#computer-history — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #computer-history, aggregated by home.social.
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Eliza Bot Running and ready for your retro psycological problems
Toot me a Hello to start
#RetoComputing #Eliza #ComputerHistory -
Eliza Bot Running and ready for your retro psycological problems
Toot me a Hello to start
#RetoComputing #Eliza #ComputerHistory -
🙄 @lobsters removed my submission of Killed by Apple as being off-topic even though I checked beforehand and it permitted Killed by Google 6 years ago. Both are interesting computer history.
https://killedbyapple.theden.sh/?ref=activitypub
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This 1974 cartoon of the ILLIAC IV would seem very at home today.
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/supercomputers/10/160/279?position=0
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The entire article is a treasure. I’ve realized that the original core harware and software design team paints a quite different picture of the historic events. Sure, Mac inherited concepts and people from Lisa. But also the Apple II philosophy has played a remarkable role; e.g. save chips to drive down the prise tag.
https://mprove.de/chrono?ll=0,0&q=-0.49633,-0.70786&z=8.39&m=IFbyte-magazine-1984-02-59&s=1&iiif-content=https://iiif.archive.org/iiif/byte-magazine-1984-02/manifest.json -
Stebe Jobs (October 1983): If you read the Apple's first brochure, the headline was “Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.”
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Hey Babe!
The new episode from @retrobytes is out! 😀
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Eliza Bot Running and ready for your retro psycological problems
Toot me a Hello to start
#RetoComputing #Eliza #ComputerHistory -
We've tested OS/2 Warp 4.52 with Super Socket 7 [1998] on 86Box!
#OS2 #OS2Warp #OS2Warp4 #IBM #Retrocomputing #Computers #TechNews #TechUpdates #ComputerHistory
https://officialaptivi.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/os-2-warp-4-52-on-86box-with-super-socket-7-1998/
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SICPers podcast episode 56 on Niklaus Wirth's "A Plea for Lean Software": what it is, what makes it a good idea, and why it'll never happen. https://www.sicpers.info/podcast/episode-56-a-plea-for-lean-software/ #computerhistory #softwarehistory #podcast
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@lobsters/116535637378554752
I found amazing to look at the past to understand why somethings are like that.
That a very good example with this analyse of the #ascii #legacy characters system.
#computer #computerhistory -
The Computer of #StarTrek IN BYTE 12/1977
Cover: https://mprove.de/chrono?ll=-0.08568,0.0743&q=0.12005,-0.36724&z=9.19&m=IFbyte-magazine-1977-12&s=1&iiif-content=https://iiif.archive.org/iiif/byte-magazine-1977-12/manifest.json
Article: https://mprove.de/chrono?ll=0,0&q=-0.21594,0.73379&z=8.39&m=IFbyte-magazine-1977-12-13&s=1&iiif-content=https://iiif.archive.org/iiif/byte-magazine-1977-12/manifest.json -
Eliza Bot Running and ready for your retro psycological problems
Toot me a Hello to start
#RetoComputing #Eliza #ComputerHistory -
Eliza Bot Running and ready for your retro psycological problems
Toot me a Hello to start
#RetoComputing #Eliza #ComputerHistory -
The Bring Your Own Bottle night is on again this Saturday 2nd May at the #Derby Computer #Museum:
https://www.derbycomputermuseum.co.uk/byob-retro-gaming-nightsCome and play on loads of home computers and consoles with friends, and listen to some great music from the '90s on #vinyl
See you there!
💻 🖥️ 🕹️ 🎮 💽 🖱️ 💿
#RetroGaming #RetroComputing #ComputerHistory #GamingHistory
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Thank you!
Indeed your post is a good read and instructive on many counts.Three notes:
(1)
«=====
(LOOP FOR X FROM 3 TO 5 COLLECT X)
(3 4 5)(LOOP COLLECT X FOR X FROM 3 TO 5)
(3 4 5 6)
=====»This is an important example (and a good catch), which has "procedural" written all over it and it shows that `loop' isn't actually declarative—it can only be viewed as such, carefully.
It seems to me that it would be interesting to fix the second case, rather than prohibit it, _but_ it may be difficult to justify the effort.
(Regrettably, I can't recall exactly what the _current_ Common Lisp specification says, but I'll check later.)(2)
Yes, I have always found the design and history of the pathname system very instructive, in more ways than I can elaborate now.
And let no one forget about logical pathnames, too."LOSSAG" fit in a single 36-bit word, didn't it?
As a footnote, a long time ago I was something of a user of old IBM mainframe operating systems like VM/370¹, which did not have directories and separated a file name from a file type with a space (each up to eight characters, no lower case).
_________
¹ Bulgaria was lagging behind the technological times then.(3)
It's interesting to mention an emulator in this context.
I can see a weak analogy to historical reconstructions.
(There are many people who do them, mostly as recreation.
I have been to some, watching horse riders shoot arrows and sheltering in a 7th-century-model tent from the rain.)#CommonLisp
#ComputerHistory
#DeclarativeProgramming
#DeclarativeStyle
#History
#Lisp
#ProceduralProgramming
#ProceduralStyle -
As part of my history project, I was looking for a document I wrote that offered specific advice on converting Maclisp and Zetalisp to Common Lisp.
I had to laugh when I found it. It's already published as part of the Sunday Morning Edition of the Pitmanual (the webbed version of the Revised Maclisp Manual, the printed version of which was the Saturday Evening Edition).
The printed version does not contain the conversion guide. It was an "extra" I through in as part of the webbing. But it's perhaps hard to find, so I thought I'd say it out loud. It's several pages that begin here:
https://maclisp.info/pitmanual/cl-conv-01-intr.html
#Lisp #Maclisp #Zetalisp #CommonLisp #KentsHistoryProject #Lisp #ComputerHistory
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I couldn't find a copy of the memo named "Loop Iteration Macro" by Glenn Burke and David Moon, January 1981 (MIT/LCS/TM-169) at MIT's dSpace site, or anywhere else. So I scanned in my copy and have uploaded it to my web site.
NOTE WELL: This document was written prior to CLTL and describes a facility that was available in MACLISP and the Lisp Machine's Zetalisp. Common Lisp drew design ideas from this, but the syntax, semantics, and associated functions/macros described in this are NOT the same as what Common Lisp offers.
For example, my recollection from long ago (which I did not re-check before making this post) is that there are other differences in syntax because this earlier version of Loop was underconstrained in the ordering of the keywords in a way that let you write some expressions that the committee felt might confuse people with their results.
But also, for reasons that slip my mind, Common Lisp did not adopt the define-loop-path macro that is described starting on page 19.
http://nhplace.com/kent/History/maclisp/MIT-LCS-TM-169-Loop-Iteration-Macro.pdf
#lisp #maclisp #loop #iteration #ComputerHistory #KentsHistoryProject #lisp #LispM #Zetalisp #CommonLisp
cc @screwlisp
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Eliza Bot Running and ready for your retro psycological problems
Toot me a Hello to start
#RetoComputing #Eliza #ComputerHistory -
Has anyone read #MitPressPlatformStudiesSeries book "Now the Chips Are Down" by Alison Gazzard?
I can't read computer history anymore that doesn't incorporate the critical lens that @LaineNooney introduced with their book "The Apple II Age": the understanding that home computers were introduced at the dawn of Neoliberalism, in a context of specific social and economic pressures.
Does Gazzard's book contain any of that perspective?
Conversely, has any other historian since picked up Nooney's perspective? (I'm aware of the very excellent writings of @histoftech and Nathan Ensmenger.)
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552028/now-the-chips-are-down/
https://archive.org/details/BBCHorizon19771978NowTheChipsAreDown
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In going through some old papers, I ran across these very interesting documents from long ago that I can't seem to find public reference to. They seem to offer some important historical insight about the Dylan language. This is from back when Dylan was called Ralph as a working title. In those days, the still-being-designed Lisp-like language had not yet moved to an infix syntax, and it looked and acted more like Scheme with an object system similar in spirit to CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System).
My understanding is that there were some fairly deliberate choices made to NOT target the Lisp or Scheme community as users, which is part of why the move to infix. I think they wanted to appeal to a disaffected C++ crowd, but ultimately lost out to Java for that bid, and then having left the Lisp user base behind, ended up with a very small community as a result.
But I still think there could be things the Scheme community would want to glean from this snapshot of history.
I've included a scan of an email proposal I got from Dave Moon while he and I were at Symbolics, with his proposal for how to add conditions to the language. Note that Dylan did eventually go public and did have a condition system, so you could also just study that design directly. But what's useful here is to see how all that looked syntactically in a Scheme-like syntax. But, in that regard, I recommend starting by looking at the language itself.
[0] Ralph: A Dynamic Language with Efficient Application Delivery, by Andrew LM Shalit, July 25, 1991.
https://nhplace.com/kent/History/dylan/ralph-1991-07-25.pdf[1] Ralph Conditions (part 1 of 2)
https://nhplace.com/kent/History/dylan/ralph-moon-conditions-proposal-v1.1-part-1-of-2-1991-08-14.pdf[2] Ralph Conditions (part 2 of 2)
https://nhplace.com/kent/History/dylan/ralph-moon-conditions-proposal-v1.1-part-2-of-2-1991-08-14.pdfcc @sigue @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp
#DylanLang #RalphLang #ComputerHistory #Harlequin #Lisp #CommonLisp #ConditionSystem #ConditionHandling #ErrorSystem #Scheme #SchemeLang #CLOS #AppleHistory #KentsHistoryProject
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I ran across and scanned an old document recently that describes the command set for TECO-based Emacs on the MIT ITS operating system in the very early 1980s, probably, although the document is not dated.
I think I either produced it, or had a hand in how it was produced. But in any case, the grouping and layout suits me in terms of describing why certain commands are related to one another, and making it easier to see why particular letters were chosen as mnemonics.
TECO was the language Emacs was originally implemented in, before it was ported to gnu. ITS was an MIT-written operating system for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10, a main frame processor whose architecture also spanned the TOPS-20 operating system (though I'm blurring some details).
http://nhplace.com/kent/History/emacs/Emacs-Command-Index.pdf
This is part of an ongoing project where I'm sifting some things in boxes at my house, trying to get rid of stuff I don't need. Some of it is getting scanned, other things just going to the trash.
#emacs #ComputerHistory #ITS #TECO #Lisp #KentsHistoryProject
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Eliza Bot Running and ready for your retro psycological problems
Toot me a Hello to start
#RetoComputing #Eliza #ComputerHistory -
Eliza Bot Running and ready for your retro psycological problems
Toot me a Hello to start
#RetoComputing #Eliza #ComputerHistory -
The "Overtom Chess Computer Museum" 🏛️: a riveting collection of silicon brainiacs that couldn't checkmate a novice if their circuits depended on it. 🤖🕵️♂️ It's like a shrine for those who think that naming a computer after a Greek myth makes it smarter. 🙄♟️
https://tluif.home.xs4all.nl/chescom/Engindex.html #OvertomChessMuseum #SiliconBrainiacs #ComputerHistory #ChessHumor #TechCulture #HackerNews #ngated
