budget constraints, and, as a computer science department, we had constraints not normally found in such labs (for…
Back around 1968, I did some work on an IBM 1130 (small-scale 16-bit computer, definitely not a minicomputer, as it filled most of a room). The disk drive was driven by a voice coil, and made an audible click as the…
I use Tk routinely in Scheme; there is no Tcl in my code, but Tk is a very nice (though basic) GUI kit, and my programs work on Linux, BSD, MacOS, and Windows. Other commenters have mentioned that Python ships with…
I have nothing to say on the merits of Khan Academy (I have never looked at it, nor have I known anyone taking a course), but from 35 years of teaching, I know that we mostly learn by doing. It's why university courses…
A correction. I can find no evidence of a Unix v2 at Berkeley, it looks like it was v4. (I was told long ago by someone who was at Berkeley then that they had had v2, but there is no evidence of this in the usual…
My vague recollection is that the kernel in Unix v2 (still called UNIX in those days) was written in assembly language, but that many of the commands were written in B. Because B was interpretive on the PDP-11 (it…
s/dark side/far side/
I tried to use Vim once, and found that none of the Emacs keybindings worked there. Seriously, learning x86 assembly language is easier than trying to grasp that INSANELY bad keyboard layout.
I would never buy a kit that required soldering, because I'm terrible at it. But I like putting things together. I've assembled a couple of DIY keyboards, and I bought a Framework 12 laptop. It doesn't take too long…
er, no, it was licensed, but available to educational institutions. I remember having to send Bell Labs our university calendar when i wanted to get a copy of LSI-11 Unix circa 1976. What is true is that Ken Thompson…
There are 2 more that I would add, both books I read as an undergraduate nearly 60 years ago. First, Marvin Minsky's Computation: Finite And Infinite Machines (published 60 years ago). Not the latest word in automata…
There are a number of image-based Scheme systems. Chibi Scheme and Chez Scheme come to mind. In both, you can save an image and reload it at a later time, though for very good reasons, most people start each session…
I for one really appreciate Caps Lock. I always remap it as Compose.
SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn…
Until the threat of anti-trust against IBM, and the latter's decision to “unbundle” its software from its hardware, in 1969. There had been proprietary software before that, but very little horizontal software (OSs,…
I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code).…
I have no opinion on the validity of this claim, but I do know that many students do not read things. I taught university level computer science for over 30 years. On midterms, I would embed phrases such as “print OKAPI…
One of the best labs I ever did in university (this was circa 1970), was to create an Initial Program Load (bootstrap) program for a virtual IBM System/360, which copied punch cards, using no OS assistance. (Modern…
Tk without Tcl?
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” — Anatole France Treating people equally does not mean treating them the same…
Oh, and there was a Cobol compiler for the 6600. (Wirth's first Pascal implementation was also for the 6600, as I recall.) My point is that the central processor architecture of the 6600, apart from the large word size,…
Excuse me? No character addressability? The scientific machines IBM was selling in 1963, the 704x/709x, were 36-bit-word-addressible. The 6600 was definitely similar to those, in many ways. And you didn't need character…
When Xerox established PARC, they asked the assembled scientists what computer they wanted. The majority view was a DEC PDP-10 KA10, with the BBN memory management unit that let it run Tenex (the ancestor of DEC…
This reminds me of the apocryphal story of the IBM System/360 running a 1410 emulator that ran an IBM 705 simulator that ran a business-critical application.
The reason for that is that it did arithmetic via table lookup. As I heard from someone who was there, the University of British Columbia wanted to show off its brand new 1620, so they wrote a demo program, and with a…
Back in the early 90s, I ran several procurements for university computer labs. We were under severe budget constraints, and, as a computer science department, we had constraints not normally found in such labs (for…
Back around 1968, I did some work on an IBM 1130 (small-scale 16-bit computer, definitely not a minicomputer, as it filled most of a room). The disk drive was driven by a voice coil, and made an audible click as the…
I use Tk routinely in Scheme; there is no Tcl in my code, but Tk is a very nice (though basic) GUI kit, and my programs work on Linux, BSD, MacOS, and Windows. Other commenters have mentioned that Python ships with…
I have nothing to say on the merits of Khan Academy (I have never looked at it, nor have I known anyone taking a course), but from 35 years of teaching, I know that we mostly learn by doing. It's why university courses…
A correction. I can find no evidence of a Unix v2 at Berkeley, it looks like it was v4. (I was told long ago by someone who was at Berkeley then that they had had v2, but there is no evidence of this in the usual…
My vague recollection is that the kernel in Unix v2 (still called UNIX in those days) was written in assembly language, but that many of the commands were written in B. Because B was interpretive on the PDP-11 (it…
s/dark side/far side/
I tried to use Vim once, and found that none of the Emacs keybindings worked there. Seriously, learning x86 assembly language is easier than trying to grasp that INSANELY bad keyboard layout.
I would never buy a kit that required soldering, because I'm terrible at it. But I like putting things together. I've assembled a couple of DIY keyboards, and I bought a Framework 12 laptop. It doesn't take too long…
er, no, it was licensed, but available to educational institutions. I remember having to send Bell Labs our university calendar when i wanted to get a copy of LSI-11 Unix circa 1976. What is true is that Ken Thompson…
There are 2 more that I would add, both books I read as an undergraduate nearly 60 years ago. First, Marvin Minsky's Computation: Finite And Infinite Machines (published 60 years ago). Not the latest word in automata…
There are a number of image-based Scheme systems. Chibi Scheme and Chez Scheme come to mind. In both, you can save an image and reload it at a later time, though for very good reasons, most people start each session…
I for one really appreciate Caps Lock. I always remap it as Compose.
SICP is not intended as a how-to-program manual, it attempts to lay the foundation for a big chunk of computer science. “How To Design Programs” might be a better choice for someone learning Scheme. (But SICP will turn…
Until the threat of anti-trust against IBM, and the latter's decision to “unbundle” its software from its hardware, in 1969. There had been proprietary software before that, but very little horizontal software (OSs,…
I disagree with this profoundly. There is no argument that Lisp in general can get you in a terrible mess. So can C, or pretty much any language (I well remember a case of 11-way multiple inheritance in C++ game code).…
I have no opinion on the validity of this claim, but I do know that many students do not read things. I taught university level computer science for over 30 years. On midterms, I would embed phrases such as “print OKAPI…
One of the best labs I ever did in university (this was circa 1970), was to create an Initial Program Load (bootstrap) program for a virtual IBM System/360, which copied punch cards, using no OS assistance. (Modern…
Tk without Tcl?