HP, sad

Of course the dotcom/telecom boom had nothing to do with it.....there were a lot of very ordinary people who looked like geniuses back then, at least for awhile.

The chickens came home to roost at HP.

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Phil Hobbs

The IoT is an unmitigated security and privacy disaster.

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Phil Hobbs

RCA did it the slow way, like a hollow tree. Back in the '60s, the Japanese offered to OEM them their lowest-end TV models for cheaper than RCA could make them.

Smart managers would have said, "Yikes. We'd better invest in lower-cost production, or we'll become uncompetitive." Their actual managers took the bait and watched the stock go up, for a little while. Then it was too late.

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Phil Hobbs

Forth was designed for that (by an astronomer such as yourself) but might no longer be useful for that task. Dunno.

Xenix 2.x used the hardware memory protection of the Intel chips. Xenix 3.x added demand paged virtual memory for the 286 and 386. MSDOS/PCDOS had LIM EMS, which took a while to produce programs that actually worked:

Agreed, but Xenix was a hard sell to non-technical users. MSDOS was fairly easy to learn while Xenix was written for programmers by programmers. I spent quite a bit of time writing shell scripts and menus to insulate the users from the horrors of learning the operating system.

I have the book in a pile to be recycled. Such intermediate interpreted languages were suppose to be a big plus to writing human readable and portable code. The code was the same for any platform. However, it ran so slow as to be useless, and was therefore not particularly popular. There were other, such as the various natural language interpreters, such as C-English, which required knowledge of English language sentence structure in order to use. Brings back fond nightmares of mistakes gone by.

It will take a while to run out of IP6 addresses though.

Forth is good for memory-constrained circumstances, because having everything be a function call (minus data encapsulation) forces code to be reused a lot.

Integer math is a serious limitation, and library support for instrument control is nonexistent, at least on the FORTHs I've used (long ago, admittedly). I quite enjoyed the companion books, "Starting FORTH" and "Thinking FORTH", and I've written way too much HP calculator software in my time, so stack-based things are quite intuitive. The most important point I took away from the books was the importance of

Debugging FORTH programs is a bit of a challenge. Debugging, integer math, primitive string handling, and lack of encapsulation are what made me conclude that Forth is actually a toy.

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Phil Hobbs

Oh, joy.

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Phil Hobbs

In our case the most apparent hurdle was the price. At one point we had to port our application to MSDOS because it wasn't justifyable to spend 3000 currency-units on an OS for a system that had a price in the same range, and with a 100 currency-units alternative.

Had Linux been available at that time, it would have been very clear what to use...

The idea still exists today, but now it is called Java. It has the same problem, and became only a little bit usable after the CPU performance had increased a couple of orders of magnitude. Of course, then it wasted its reputation because of lousy security.

spending the effort to find good names for variables and functions. Very often if you can't think of a good name, it's because the function lacks conceptual unity and needs to be split up.

Of course the applications that most need the extra addresses still don't support IPv6...

That is partly because the requirement for IPv6 was defined by its inventors, not by the users (both the end-users and de developers of equipment).

Almost all IPv6 stories refer to the number of mobile phones as a reason why IPv4 address space would run out, but the developers of mobile phones clearly did not read that and/or did not see it as an issue. Most mobile phones today still do not support IPv6.

EDLIN? ;-)

Yeah, if you aren't doing anything wrong, who cares if they know what you're doing.

Nah, XX--see

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

In 1980, that would have been more true than it is today. First, we now live under the tyranny of administrative law, selectively enforced. For instance, what used to be perfectly. X0o

In 1980, that would have been more true than it is today. First, we now liv e under the tyranny of administrative law, selectively enforced. For instan ce, what used to be perfectly legal tax minimization strategy is now "struc turing", and you're guilty if the IRS says so.

Second, state power is being applied against political enemies on a scale t hat makes Joe McCarthy look like a choir boy.

Phil Hobbs

I'm very partial to Crimson but I rarely need a stand alone editor anymore.

...and Richard Nixon a saint.

OK, we'll make one of the 256 cores a dinky x86, to run antique programs.