25,705 karma · joined April 13, 2014
\ don@donhopkins.com
FORTH ?KNOW IF HONK ELSE FORTH LEARN THEN
: C(-; LICK SMILE NOSE WINK ;
\ FORTH PAPER TAPE PUNCHER:
: PT# ( L --- L/2 )
DUP 1 AND IF
ASCII @
ELSE BL THEN
HOLD
2/
;
: PT. ( N --- )
<# PT# PT# PT#
ASCII . HOLD
PT# PT# PT# PT#
#> TYPE
;
: CUT
." -----------" CR
;
: PTAPE
CUT
BEGIN
KEY ?DUP WHILE
DUP ." |" PT. ." |" SPACE EMIT CR
REPEAT
CUT
;
; Lisp:
(defun caar (x) (car (car x)))
(defun caaar (x) (car (car (car x))))
(defun caaaar (x) (car (car (car (car x)))))
\ Forth:
: droop drop drop ;
: drooop drop drop drop ;
: droooop drop drop drop drop ;
% PostScript:
/poop { pop pop } def
/pooop { pop pop pop } def
/poooop { pop pop pop pop } defThere were two buttons, one labeled "Our Web Site", the other labeled "Our Competitor's Web Site".
When you moved the mouse over the "Our Competitor's Web Site" button, it would quickly slide out from under your cursor before you could click it!
Then when you stopped moving your mouse, the "Our Web Site" button would slyly slide right underneath your mouse!
Dammit Microsoft!!! ;)
Then he not so politely explains to me that my butt crack is showing!
I tucked my shirt in, and said that was the best complement I'd had all day!
Jacques was not in the least bit phased. ;)
I miss suck.com.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com
Suck.com Net.Moguls Internet Mogul Trading Cards:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181211075708/http://www.suck.c...
Rick Adams, Front:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802115113im_/http://www.suc...
Rick Adams, Back:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802143444im_/http://www.suc...
And the hard hitting funny-because-its-true parody from fuckedcompany.com.
Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.
(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)
Classic Dot-Com Era Fucked Company Brock Pierce DEN (Digital Entertainment Network) Documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W41Ttr73TqU
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
I rescued this from the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Yes, THAT creepy MAGA Bannon Epstein good buddy pedo crypto shill guy, Brock Pierce, who turns into a banana at 20:30 in this video:
Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s
Brock Pierce's Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein Went Deeper Than Anyone Knew:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/brock-pierces-relationsh...
Fucked Company:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:
https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
>Sorry.
>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
Alternative alternative archive of the front page, only existing in the web.archive.org snapshot of wayback.archive-it.org snapshot of fuckedcompany.com:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164342/https://wayback.a...
Then they went from sorta fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...
To fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...
That's a false choice, and pie menus are the way out of it. The same menu can lead novices by showing them labels, follow intermediate users who know roughly where things are, and get out of the way of experts who flick in the direction without waiting for it to appear. One UI, no "simple mode" and "advanced mode", and the novice turns into the expert just by using it, by self-revealing rehearsal! I went into that and the research behind it upthread.
As I titled my 1998 Xerox PARC talk: "Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus", reviewed here:
https://baychi.org/calendar/19981013/
> Pie menus appealed to Hopkins because they conform to the rule that the user's attention should not be squandered. A pie menu selection offers direct feedback versus a user selection that brings up intermediate menus. The programmed pie menu ignores users' gestures except the motions to select or cancel. Hopkins uses pie menus because they take advantage of Fitts' Law, which relates fast selection speed and low error rate to the pie menus' large target size and small distance between selections.
The other half is letting users rearrange it themselves, without registry hacks. HyperCard set the precedent in 1987: the user interface was made of the same stuff as the content, so anyone could open it up and change it. Arthur van Hoff's HyperLook took that to NeWS and PostScript and networking: users could build and edit not just their own nested linear and pie menus, but also customize the live user interfaces of running apps, including the SimCity I ported to it, by copying, pasting and configuring scriptable components from "warehouse" stacks. We were taking it all the way to the window frames themselves, with a HyperCard-like window manager where you could build your own frames out of the same parts, a built-in structured PostScript graphics editor you can use in your own stacks, windows with any shape (like my Lava Lamp shaped Cellular Automata Machine), and you can compose your own custom applications inside them.
HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
HyperLook SimCity:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Why we also need a non-editable runtime system (with a removable UI editor): User Interface Vandalism:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
My comments in the "What HyperCard Might Have Been" discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22282361
I also discussed HyperLook and HyperCard with Alan Kay, who said "This work is so good -- for any time -- and especially for its time", and also "I wish he had done a real end-user language for this":
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Simon Schneegans's Kando carries that spirit today. Its menu editor is direct manipulation all the way down: you drag and drop items and submenus right into the pie, see exactly where they'll go, and put the things you use most in the directions that feel right to your hand. That's how a power user should customize a menu, and a novice can do it too, because it's just dragging things around:
I took that idea further in MediaGraph, a music navigation prototype I made in Unity for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club in 2010. It has two layers of pie menus.
The first layer is ordinary nested pie menus for editing the content, with live feedback: as you move around the menu that sets a song's size or its "biome" (a cellular automaton growing around it on the map), you see the effect in the world before you commit. Same biomes merge, different biomes compete for territory.
The second layer is the content itself. The songs are laid out on a map and connected by roads, and the map is a geographic, networked pie menu. Touch one song to another -- kissing them together -- to make a road between them, and kiss them again to break it. Flick on a song in a direction and it fires you down the road to the next song that way, like the cannons in Super Mario World. Point at a song and it plays an earcon, click it to play.
Following links, editing links, panning, zooming and flicking are all the same kind of gesture, with continuous zoom and pan and inertia. As I wrote at the time, what I was proudest of was the "Fahrvergnügen" of connecting and disconnecting places by bumping them together, and traveling down the roads by flicking between them, "without creating another mode". The menu editor disappears and dissolves into the content, by replacing hierarchy with geography.
MediaGraph demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc
How it works, with a timeline from DreamScape and iLoci to MediaGraph:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
https://donhopkins.medium.com/bill-joys-law-2-year-1984-mill...
>The peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time. Specifically, S = 2^(Year-1984), in which S is the peak computer speed attained during each year, expressed in MIPS. -Wikipedia, Joy’s law (computing)
>“C++++-= is the new language that is a little more than C++ and a lot less.” -Bill Joy
>In this talk from 1991, Bill Joy predicts a new hypothetical language that he calls “C++++-=”, which adds some things to C++, and takes away some other things.
>“Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs.” -James Gosling
I also saw Bill Joy's much earlier talk at the 1986 Sun Users Group in Washington DC, where he announced a hypothetical language he wanted to build called "C++++-=", and that he talked about in subsequent presentations.
I think that was the same talk when Bill said "You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar". More Bill Joy quotes:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/slowlari...
At Educom in October 1988, I was running rotating demos of NeWS, pie menus, Emacs and HyperTIES on a Sun workstation at the Sun booth, for whoever walked by...
https://hyperties.org/databases/playground/sun-founders-big-...
I appreciate, appropriated, and built on top of the excellent definitive SIMH Type 340 display work that you, Phil Budne, and Douglas Gwyn did, and I hope to incorporate your phosphor simulator with your permission and guidance! Imagine the beautiful trails that the Ultimate Hand will leave behind (direct manipulation power cycling via hand waving, implemented in Mitch's PDP-7 Forth):
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/ultimate-hand/
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Please let Gren know I'd love to hear from him, it's been a long time since I last visited him in Santa Cruz.
Those LOGOs are a treasure trove! Thanks for digging them all up and bringing them back to life. I consider LLOGO (and the others) to be classic computer science literature worthy of study and analysis and emulation. LLOGO is especially interesting and challenging to emulate since it speaks so intimately with such a wide range of cool devices.
An authentic historic LOGO Turtle with an accurate 3D model and mechanical locomotion simulator that draws with SVG instead of ink would be a perfect portrait to paint!
The portrait: a 3D cabinet with live lights, a hot tube, and hands:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23054174
>DonHopkins on May 2, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: History of Logo
>Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code and comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23054499
>larsbrinkhoff on May 2, 2020 [–]
>Also running on the emulator: PDP-10 Logo, PDP-11 Logo, Applle II Logo.
>The emulator doesn't support the robot arm yet.
Now the PDP-7 emulator supports fictional emulated devices like a Turing Machine co-processor, an Ultimate Machine hardware accelerated self-switcher-offer, and a Data Hand (webcam driven data glove without the glove).
Besides a PDP-6 emulator, PDP-10 emulator, PDP-11 emulator, and shared memory support to emulate AI's 10/11 interface, we also need a callable elevator emulator and a buzzable door lock emulator, since you recovered the chaosnet server to drive them!
https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/lmio1/door.1
The idea is that these device emulators can plug into all kinds of different machine emulators, just like the real Type 340 display can plug into a PDP-1, PDP-6, PDP-7, PDP-10.
Or even plugging an Englebart Mouse and Chord Keyset, Data Hand, Turing Machine, or Ultimate Machine device emulators into an Apple ][ emulator using $C0X0 memory mapped hardware registers and $CX00 PROM drivers instead of IOT instructions, so "IN#7" lets you type with a chord keyboard (driven by webcam hand tracking of course). I'm using and extending Paleotronic's excellent microM8 Apple ][ emulator written in Go that runs in WASM, and adding a Videx 80 column card emulator that my Forth terminal emulator needs:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/tree/main...
Mitch's PDP-7 Forth is the ideal way to integrate those fictional device emulators with the real Type 340 display device emulator in the PDP-7 emulator. And I'm reincarnating my Apple ][ Forth and terminal emulator, which I lost the source code to long ago, but still have a build on a floppy image, which can decompile and disassemble itself, to reverse engineer a rebuildable source code base.
Cabinet Manifesto:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Plugging devices into multiple machines:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
The DataHand, layer by layer:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
How a device reaches a machine:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Architecture and Lineage: Devices can travel farther than CPUs:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
More (old) Forth Stuff (mentioning my Apple ][ Forth system and terminal emulator I'm recovering):
https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/forth.html
>The first Forth system I used was Cap'n Software Forth, on the Apple ][, by John Draper. The first time I met John Draper was when Mike Grant brought him over to my house, because Mike's mother was fed up with Draper, and didn't want him staying over any longer. So Mike brought him over to stay at my house, instead. He had been attending some science fiction convention, was about to go to the Galopagos Islands, always insisted on doing back exercises with everyone, got very rude in an elevator when someone lit up a cigarette, and bragged he could smoke Mike's brother Greg under the table. In case you're ever at a party, and you have some pot that he wants to smoke and you just can't get rid of him, try filling up a bowl with some tobacco and offering it to him. It's a good idea to keep some "emergency tobacco" on your person at all times whenever attending raves in the bay area. My mom got fed up too, and ended up driving him all the way to the airport to get rid of him. On the way, he offered to sell us his extra can of peanuts, but my mom suggested that he might get hungry later, and that he had better hold onto them. What tact!
>I had a job programming Forth for a little company called "Computer Challenges", when I was in high school. I implemented my own Forth programming environment for the Apple ][ computer, and a graphics and animation package in 6502 assembly. Then I wrote an animated graphics demo with it, promoting Forth as a cross platform game programming language across Apple ][, C64, and BBC computers. (That was more than a few years before Java.)
Patrick Stewart as Macbeth ("Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129571
"Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress." – Scott McNealy
On the other hand, down the road at SGI there was a practice called "Skinnyhacking"!
https://rdtk.net/internet/how-do-you-check-a-computer-s-comp...
>Snowsinger. November 21, 2020 at 07:48.
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sgi.misc/c/X50cCoYrU20/...
>Tom Davis, Mar 22, 1993, 6:06:21 PM, comp.sys.sgi.misc
>In article <gom...@zola.esd.sgi.com>, ol...@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson) writes:
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
NSFSIGGRAPH:
Have you ever even used a PDP computer, or been in the same room as one, or even know anything at all about them?
You've totally failed to engage, and you've said absolutely nothing relevent, interesting, on topic, or cool at all. Do you have anything at all to contribute to this discussion besides rudely attempting to interrupt it, or are you just an obnoxious drive-by cowardly anonymous troll, afraid to even use your real name?
Why don't you post something relevant and interesting that actually contributes to the discussion, or if you're incapable of that, simply shut up and go away, instead of whining and trying to police public free speech that you have no interest in or understanding of, wasting everyone else's time, and making a complete ass of yourself, the exact opposite of doing a "cool thing".
anonymous908213> Indeed I would go so far as to say posting it publicly has negative value, because everyone is posting their million lines of free open source slop per day, making it exceedingly difficult to find the interesting code that people are still putting effort into.
I don't have to go far to objectively say that goes double for you. Everything you've posted to this discussion -- and many others -- has intentionally negative value, of interest to no one, because everything you've said is just whiny derogatory low-effort factually incorrect human slop, making it exceedingly difficult to find the interesting words that other people are still putting effort into.
https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/tk_bisque
The Tk command tk_bisque, documented in http://www.purl.org/tcl/home/man/tcl8.5/TkCmd/palette.htm is implemented in the Tk library file palette.tcl.
https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/bisque
"X11 bisque - also known as 'Ousterhout beige' - was for a long time the default color of Tk GUI's."
The "bisque is beautiful" slogan first appeared on a T-shirt [L1 ] in 1995.
Did AI or any other PDP-10s have a 340 display, and did LLOGO use that, or a raster framebuffer? What versions of LOGO does SIMH run, and is PDP-11 LOGO recovered and running?
I found a recently written Forth for the PDP-10 called "TENTH" (Ha ha! I suppose that means we should call Mitch Bradley's PDP-7 FORTH "SEVENTH"!), and I remember GREN (Ian Mackey) wrote his own PDP-10 FORTH on ITS as well as lots of other cool hacks in MIDAS. Do you know if anything from his home directory was recovered from backups?
https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/humor/...
Date: Wednesday, 20 August 1986 03:42-EDT
From: Mark Crispin <MRC%PANDA@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
To: TOPS-20@SU-SCORE.ARPA, Boken@RED.RUTGERS.EDU
Re: DEC's PDP's
Postal-Address: 1802 Hackett Ave.; Mountain View, CA 94043-4431
Phone: +1 (415) 968-1052
The PDP-1 was an 18 bit machine. It was DEC's first computer, and some of the first timesharing systems were designed for it. It's also unique in being one's complement; all later DEC computers were two's complement. Some machines, such as one of MIT's PDP-1s, were in operation until the late '70s.
The PDP-2 was a designation reserved for a 24 bit machine, but as far as I can tell it was never even designed and definitely none were ever built.
The PDP-3 was a 36 bit machine that was designed but never built by DEC. However, Scientific Engineering Institute built one in 1960.
The PDP-4 was an 18 bit machine that was intended to be a cheaper, slower alternative to the PDP-1. It was so slow that it didn't sell well, although it was interesting for its auto-incrementing memory registers. It was not program-compatible with the PDP-1, but its instruction set was the basis of DEC's future 18 bit computers.
The PDP-5 was a 12 bit machine designed to be a small laboratory system. It used many of the ideas in the LINC (Laboratory Instruction Computer, designed by Lincoln Labs at MIT, some of which were built by DEC).
The PDP-6 was a 36 bit machine and the first machine to implement the most wonderful computer architecture known to man. It was rather expensive and difficult to maintain, and not many were sold. As a result, DEC cancelled 36 bit computers for what was to be the first of many times.
The PDP-7 was an 18 bit machine and the sucessor to the PDP-4. It was a major price/performance win over the PDP-4 and the first DEC computer to use wire-wrapping.
The PDP-8 was a 12 bit machine and the sucessor to the PDP-8. It basically defined the term "minicomputer", and went through several incarnations. The original PDP-8 was followed by the extremely slow PDP-8/S (as bad as the PDP-4 was to the PDP-1, but at least the /S was program-compatible). DEC recouped with the PDP-8/I (using MSI integrated circuits) and the smaller PDP-8/L, and somewhat later came out with the "Omnibus 8" machines -- the PDP-8/E, the PDP-8/F (a half-sized version of the PDP-8/E), the PDP-8/M (an OEM version of the PDP-8/F), and the final machine, the single board PDP-8/A. The PDP-8/A still exists after a fashion as a current DEC product.
The PDP-9 was an 18 bit machine and the sucessor to the PDP-7. It had a faster memory than the PDP-7 and was the first microprogrammed DEC computer. Modulo a 300 wire(!) ECO required in the first machines, the PDP-9 was a reliable machine and some are still in operation today. There was a short-lived PDP-9/L.
The PDP-10 was a 36 bit machine and the sucessor to the PDP-6. It is especially noted for its software, which represents the pinnacle of DEC software engineering and has never been equalled. The first KA10, largely installed in universities, created a whole generation of timesharing hackers. The follow-on KI10, with paging and using IC's instead of discrete components but otherwise unexciting, mostly was sold to commercial organizations. The KL10 went through several incarnations and is today the most representative of this marvelous machine. The KS10 was a small, low-speed (approximately KA10 performance) processor which was DEC's last successful implementation of this architecture.
The PDP-11 was a 16-bit machine that went through more implementations and operating systems than can be counted. Presently it superceded the less powerful PDP-8 as the representative minicomputer. While the PDP-11 used octal, it was in its deep heart of hearts a hexidecimal machine, and the first indicator of the creeping IBMification of DEC that took full fruit in the VAX. [I can hear the flames now...] Rather than fight it the customers loved it; more PDP-11's have been sold than any other DEC computer (possibly more than all the others combined).
The PDP-12 was a 12 bit machine and the sucessor to the PDP-8. It combined a LINC and a PDP-8 type processor in the same box and basically was a new model of the LINC-8 which was the same thing.
No PDP-13 was ever designed or built. Even DEC gets superstitious.
The PDP-14 was a 12 bit machine with a 1 bit register. It was used as a process control engine in applications that were felt to be too rugged for a PDP-8, and basically replaced a set of relays. Later DEC made PDP-8's suitable for this sort of thing, but it didn't stop them from the ultimate silliness of building a PDP-14 that used a PDP-8 as its console processor!
The PDP-15 was an 18 bit machine and the final one of this design built by DEC. More PDP-15's were built and sold than any of the others, and it went through several incarnations including some which used a PDP-11 as a front end. Apparently the cancellation of the PDP-15 came as a great surprise to the "Tiger Team" who worked on it, although considering its general ungainliness compared to comparable performance PDP-11's it wasn't surprising. In many ways the PDP-15 died for the same reason the PDP-10 did.
The PDP-16 was a "roll your own" 16 bit machine based on various "building blocks". Every PDP-16 was essentially custom-designed by the customer. It got a fair amount of attention when it was announced but evidentally didn't sell very well.
There was no PDP-17 or any other designator. DEC apparently decided that "PDP" had a perjorative ring to it.
----
Also from the humor directory, you might also enjoy singing along with "Alice's PDP-10":
https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/humor/...
----
DEC Mail from Ken Olsen to Gordon Bell, Dick Clayton, Jack Shields, and Jack Smith, 18 November 1980. A real memo. The 11/23 is the machine Crispin, above, says replaced the PDP-8, and Olsen has just had one delivered. Four dual boards, in a steel box, and he says the integrated circuits were a waste:
https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/blob/master/files/humor/...
The printer is the size of an IBM typewriter and arrived in a crate five feet tall that would not go through the doors of his house. The two RX02s fill about a third of their cabinet, and the rest is air. DEC made smaller floppies because the box was so big. He says anyone paying attention would have made the box fit the floppies. Every screw has its own washer and its own lock washer, and he lost one inside the machine. He wants the names: who designed it, who packaged it, who approved it for manufacturing, who approved it for field service. Bell had been saying the Japanese were coming on financing and manufacturing. Olsen says they are going to kill DEC by better design.
https://cars-int.org/editorial-board/
I found the reference to his 1969 PIXIE paper, which describes his radial menus, in December 1986. His pioneering work inspired me over many decades to publish papers, free open source code, and develop pie menus for X10, NeWS, X11, TCL/Tk, ActiveX, JavaScript, SimCity, and The Sims.
I have been actively tracking down his PIXIE papers, the films, and the listing since May 2008, to tell his story and give him credit while he is still alive and active, and to see and feel first hand how his radial menus worked with a light pen.
I asked Cambridge University Library to help me find the films. David Chapman tracked them down, had them digitized, and the library published them in July 2019, and I made a music video from them in March 2020. I asked Heinz if he had any code listings or other resources. He had kept the listing, and sent me the scan in July 2026.
Please explain and justify which specific objections you have to using AI to OCR and correct the scans of handwritten notes and 128 pages of line printer listings, and implementing an emulator that runs that code in a web browser? Can you suggest a better approach, please?
It simply would not have been possible to do in this time frame at such a low cost without AI, which only just recently enabled a quest I've been on for 40 years since 1986.
I am doing it all on my own time, paying for it all out of my own pocket, while Heinz is still around to help by sending scans of his listings, papers and handwritten notes, generously answering my questions, and patiently explaining the history and details of his work.
PIXIE System Analysis -- Heinz Lemke's handwritten scanned notes and AI assisted transcript:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/tree/main...
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
How do you suggest I should have done anything differently? Are you volunteering your own time to help out with this project without using AI?
If you want to do cool things without AI, I could certainly use your help manually proofreading the transcript of his handwritten notes, carefully looking at these 128 scanned pages of line printer listings from 1972, meticulously cross checking the octal machine code against the PDP-7 assembly language source, and thoroughly testing and debugging the code in the emulator, or on a real PDP-7 if you are lucky enough to have access to one. The scans, the assembly, and the octal are all here:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/tree/main...
The version the browser emulator runs is here:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/tree/main...
Please submit PRs for any errors you find, and I will appreciate and credit your constructive criticism and contributions more than your banal unhelpful low-effort drive-by knee-jerk anti-ai trolling.
Or do you believe I just should not have done any of this research and work at all, nor published it as free open source code for other people and museums to use, nor shared it on Hacker News?
Doug Humphrey's nickname was DIGEX, and he had a PDP-10 in his living room in Westchester Tower Apartments that he acquired from a loading dock at the University of Maryland. It was challenging to haul up in the elevator! It had two power cords, and two of us had to plug them in at the same time, into outlets on different circuits, so it got both hot legs.
He started one of the first ISPs by that name, which was later acquired by Worldcom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digex
The Digex Video! - Part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsgROO4MIvc
DEF CON 12 - Doug Mohney, DIGEX At the Dawn of the Commercial Internet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxMq-x9rlJM
The article also didn't mention the PDP-15, which was the fifth and last 18 bit DEC machine of the PDP-1 => 4 => 7 => 9 => 15 lineage.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/eaqgk/java_is_...
"XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it." -Chris Maden
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1mbgih/xml...
"XML is a giant step in no direction at all" -Erik Naggum
https://quotefancy.com/quote/1643080/Erik-Naggum-XML-is-a-gi...