Re: My Vintage Dream PC

One of the basic, nostalgic, powerful smells from childhood. Like burning selenium rectifiers.

John

Back in those days, you couldn't just go to Best Buy and pick up a Dell to cross-compile on. Machine programming was common and HLLs were novel. Machine coding was an essential step in the bootstrap process. One might initially hand-code a stripped subset of a compiler so that you could then pass successive versions through themselves. If that took a man-month, no big deal. Even renting an IBM machine could cost $20K a month.

John

You know what I miss? Real scientific desk calculators. You just can't beat the ergonomics of a "real keyboard" (think HP-46). Yeah, I know you can get feature-accurate simulacra of calculators for your computer, but the work-flow just isn't the same. *sigh*

Or ants.

That's not what I meant -- when the first assembler was written for some other machine, a cross-assembler or cross-compiler should have been used to bootstrap the language processors for all later machines.

Well, the earlier machine was a B300, and IIRC, they did use it for some of the B5000 development internally. B300 was a descendent of the Electrodata B205.

There is that story of the woman who was completely against drinking alcohol, but *loved* to run the ditto machine.

Ah, yes. The wonderful aroma of warm peanut butter.

Jim

Or, if you really didn't want an assembler, why not code in Algol or whatever and cross-compile?

Aromas? Can't beat fresh-baked bread, hot out of the oven. :-)

Cheers! Rich

But cross-compile it using what?

If they didn't have an assembler, it's likely they didn't have a compiler backend just lying around, either.

One might, however, hope that the "first compiler" referenced above wasn't a compiler for the entire language. Anyone know?

The greatest invention since the microwave oven is the bread maker. :-)

Yup, and it still works. I bought that one for about $400 just after it came out. I found a bunch more in a box at Los Alamos Sales, but only a couple still work. I prefer it to any of the later HP calcs... the stuff you really need, like pi and x^y and things, are in plain sight.

I also have a few desktop 9100's that I'd love to get working again. That was an awesome machine.

I've been meaning to try the new 35, for carrying around. At least RPN isn't totally dead.

John

Not my childhood olifactory memory. We ate Wonder Bread.

John

I have a glass tube a little over a foot long, and about 5" in diameter. It is Pyrex, and was sold in the early seventies as a bread baking wonder. It was called "Pyrex Bake-A-Round", by Corning. It comes with a wire rack to keep it in place in the oven, and on the counter top.

Still in Original Box. Mine is on my fridge. This one is some other dude's.

Take two pieces of white bread, some PB and J, and put a tablespoon of each in the center of the bread slice. Place other slice on top. Take a plastic 16 Oz Tupperware glass, and pinch the two pieces of bread together with it.

A mini PB and J samich without crust.

I agree with Mr. Pfeiffer. If an assembler is developed, then *no* more programming in machine code. But *when* was the assembler developed???

I knew an "auld fart" who took an early computer course at Michigan State University in 1954. He was programming some incarnation of an Illiac. In this early course, they programmed in *absolute* machine code. He talked about adding several no-ops at the end of each loop, so that more instructions could be added *without* changing the branch address by simply replacing no-ops.

At that time for this machine, they used "KSNJFL" instead of "ABCDEF" for the last six digits of hexidecimal. And so the "king size numbers just for laughs" or "kind souls never josh fat ladies" mnemonics.

Doesn't make the dough and bake the bread while you're at work.

Early 1950s. Granted, that's an assembler for a different computer. But I just can't believe that when there were something like five (or fewer) computers in the world, such a small community couldn't do favors for each other.

And I'd have to look it up, but there was actually a reason why the character encoding they were using made KSNJFL sensible. One could argue that meant the encoding wasn't sensible....