- This is a nice historical summary of the origin and evolution of MUMPS. The author briefly mentions the involvement of BBN and the JOSS language, but there was actually more. Jordan Baruch, who was a doctoral student of Prof. Leo Beranek, one of the founders of BBN, was involved in the development of what we call a medical information system today, as an employee of BBN and in cooperation with the Massachusetts General Hospital (see https://www.nae.edu/29722/Dr-Jordan-J-Baruch and https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/41526.41531). He switched to the new MEDINET department of General Electric in 1966, where he developed the FILECOMP language, which actually pioneered the tree-based data model where files could be accessed via nested subscripts. This was an important influence on MUMPS.
- I work with a few of the MIT old timers who love the idea of Lisp machines. When I want to really piss them off, I just tell them vim is much better than emacs :)
- Article is pay-walled.
- Of course forth is the language whispered by desert prophets and mystics
- It is us who have failed
- God speed you legend!
- How could machines that run gods language fail ?
- This feels like the kind of project I’d like to do over the holiday break. The magical two weeks where everything is on lockdown and there is nothing to do but tinker and egg nogg
- Interesting article. But I don't think it's a real problem. As the author said, we have SBCL and implementations based on LLVM, and development/innovation is not hindered.
- With all those rare chips required (which are basically unobtanium, as stated in the article), I think it would be interesting to see if someone can come up with a "reimagniation" instead of a straight-up clone.
Something like using a few RP2040's for glue logic and a RPi4 running a modified 86box build for emulation of the 386....
- That’s a big read and a great article. My first job, in London, as a young and ignorant engineer (I’m still two of those three things) I bought millions of £ worth of Sun hardware. Mostly pizza box SS20’s. I’ve always loved those machines. Very reliable, very heavy, and returned my employer an impressive ROI so I don’t get fired! I have a couple at home now, and I still have the IPX that was on my desk in 1994 I used to install, configure and maintain those machines. They were the days.
- Early versions of StuffIt included the file format info (eg, Appendix D of the Stuffit 1.5 User's Guide) so there were a handful of utilities with StuffIt 1/1.5 support. Aladdin went off and changed the file format.
- I often think more like the film _Brazil_ when dealing with Canadian customs. I import a lot of vintage LEGO from Britain. Morpeth, Northumberland seems to have 50s and 60s LEGO preserved in amber. Anyway, every now and then a package from there is classifed as Commerical Good. To liberate from customs you have to register as a commercial entity and then clear it with a surety bond.
The advise in the article is sound - pay the duties and if you can appeal, do so.
- The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. right at the beginning of it all with reports of troubles but no one putting together just how fundamentally their universe had changed.
- I don’t know what happened. The repo seems to be gone. I checked the matching link on the orange site and it’s 404 too
- 404?
- Nice refurb!
- The author has the best of life goals:
> I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to be able to play the EGA version of Monkey Island 1 on it, with no features missing.
- It’s a bit murky. Technically not wrong. He does hold a design patent on the c64. The breadbin is what got used but what I have read was another case had been planned that never shipped. I can’t really tell from the drawings in the second link if that’s the OG c64 or this rumoured, phantom c64. Companies will get patents to protect themselves even if they never use them.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adammossoff_on-this-date-in-i...
And https://retropatents.com/products/commodore-64-patent-print
- Very interesting! I am just a little confused about this part:
> His obituary credited him with the design of the original Commodore 64, nicknamed the breadbin.
I thought the case for Commodore 64 was basically a copy of VIC-20.
- I think so - the book contained basically entire Unix source code and AT&T lawyers were not happy about it...
- That's something I didn't know - was it because of AT&T ?
- Some screen shots showing this retro look for Linux xfce https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screensho...
- Apparently the most frequently photocopied book in computer science, as there were legal issues about its distribution.
- As someone said on the orange site, it was a shame Transmeta didn't also make "cpu emulators" for MIPS, Sparc and other cpus that were doomed to lag behind x86 at the time. It could have prolonged their lifetimes too.
- I remember some similar "extension" for C64 basic in some magazine in the 80s where you would load the machine code and then you could run 10 SYS49152,34,32,3,23 something and the routine there would call the zeropage parser at $73 to pick out the parameters after the syscall. Totally magic to me at the time, how one could "float" between the two languages like that.
- Very true. On my 6809-based Radio Shack Color Computer 1, I'd upgraded to 16KB by the time I got into learning assembly which made it less tight - especially since writing even a 1KB program in 8-bit assembler took a long time. 6809 assembly code could be even more byte efficient than 6502 or Z80 due to its indirect addressing modes, multiple 16-bit registers, etc.
One option that made tight memory much more workable was Radio Shack selling an editor/assembler on ROM cartridge, so it didn't take up any RAM for its own code (with the catchy name EDTASM+). Odd to recall there was a time you could pop down to the local neighborhood store and pick up an assembler.
Obviously, all of these tools were primitive by later standards but it all worked quite well and I spent countless hours using it. I later upgraded the Coco RAM to 64K then added a floppy disk drive (quickly followed by a second floppy). This allowed me to use the disk based version of EDTASM+. All that memory and storage. It felt like living in the future :-).
- Cool to see, but what’s going on with that keyboard layout in the last pic? I’ve never seen anything like it before.
- More