adventofcomp.bsky.social
A podcast about the history of computing
https://adventofcomputing.com/
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This was a really really fun episode to work on
I love when I get to use old news clippings as sources!
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It's been a team effort with Daniel Tempkin from esoteric.codes.
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This episode tells the whole story, and what I've been able to uncover in the code. The full code, original scans, and my restoration is here:
github.com/rottytooth/I...
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This feels like one of those questions that would be hard to tackle head on, but that you may stumble on the answer while looking at old code
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That's a good question! I do know that the idea of programming functions started on ENIAC, but that took a very different form than modern code. Idk about calling convention. LISP wouldn't have been using the stack, I don't think.
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That's a really good point. It almost feels like a leaky exception handling to me.
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Function definition is also super nonintuitive.
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I'm using the spitbol 64 compiler github.com/spitbol/x64
And yes, the success vs fail signaling is fascinating to wrap your head around!
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Did Linux format get canceled!?
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I mean, I really liked my 286 but idk the full story yet.
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That series was getting up to the 8086 specifically. I haven't gone back to grab more Intel chips. I'll probably get to the 286 eventually.
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Oooh. No.
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That's so cool! Congrats!
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One thing I'm realizing is that LGP-30 tapes don't have headers per say, but they _do_ have instructions to the p104 program loader. So they don't work without p104 being loaded. At least... some of them.
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The displays weren't buffered, from what I can tell. You had instructions to plot pixels directly, and the manuals give time measurements for phosphor persistence. So it was all direct.
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A lot of char encoding in that period was 5 or 6 bit. I'm not sure how much that actually contributed to word sizes, however. In some machines it definitely seems like text was an afterthought. I'd have to look at LINCs keyboard instructions again.
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Combine that with the cast that all code for the LGP-30 is self modifying and, well, 🤯
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I'm trying to get to the point of running the example program at the back of the programmer's manual. But... that needs a subroutine loaded which means you have to have the loader loaded which means............. a lot of work. I'm starting to see how hard programming was in the 50s.
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That's beautiful
Hahaha
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Haha. Who even wrote DOS at this point? Seems like it was a real tapestry of other people's code.
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I'm in a crossover episode?
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Hell yeah. I appreciate you.
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...but there is nothing at 0600 to call! It's trying to run some standard subroutine that I haven't found yet. So it's back to the archives until I find some "print integer number formatted" subroutine tape.
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Woo! Very excited for next year!
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*now, not not. Lol
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I am planning to expand things once everything fully works. Going to have resources about programming and operating the machine, and all that kinda stuff.