ForOldHack

I was walking down the street, and I saw a art/documentary style picture of a book seller, wearing a Fez, it seemed interesting, so I took a picture of it, and later fawned on it... until I realized that his books were on display, so I rotated the picture, and scanned the titles. There were three Greek tarot decks, which were interesting, and a book, that was about an old technology. I went to the library to see where I could check it out. No were in the city library, no where in the State University or State colleges, no where in the county collection... and then the librarian/Super-genius, suggested scanning the local library database, and found the book, in a small library, in the far corner of the state, and I filled out a form to request a two week loan... but two days to get here, and two days return, I would have the book for 10 solid days.

When I got it, I read through it, solid for three days. Wow. Stunning look at a technology in its infancy.

The name of the Bookseller was Luma Kunda. Thank you Mr Kunda. I later learned from someone at the nearby bus stop, that Mr Kunda possessed an eidetic memory.

I would have loved to hear him tell stories about what he saw in the tarot cards.

Dijkstra? What is your go-to Dijkstra paper? His papers are like The short stories of Philip K Dick. Everything seems fine and straight forward, until you step into another world.

You are indeed privileged. What you have gained by reading them, is more than an education: It would be a journey, to read them, and your commentary.

I picked up a science fiction book, in a recycle bin, that for the most part belonged there, except for one chapter... one short chapter-and after I read it, the world started to swirl... "Human language had by this time, become mostly telepathic." Thank you, Joe Haldeman.

And Thank you Edsger W. Dijkstra.

Let this lesson be learned: "In my frustration, I decided to punish this software by decompiling it to figure out how it worked,"

Note to self: Never piss off a programmer, while he is gaming. To quote: "You're gonna die for that." -Duke Nukem.

Rosetta 2. Rosetta was for Intel to emulate 68k, now if you could get Rosetta 2 to run under Rosetta, then you could run 68k, on an ARM, and if you could get the apple ][ emulator...

I was at Best Buy in the Apple section, and I asked its AI "What is the best value in four year old MacBook pros." It pointed me directly at an over-under washer dryer for $3400. Quite obviously, it was trained, like a drooling puppy by Madison Ave.

Wait... don't tell me... there is an App for that.

Well, back in the day... The MacIIfx had video memory, ( dual ported ram ) that could be read and written to out of different ports. Wicked fast. It 486DX2s more than a year to catch up.

You mean Apple prices are notoriously over priced, over hyped, under powered, and

"Abdul Jabar, couldn't have made these prices, with a sky hook."

Don't I/you wish. The mechanical junction adds no delay, only manufacturing expense, and the delay of purchasing new systems to keep up with OS bloat.

Actually the opposite is true. Socketed RAM can be made to overclock and adjust timings, while soldered ram, no. Two Lenovo's one soldered ( Carbon X1 ), one T590, one slot: Crucial 16GB, 260-pin SODIMM, DDR4 PC4-19200. Exact same processor, the X1 is DDR3 soldered on 532.0 MHz PC3-1066. The T590, has DDR4, PC4-19200, 1200Mhz.

Both have a Core i7 8665U... and the T590 is much faster, with socketed ram.

Sir! I am typing this on a Lenovo Carbon X1, with soldered on ram, and you are EXACTLY CORRECT!

I would much prefer two SODIMM sockets with the option to go to 32MB shared video memory, or DDR4/DDR5. Give me OPTIONS!

Well, lets get started. I have 4 of those machines, and they are Two dual processor. They all had 32GB of ram, so now I have two with 64GB, and two with zero. They all hand stock K5000s, now how two have two cards. I stripped the uni processors ram and video cards, and put those into the dual procs. They have 256Gb SSDs, and two 1TB disk drives. One machine has 8Gb of VRam across two cards. Dual processors are 8Cx2 and 32 Threads. They can easily play 16 videos at once. For AI, I have not found a model that I can get above 3 tokens a second. Not a one.

Cannabalism ?

I did not, but since my nephew got a network adapter, he told me about the game he played online, and showed me around. Thanks for the tip about Profound Distortion.

Thank you so much for your work. Thank you!

I wanted to give HN a perspective on working on this stuff: Working on these micrographs is like looking for a penny on 4 football fields: I tried to see how long it would take me to search the physical area for any coins, and it took 4 1/2 hours and I did not find a penny, but I found two dimes.

This is maddening work, and again, thanks.

Keep in mind, that this was Intel's flagship processor, From October 1985, until April of 1998, and they had tried to eliminate all the second sourcing. It wasn't until 1989, that the Am386 was released, and out came all the lawyers.

They were using the 6th and 7th bytes of the GDT/LDT, which were reserved, and since it affected protected mode, and virtual mode addressing, was likely stored in the microcode. Which affected Xenix, and pissed off Intel enough, that they fixed their version of Xenix, and no one else's, SCO did a rewrite and charged $500 for the privilege of running a multi-user OS.

Add to #8, the new addressing modes, the new protected modes, which affected ALU OPS, Moves, calls, redirects, and indirects.

#7, the Microcode entry points are linked directly to the instruction decode logic, and of course not limited to the great LOADALL instruction, and the new multi-stage instruction pipeline, and prefetch.

This took years for AMD to blackbox the 386, and then:

"1987–1992: The arbitration proceeding, originally expected to take only six weeks, dragged on for nearly five years."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_discontinued_x86_instr....

"The 80386 microcode was successfully extracted and publicly disassembled by a team of hardware historians and demoscene researchers (including reenigne, Ken Shirriff, and others). They extracted the 94,720-bit microcode ROM from 80386 die shots by combining image processing, neural networks, and human-aided automation. AI tools played a crucial role in cleaning up the die images, detecting cell patterns, and binarizing the data before humans parsed the 37-bit microinstruction formats. You can read about the full process on the Reenigne Blog.By contrast, the 8086 microcode was extracted through purely human-driven analysis of die photos. The 8086's 21-bit microcode is simpler and was fully reverse-engineered and disassembled in 2020. You can explore the decoded 8086 microinstructions interactively using the nand2mario 8086 Microcode Browser.8086 Microcode Browser - Small Things Retro - nand2marioDec 4, 2025 — Since releasing 486Tang, I've been working on recreating the 8086 with a design that stays as faithful as possible to the original...GitHub80386 Microcode Disassembled - Reenigne blogMay 23, 2026 — Well, they may have taken that as a bit of a challenge - they threw various bits of image processing, neural networks, and human-a...www.reenigne.org80386 microcode disassembled « Reenigne blog - daily.devMay 23, 2026 — 80386 microcode disassembled « Reenigne blog. A detailed account of disassembling the Intel 80386 microcode ROM, a 94720-bit blob ...daily.devi386 - WikipediaMicrocode reverse engineering In May 2026, the Intel 80386 microcode was reverse engineered and publicly disassembled by a group i...Wikipedia8086 microcode disassembled - Reenigne blogSep 3, 2020 — Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photogr...www.reenigne.orgThe 386 microcode has been fully reverse engineered - Reddit May 24, 2026 — In a group effort, a bunch of demoscene legends like reenigne have reverse engineered the microcode for the 80386, opening the pat...Reddit·r/thisweekinretro80386 microcode disassembled « Reenigne blog | daily.devMay 23, 2026 — 80386 microcode disassembled « Reenigne blog. A detailed account of disassembling the Intel 80386 microcode ROM, a 94720-bit blob ...daily.dev"

Pfft, this thread got derailed rather quickly; Lets get it back on track! I welcome our new Credit Card sized computer overlords.

I would pay dearly for a credit card sized eink display, that could feed HN, from Wifi, and even with a 2Lb lead acid battery, it would be a joy, and head and shoulders above my current ball and chain type android cell phone.

Make it so.

Thanks: All your math checks out.

You're gonna die for that.

See? Pepperage Farm and cyberax remembers! Exactly.

This is exactly why I come to HN, vs Wikishemedia... People here WERE THERE!

When I worked at C_ we used to load Some solitaire game (Freecell) to verify that Windows98SE was in 32-bit mode before installing the network stack, and Chief Legal Officer, and from what I understand CLO was $4,000 a seat.

Load Driver, Reboot, Solitare, CLO. and then onward to disk optimizing, and then virus scanning... Two people did 89 machines, in 4 days. an entire floor... Food was delivered, and we slept for 4 hours, in the floor below, and on Friday, The head of Legal called us into his office... we showed him the checklist, as complete, and He laughed... the whole department was both amazed and happy.

He really called us to change his desktop into a scene from JAWS.

It was Windows 98SE that got a 32-bit disk driver upgrade, and FreeCell verified that it was installed.

We have an app for that. Would you like me to write a new one?

I could feed a lot of posts into ELIZA...

Yes, A rock-solid workflow for 54+ years.

And ELISA.BAS is still running strong. Its just classic human psychology.

Well, if all there QA people have left... Their "pivot" is straight off a cliff. Best of luck.

PRIEST! ( oh, exucse me... )

HSc made an alternate file manager for Windows 2. They never ported it to Windows 3.

https://ia601001.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/18...'

You are basically expanding the zip file, and you can pick and choose.

The abstract list, which is pretty complete is here:

https://virtualosmuseum.org/readme/#whats-included

Although Emacs commonly refers to an editor, It was always so very much more: It is a compiler, an editor, a pain-in-the-arse, one of the most brilliant uses of the blurring of the layers of App/os/hardware. Its a lisp editor, a lisp development environment, a lisp machine, an OS, Its a database, a word processor, a calculator... the only things in computer science that It is not is a spread sheet, and a paint program, but do not say that too loud or someone will write a macro for it that does both of these things, in some weird way, you will have visions of Phillip K. Dick.

Oh, and did I say it was also a threaded-mail reader? A threaded-news reader?

Oh, and lastly, Emacs is a torture device.

Since there is a multitlude of whatabout...

Oberon?

Its called Eye candy, cheap plastic eye candy, but it sucks.

"The most influential." is relative, I read it when it came out, and I had been programming for more than 20 years, there were 2 professors on the facility who were there... and confirmed much of it. 10 years later, while dipping back into academia again, it was a recommend read, so I read it again. 20 years later, the same thing happened... it influenced multiple generations of programmers and managers world wide. I am willing to read it again, and yes, it really is that influential.

"He revealed Kaplan’s and Newell’s pedigrees, and the Xerox execs sat speechless.” When I first got started in UX/UI, a future XPARC staffer told me to read some of both of their papers. I loosely saw the connection at first, but as my work continued, the more it directly influenced how I spoke, how I taught, and eventually and reluctantly, how I thought. I said in the previous post, that this should be a static post, in a Best of Hacker News, and I still truly believe it.

We are doing here, and most brilliantly, doing what Xerox technicians did back then, and that the scholars that worked in the infinite corridor at MIT have done, and do now.

Thank you!