ForOldHack

Despite no one actually mentioning the white tr*sh cookbook ... I do not see the point behind raising racoons for food. They do NOT taste like chicken. How do you think your dogs would taste?

I like your dogs too, and ain't no way I would disrespect them... Pets are not food sources. But a coon.. . They seem nice enough until they fight over food ... Then they become _ <- insert unfavoroable political party.

Oh right. But how do they taste? Asking for a friend.

And pugs? What would a pug raccoon look like?

To quote Scotty: "we going nowhere mighty fast."

Motif? What version of SCO UNIX?

Where is the Josun Encyclopedia? I would like to read it. Thanks

( I lived in South Korea, and I read Korean rather well, and have traveled very extensively in South Korea. I have seen North Korean across the borders from 4 sites. )

The prevailing narrative in North Korea is utter propaganda: You cannot win a war that is still not over.

Korea should reunite as some point, when the North has a moderate leader or falls like East Germany. Until then all the wishful thinking of a deranged leader in the North, will amount to cold, cold air. The North Koreans starved millions of their own citizens. Millions, and continue to do so.

"Government Policies: The state's rigid public distribution system failed, disproportionately affecting the urban population and rural areas, while prioritizing food for the military and political elite. The government was slow to seek international aid and restricted the access of foreign relief agencies, diverting much of the aid that did arrive. "

Westerners who are not traveled, do believe themselves to be the center of the universe, its why they are almost universally known as 'Ugly Americans.' Loads of those in South Korea.

An honest map of korea would be east west centered on the China sea, looking over the plains, and with the mountains at the top... ( I am getting emotional now at the thought of the mountains... so incredibly beautiful, and... amazingly clean. ) My wish for Korean Unification is to see the Golden Mountain. (金剛山), and for the long separated families to see each other.

Rotate all these maps 90 degrees counter clockwise.

The best hope for unification for Korea... was laid out by Sec Hillary Clinton, who before she became Secretary of state, basically reiterated verbatim one of the most well thought out assessments of unification I have ever heard. Since she is not exactly a professor of Far East Studies, someone in the State Department must have written it for her, someone who had been studying it for decades, like I have.

The Roms it came with did not work, also the disks had to have perfect media. Everything bad to be formatted beforehand. So, I got IBM ROMS and it worked, then got some other roms so the keyboard speed switch would work, while the IBM ROMS were installed there was a simple program that would kick up the speed, and turn wait states off. It was slightly faster than a 6mhz AT for DOS and we did not have Xenix 286. Got me through K&R and passed the class, but do useful work? No.

We found out after the third try, that both the IBM and one of the clone BIOSes would run the install, and all of them would boot. ( And an OMTI Rll controller, supported... Dual hard disks too. ) I needed an assembly language program to much the speed up to 10mhz, and it still ran fine, right up to the 'make nethack' then 4 hours later...beeeep beeeep beep. OS not found. We never figured out weather it was a out of memory error or a temp file error ... But the OS was gone.

I would like to have a xt and at and 386 in this tiny form factor, to play Rogue on the X T and try to compile nethack on the 286 version of Xenix and the 386 version of Xenix. I know from experience it will never compile on the 8088 version of Xenix. It will wreck your OS and filesystem.

Well, we have a dos clone and FFTs I. The news... Can this run the DOS clone and do FFTs?

The floppy disk usually made this straight up honking noise . I had a V20, but at 10Mhz. Never had a problem, except for formatting floppies. The V20 has a few tricks up it's sleeve, with a few less clock cycles on some instructions, and a Z80 mode to run cpm.

But,the real trick was to put real IBM roms in a clone board and run Xenix. When the clone roms are back in it still booted. Helped a lot to have a 2:1 Rll controller. Xenix was just pollute and delute - system V with some BSD thrown in and a slightly altered portable C complier that was later admitted to be wrong endian.

Did this Board have a FPU socket? Made turbo pascal run much faster. ( The 8087 version we got from the physics lab...) Especially the Hilbert matrix. And FFTs.

Stone thrown for a hit. Apps want to use locations and the microphone, but not to help you, but to sell you stuff. I have 14 sensors on my phone, mostly for positioning, and the software still cannot reformat text for zooming without a left to right cornrow panning. You get the absolute absurdity of it.

AOL had great marketing, just not pointed at consumers, it pointed it at ad providers. The free disk thing ...

I had the message pad 100 and a message pad 120. My handwriting improved, and it s recognition also improved. It was brilliant. I stored shopping lists and recipes on it. Although a lot of fun was made of the handwriting recognition, it was surprisingly good, and got better with use.

Of course I found it, AFTER I hit post...

https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/b-a-simple-interpreter-com...

The 'B' compiler was written in TMG-Compiler-Compiler. TMG (Transmogrifier)

https://github.com/amakukha/tmg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26722097

""Douglas McIlroy ported TMG to an early version of Unix. According to Ken Thompson, McIlroy wrote TMG in TMG on a piece of paper and "decided to give his piece of paper his piece of paper," hand-compiling assembly language that he entered and assembled on Thompson's Unix system running on PDP-7."

We are not worthy, friends. We are not worthy."

Tons of info, but not much source:

"The first B compiler was written by Ken Thompson in the TMG language around 1969. Thompson initially used the TMG compiler to create a version of B for the PDP-7 minicomputer, which generated threaded code. The B compiler was later rewritten in BCPL and cross-compiled on a GE 635 mainframe to produce object code, which was then re-written in B itself to create a self-hosting compiler. "

So... a B compiler would use GE 635/Multics as a OS.

3 cards. CPU/Memory and communications cards.

Details: The IBM AT/370 used standard bios on the motherboard, and the two 68k custom cards had their own bioses. The 68ks were very heavily modified by one of the motorola engineers.

Its the second version of the AT Bios that was disgusting was verion 2, that ran on 6mhz 286s and prevented you from swapping the crystal for a 16Mhz/8Mhz speed up. The first version had bugs, and the third version was for the 8Mhz machines. ( still a few bugs ).

This is the AT/370:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-based_IBM_mainframe-compati...

https://www.cpushack.com/2013/03/22/cpu-of-the-day-ibm-micro...

https://anycpu.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=350

There was one additional model of the IBM AT: THE IBM XT/286: An AT class mother board in an XT sized case.

https://www.dosdays.co.uk/computers/IBM%20PC-XT-286%20(5162)...

If you had single sided disks for an Apple ][, and wanted to make them flippy, then you punched another notch, and hole, and then formatted it 4 times, and then cleaned your recording head. Make a whole bunch of them.

Ill get back to you about the DEC floppies.

My Editor VSCode has the Hex editor installed, always... invisible unicode? Not to Hex. What? are you doing without Hex mode? What?

The paarts ( long a ), folling of this car, are of the finest German Worksmanship.

"your credit card terminal might be the gateway to your entire customer database."

That is not the way it works now. The standard is 4 levels of encryption, most have 8. Multiple sign-offs for every single code change.

Your credit card terminal is a gateway to the signtors transaction database, last transaction, balance, current transaction. Every single code path is mapped out meticulously, at least on the most popular ones, and crypto keys are not padded like the very cheap ones.

Both, If you need to upgrade the firmware often, have a switch on the front of the case, like everything physical access needs to be the barrier.

I get more done by writing the stupid code, and fixing it, than junking the old code... but every now and then I can see clearly a structure for a rewrite, and then I rewrite, but its rare.

There are also people telling you the earth is flat, and 30 years of experience can be compressed into a 4 minute you tube video. Even if a chisel could spy on me, it becomes dull with use, where as AI may become sharper with use, it still cannot distinguish which idiot is operating it. AI is just for people to learn prompting, which is an art, like google searching. It still cannot fathom "taste." or a large host of other types of nuances, that again, only come with experience and enculturation.

You are the master of understatement. I just spent 5+ Hours getting an emulator to just work. back and forth with the AI required me to be cognizant of the direction I was going, very cognizant. After It finally worked... the clean up was huge. at least 15 broken images, 100s of scratch files.

"An sNaN (signaling Not-a-Number) is a special floating-point value that is designed to trigger a hardware trap or exception when it is used in an arithmetic operation. This differs from a qNaN (quiet Not-a-Number), which propagates through calculations without causing an immediate exception. Handling sNaNs requires a more deliberate approach that involves enabling floating-point traps and writing a custom trap handler."

Just learned something. Thanks.

The trick is to get your ALUs to do some of the math for you. Oh I miss the days of the 68020 fast barrel shifter and the 68030 byte smears. Tricky stuff lost to the silicon/sands of time.

Compromises. We had BCD for finance, binary for games, and floating point for math. I wrote a sample 'make change' using floating, BCD, and integer( normalizing by multiplying by 100). The integer ripped thru it, but surprisingly BCD kept up with FP, and with compiler optimizations, in certain edge cases and unit tests was significantly faster.

You get surprising things with common place problems.

So as the sum grows with the square, the error function grows in the same magnitude. A very interesting excersise. I'll get an AI to choke and puke on that.

I seriously do NOT want the two plus hours back I spent diddling ( 1 bit not ) all those bits. I first learned it in binary on an HP, and then had to learn it on an IBM mainframe, and then got an 8087, and it was so incredibly fast, but error crept in for Fourier transforms. Started using extended double to keep the errors at bay. Hilbert spaces here we came.

The killer app was not Lotus 1-2-3 v2, but Turbo Pascal w/ 8087 support. It screamed through tensors and 3D spaces, places we only saw on plotters.

It was not until I got a G3 and used Graphing calculator that I could explore sombrero functions of increasing frequency.

Floating point math is essential, not an option.