My teen years: The transputer operating system(nanochess.org) |
My teen years: The transputer operating system(nanochess.org) |
One minor grammar thing: "didn't worked" should be "didn't work", because "do" in English as an auxiliary verb always takes the root form of the verb, just as "will", "may", and "can" do. Similarly "don't exists" should be "doesn't exist".
This text makes me relive it!
I regularly return to my old 80's 8-bit machine (Oric Atmos, FOREVER!) just so that I can remind myself how great we've got it in this day and age of near-infinite memory, the network-is-the-computer, and endless pixels for days. Nothing sharpens the mind stronger than a misplaced RTS or a failure to budget for room on the stack ..
Sometimes the value would wind up in the basic program itself and it would stop. Mostly it just locked up and I had to hit the power button and try again.
Not only was finding interesting memory locations fun, it generated interesting ideas for program features.
I found the address for the line length constant 64, used by the screen scrolling loop. I think the screen was 16 lines x 64 characters. By setting the scroll width to less than 64 I could protect the right side of the screen from scrolling.
So my first games had an area on the right for a non-scrolling title, author attribution, and game state info. It seemed to be a unique feature - I didn't come across any other programs that did that.
Some of my first programs were text adventures. Looking back, I should have put a short room description and usable object list on the right, updating in response to actions. That would have been a significant improvement over having to type "look" over and over, as was typical for those games.
Crazy times: 64x16x1 byte = a 1,024 bytes screen. Total memory was only 16k -> Today that is just a 64x64 rgba (4 x 8-bit channel) icon. But we always found a way to create our programs. I had a 4k RAM TRS-80 handheld and was able to create a tiny version of Zork on that, with a few starting and iconic rooms.
If not, somebody definitely should.
Back around 1985 I was 15 years old and very interested in transputer processors, so much that I called up SGS Thompson, as I wanted to get the datasheets for the chip. The guy at the company was so surprised to be getting a call from a 15 year old. He didn't send me the technical info I was seeking but he did send me some brochures. That's as close as I got to a transputer :(
I daydreamed about transputers and how they could be the future of computing, while I was hacking way on assembly language on my Commodore 64. I'd draw all kinds of network topologies between transputer chips in my high school english class. I had dreams of a system where adding more computing power meant just adding some more transputer chips. In my ideas, connecting a printer would also add more computing power, because the printer would also have a transputer chip in it to control print functions, but when it wasn't printing the rest of "the system" could use the CPU. Of course none of that came to pass, but it was great to daydream about the possibilities.
It were great times. Like aviation in 192x-193x.
(Actually we sometimes make exceptions when the author is the submitter, and I'd be happy to do that here, but the original title is pretty damn cool and will probably attract more readers!)
I was already proficient in Z80 and 16-bit x86, so learning another instruction set was pretty welcome. The fun came from developing things for the first time and discovering how to actually do things, a 32-bit operating system, a K&R C compiler, and the assorted utilities.
Enforcing limitations was inspired by the IOCCC, and later by my boot sector programs. The type of things you do after work, just to test yourself and have some fun.
> CD path, creates a directory.
Oh, that will mess with Linux users’ muscle memory, haha.
> if you are using macOS you'll be able to edit easily the files
I find it charming though, to be honest :)
I think it maybe points to shared features of European languages that English doesn't follow.
Huh, apologies. I have a Dutch friend who has similar quirks in their English, and the article mentions Dutch by name (in "A Dutch operating system"), so I assumed the author was Dutch or that that quirk came from Dutch influence.
For what it's worth, Dutch is not the only language that does this, I'm pretty sure German does as well, and a bunch more. So you may be correct.
Just provide the emulator with an ISO CD image, and once it boots up, type DIR D: this single operation requires just about 28 kb of transputer RAM memory for the operating system, the command-line processor, and the buffers.
There's a file browser embedded in the text editor, so you can navigate using the arrows keys and choosing text files to read.
In fact, we need very little info to read CD-ROM directories. A directory search only requires a 2 kb buffer and some variables to keep track, read until you find the first part of the path, read that block, and repeat recursively until you find the desired file.
Reading a file from the CD-ROM can also be done just keeping a 2 kb. buffer and some position variables. My transputer operating system is inefficient in this because it reads the CD-ROM discs in terms of 512-byte sectors, cached by the host system.
CD-ROMs were outselling all other audio formats in the United States by 1991 for context.
128k is enough for a lot of things.
One is to work on a super low spec machine because things were really expensive and the tech scrap in Mexico at the time just didn't have anything better. Fine, believable.
The other is that CD-ROM drives were available much earlier than the general public believes, just that they were really expensive. Fine, also believable.
But it's much harder to believe that both are true for the same person at the same time and place. Either they couldn't afford the CR-ROM drive or they could afford more RAM. Moving forward on the time axis strengthens one argument (CD-ROM drive availability since those got cheaper over time) at the expense of weakening the other.
A quick google didn’t tell me anything so maybe I imagined it.
The Spectrum did not have 128kB until near the end of its life. It started out with a choice of 16kB or 48kB and that was all you got until 1986.
It also didn't have a joystick port. Nor did it have floppy disks (although 3rd party interfaces existed). Amstrad added joystick ports when it bought the product line and brand from Sinclair Research, soon after Sinclair launched the Spectrum 128, based on a Spanish model.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57231/Amstrad-Buys-S...
If the other commenters left additional discussions on the table I didn't consider let's chat about them. You've also got the author themselves as the poster and in the comments so they may be able to shed more light than I ever could on that side though. It looks like they've since left a comment about the technical approach in the source.
I may still have imagined it.
But it's not really a CDROM.
Wow! I defer.
A CD not a CD-ROM, but you're right.
Too bad the UK gov were so shortsighted, or that Atari, instead of making the ATW (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation)
should have simply used a T212 in the ST blitter socket as a coprocessor. That way people could have slowly gotten familiar with the arch :|
People are building new hardware to run transputers though: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/369254-pre-annoucement-atw... so maybe this amazing code can be resurrected on real hardware!
Edit: Found it. This is the paper on 3d parallel transforms: https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/611934...
Later transputers also had DSP instructions built-in.
The target is the embedded space now, though.
Zapotec sounds like it would be a lot more difficult, but I think really all natural languages are equally difficult, because if it takes children more than about five years to master them, they get simplified, and if it takes children less than about five years to master them, they accrete irregularities, idioms, and metaphorical sense extensions to compress the representation of low-entropy concepts.
As for irregular verbs, there are quite a lot more than 20; https://howismyspanish.com/all-irregular-spanish-verbs/ lists over 270 irregular verbs in Spanish, but it also says that's "over ⅓ of all Spanish verbs", so it may not be the most reliable source. There's a lot more than five irregular subjunctive verbs, and they aren't all very common verbs; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_irregular_verbs#Presen... mentions "moler", for example. Other uncommon irregular verbs mentioned in page include "maullar", "erguir", and "embestir". https://web.archive.org/web/20200807095413/https://socratic.... says that the Manual de la Conjugación del Verbo lists 12'290 different Spanish verbs with 63 different models of irregular conjugations; the number of verbs following one of those models must be in the thousands.
By comparison, English has under 200 irregular verbs, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs.
I really thought there were only 5 irregular subjunctive verbs: dar, ir, ser, haber, estar, & saber. I've read a couple of novels in Spanish, and it just seems more regular. I guess that's just my opinion. Thanks for teaching me a few new things.