Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/30
Wow, 60 years after her birth, the original ELIZA Chatbot got resurrected after a re-discovered paper version ¹ of the SLIP and MAD based source code was found in the Joseph Weizenbaum archives: [Wayback/Archive] ELIZAGEN – ELIZA Reanimated
Back in 1965, ELIZA ran on top of CTSS on an IBM 7094. Nowadays, few of that hardware is still running, but luckily there are emulators.
Back in the days, a large percentage people chatting with ELIZA thought she was a real person. With the dwindling language proficiency, the rise in believe in alternative facts, and THE RISE OF USE IN ALL CAPS, likely that percentage has increased.
Steps to get started with ELIZA are at [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – rupertl/eliza-ctss: The original ELIZA on an emulated CTSS environment, which carefully got assembled over the course of the last 2 months.
If you want to know about the process, be sure to read the
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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Development, History, LISP, Power User, Retrocomputing, Software Development | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/23
Posted in //e, 6502, Apple, Apple ][, Applesoft BASIC, BASIC, Development, History, Mastodon, Power User, SocialMedia, Software Development, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/14
For my link archive: below a series of articles my Raymond Chen on “The AArch64 processor (aka arm64)” in the order of appearance from a few years back and still very relevant today.
It is part of a few more series on processors that (were) supported by Windows. A good reference to find which version supported which processor architecture is the tables in List of Microsoft Windows versions – Wikipedia.
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Posted in AArch64/arm64, ARM, Assembly Language, Development, History, MIPS R4000, PowerPC, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows Development, x64, x86 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/01
I wrote a two earlier blog posts around puns in programming book indices before:
- the 1992 Turbo Pascal 7.0 Language Guide having both entry in the manual about Recursion (“recursive loop, see recursive loop”) which of course is similar to “infinite loop” and entries for “infinite loop See loop, infinite” and “loop, infinite See infinite loop”.
- infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994.
In the last one, I promised to list more occurrences which I now finally had time for to do.
But let me first elaborate more on the observation that modern computer books (like for instance on C# and Delphi beyond version 1) lack these kinds of index pun.
On the Delphi side, the index entry joke for recursion got removed no later than Delphi 3 (I am still looking for a Delphi 2 version of the Object Pascal Language Guide, see further below) even before the book being fully redone electronically and the index pages generation being automated in
I think I even understand why that is: the process of creating of indices. By the start of this century, more and more indices were automatically being generated and for the last 2 decades or so, all of them are. Back in the days however, indices were mostly done by hand. Nowadays, with everything automated, it is actually pretty tricky in most environments to add such an “infinite loop” index entry like in the Turbo Pascal book, as it would require two things at once:
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Posted in .NET, C, C#, C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Development, EKON, Event, History, LaTeX, LifeHacker, LISP, Mathematics, Pascal, Perl, PL/I (a.k.a. PL/1), Power User, science, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Typesetting | Tagged: 1, 7 | 4 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/31
A small introduction is the Pentium FDIV bug – Wikipedia article which already has some of the highlights..
Ken Shirriff however went all the way in, and used a microscope to focus in on to the actual cause.
He wrote two Mastodon threads on it watching (most recent first, with a link to his blog post) making a good year’s end read:
And there is of course this, that predated his microscope work [Wayback/Archive] Ken Shirriff: “I recently saw an amazing Navajo rug…” – OldBytes Space – Mastodon Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in 8086, Development, Hardware Development, History | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/11/29
In the past xs4all.nl had a shell server. In the shell you had a WWW directory which was the route of your personal web-site.
For instance, I had a file there in ~jp/WWW/route/route.html which was served at:
Almost 25 years after KPN bought xs4all, it switched off the shell servers and these links, so I was glad with this warning [Wayback/Archive] Koen de Jonge on Twitter: “Morgen stopt #kpn4all met het aanbieden van shellaccess. Wij willen dat met #Protagio ook gaan aanbieden. Wil je ook #shellacces houden, kijk dan snel op: … #eerlijkecloud”
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Posted in History, Internet, ISP, Power User, xs4all | Tagged: duurzaamheid, eerlijkecloud, Hosting, kpn4all, netneutraliteit, opensource, Privacy, Protagio, shellacces | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/11/25
Earlier this year, I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] The Trash Computer That Became Your Phone – YouTube which discusses the Tandy TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1, . The video includes a lot of history about Tandy Corporation, Charles Tandy and Radio Shack including quite a few bits I didn’t know yet.
It was part of the Tandy Pocket Computer, and succeeded by the Z80 powered TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-2 (which was actually a rebadged Sharp PC-1500).
The TRS-80 Pocket Computer PC-1 itself was also a rebadged Pocket Computer, this time a Sharp PC-1211 powered by a duo of 4-bit CPUs so totally incompatible with the PC-2. Actually none of the Tandy Pocket Computer line were compatible with each other (nor with the desktop TRS-80 which itself was incompatible TRS-80 Color Computer). With the PC-4 and on Tandy even switched to Casio as manufacturer, then back to Sharp for the final PC-8.
Anyway: this video was a trip down memory lane and reliving my 2012 blog post The calculators that got me into programming (via: calculators : Algorithms for the masses – julian m bucknall), and I was glad that by now there are more videos covering the calculator I started with, for instance via [Wayback/Archive] sharp pc-1211 – YouTube:
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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Event, History, Z80 | Tagged: SepTandy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/09
Not having lived in the USA, I was unaware this was major step there: [Wayback/Archive] 40 Years Ago, Drexel Made Computer — and Apple — History.
A big part of the importance – giving them away for free – fails in the above link title, but the content makes up for that very well.
Boy, this was so different from my education era (:
I you want to see how this worked 40 years ago, be sure to read [Wayback/Archive] In Pictures: When Drexel gave every student a Mac in 1980s – Interesting Engineering.
This great VCF East recapitulation pointed me to the Drexel Macintosh: [Wayback/Archive] VCF East 2024 – A Whirlwind of Retro Shenanigans! – YouTube.
There is even this beautiful video: [Wayback/Archive] 1984 ‘Drexel’ Macintosh 128K- Restoration and History! – YouTube
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Posted in Apple, Classic Macintosh, History, Power User | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/10
Cover of “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, 2nd edition”, Published by Addison-Wesley Professional (June 30, 1994) © 1994, authored by Leslie Lamport
LaTeX was slightly later than the 1992 Turbo Pascal 7.0 Language Guide having both entry in the manual about Recursion (“recursive loop, see recursive loop”) which of course is similar to “infinite loop” and entries for “infinite loop See loop, infinite” and “loop, infinite See infinite loop”.
So what is LaTeX?
Where Donald Knuth created the typesetting program TeX (visually TeX), Leslie created a set of macros for it, later named LaTeX (visually LaTeX) and wrote the first (still famous) book – cover on the right – on it: [Wayback/Archive] LaTeX: A Document Preparation System by Leslie Lamport, second edition, printed in 1994 back then by Addison-Wesley (now Pearson Education, subsidiary of Pearson plc) with ISBN 9780201529838.
It’s gimmick was at page 252, inside the index referring “infinite loop” to page 252 itself.
Many people keep posting screenshots of the page without referencing where it is from. That’s a bit sad, as these gimmicks are an important part of history where programming books were as much about explaining features of computing environment, as well as explaining underlying concepts like recursion.
So this 2024 post finally made me write this blog post: [Wayback/Archive] vx-underground on X: “HELP!”
[Wayback/Archive] GTv89dwWsAM05wM.jpg (552×639)
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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ffmpeg, History, ImageMagick, LaTeX, pandoc document converter, Power User, Typesetting | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 