- vcf-midatlantic - lists.vcfed.org

Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Perhaps I asked the wrong question... FORTH
by Brian L. Stuart 22 Jan '17

22 Jan '17

On Fri, 1/20/17, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote: > Schweet. > Have you ever seen CamelForth? I've only taken a cursory look at it, but never actually run it. I've generally heard good things about it though. > Brian, speaking of PDP-11 Forths, have you seen SOL-11? I had not. But it turns out that I'm planning to show something similar running on a little LSI-11 in a BA11-VA box. I'm going to try to dust off something I wrote *mumble* years ago back in college. For several years, the August issue of Byte was dedicated to a particular language. The year I graduated from high school it was Forth. So I arrive at college with the latest issue of Byte in hand and am thinking this looks like kind of a cool language. Of course, I ask if we've got a Forth implementation on the school's 11/70 to play with. When the answer was no, the natural response was, "ok, I'll write one." That was the genesis of a college nickname, Sir Forth. Senior year comes along and I decide to write a small OS for my CS senior project. That Forth implementation becomes the shell/application language for the OS. So it's long overdue to be returned to a running state. BLS

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HP rack door hinges needed
by Evan Koblentz 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

VCFed got this during the workshop weekend: http://vcfed.org/evan/hpmini.jpg We have the left/right cabinet doors, but the cabinets are missing all of the hinges where the door pins sit. Does anybody have spares?

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Forth exhibit (was Re: Perhaps I asked the wrong question... FORTH)
by Brian L. Stuart 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

On Fri, 1/20/17, Jim Scheef <js(a)sdf.org> wrote: > An exhibit on Fourth should explain the stack archtecture and other things > that make Fourth unique (and a write-only language). An excellent topic. Indeed. My initial plan is to have a poster that explains the basic idea of a stack and how a stack language works. Then if time permits, I want to write a little tutorial running on one of the machines running Forth that covers things a little deeper. BLS

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] C Compilers (was Re: Perhaps I asked the wrong question...)
by Brian L. Stuart 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

On Sat, 1/21/17, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote: > Innnnteresting. I've played with clang, and eventually started > asking "what's the point?"...but kenc is something I've never heard of, > and Ken Thompson's toenail clippings know more about programming > languages than I ever will, so I'd like to look at that compiler. > Does/can it target bare-metal ARM7/Cortex-M families? Yes, it does. Now, I'll admit that I haven't played with the packages that are targetted at general use for e.g. Linux. However, someone recently said they were successful in biulding the Pi version of Plan 9 using it. And I did use the version that is packaged as part of Inferno to do an Inferno port to a little ARM box created by Sun Labs. Along the way, I added an output format to the linker so it would directly produce the format the SunSPOT expected. One unusual thing you'll find about these compilers is that the division of responsibility is a little different than is typical. The object files are actually in a form of intermediate code (though not portable between architectures) and the actual code generation is done in the linker. BLS

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Perhaps I asked the wrong question... FORTH
by Brian L. Stuart 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

On Fri, 1/20/17, Evan Koblentz <evan(a)vcfed.org> wrote: > Do it! Registration is here: There definitely seems to be a lot of interest in a Forth exhibit, so my third appearance at VCF-E will be forth. I just registered it on the VCFed site. For the next month, my time still needs to be primarily ENIAC focused, but that should still give me plenty of time to put together the exhibit I've got in mind. BLS

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link-editor fun and games before virtual memory (was C compiler)
by Jeffrey Jonas 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

> The IDE isolated the programmers > from full control of the compiler and its code generation options. Once upon a time, programmers were REQUIRED to understand and sometimes manually configure the link-editor. That allowed for things like load-no-call: load debugging modules/subroutines that were not called anywhere, but were available when debugging. Before virtual memory, there were overlays. The IBM 1130 made that simple with LOCAL (load on call) and SOCAL (system call load on call) directives. But only one was loaded at a time: one load-on-call could not call another. I think the IBM 360 allowed for specifying a tree of nested overlays. When using the PIC18, I had to configure the linker to load my "C" code around the boot loader. 'tis the joy of not using absolute addresses for everything. .csect is the IBM pseudo-op for such things: http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_aix_71/com.ibm.aix.alangref/… Everyone had their own names for such stuff :-( Anyone who hand-coded assembler did absolute addressing. I worked on a project where the assembler did not generate relocatable code. Everything was absolute addressing, requiring the build-meister to manually map out memory for all modules, storage sections, temporary scratch-pad areas, etc. It was easy to trash memory when anything changed size. -- jeffj

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Perhaps I asked the wrong question...
by Devin Heitmueller 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

On Jan 20, 2017 7:59 PM, "Neil Cherry via vcf-midatlantic" < vcf-midatlantic(a)lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote: On 01/20/2017 01:47 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote: > On 01/20/2017 01:35 PM, Steven Toth wrote: > If you're writing a large software stack, need to integrate with other >> frameworks or libraries, an IDE is the way to go. >> > Not picking on Steven, but on the dislike of most IDEs. One more thing, and it's really at the top of my list since I tend to be very OCD on engineering related things ... it makes a @#$!%^& mess of the code indentation. I almost always know when someone uses an IDE because the code will end up getting some weird identation that no programmer could ever come up with. You can generally tell a programmers preference for the way they code but only an IDE can mess up indentation like that. if(blah) { if (!red) { sub_function(); subfunct2(); } } else { subfunct2(); } (Wow that was painful to type and look at) I'm not arguing for or against IDEs but this isn't really a fair criticism of IDEs. Such formatting issues are usually a difference in an editor's defaults with regards to tabs vs spaces, and it's common when you have any project worked on by users of multiple text editors. Code can look just as crappy in emacs after a vi user comes along and makes changes. There are ways to mitigate such issues through specification of tab/whitespace handling at the file or project level, but they are not uniformly supported by all editors. The real frustration I have is not about what the "right" answer is about tabs but rather that after decades the editors haven't arrived at a uniform standard for specifying the whitespace policy and having all the editors know how to parse and abide by it. In short, I agree with your frustration but an IDE user is just as likely to see their source code mangled by your non-IDE editor of choice. Devin

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Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Perhaps I asked the wrong question...
by Kenneth Seefried 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

From: Neil Cherry <ncherry(a)linuxha.com> > >This new is better is what got Wellfeet/Baynetworks in trouble. Instead >of providing an ASCII interface to the command line they went menu (not >terrible) or snmp commands (ARGH!). Later they dropped the menu and went >full Windows GUI. Which was useless when the network as down. > Ahh...Wellfleet's "Site Manager". I'm sure in some Bostonian ivory tower, "everything is an SNMP OID and thou shalt only speak SNMP to it" sounded like a great idea. What they delivered was a steaming pile of bad design choices, wildly inconsistent behavior, poor documentation and crippling bugs (new and different in every release). To this day it's my go-to example of truly awful, how not to do it, user interfaces. I've rarely found one worse. KJ

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Mac 128k M0001 for sale
by Joseph Oprysko 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

I'm looking to part with my Mac 128k. Rather than selling it on eBay, I'd rather it go to someone I know will appreciate it. It's fully functional, comes with mouse, keyboard, manual, original boot floppy, Apple Mac carrying case, and external floppy drive. It's the exact same Mac 128k that appears in the Smithsonian Channels "The Real Mad Men of Advertising" which was shot last summer. If you're interested, please email me off list with an offer, I can also send pictures. Thanks, Joe

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simH (was Programming)
by william degnan 21 Jan '17

21 Jan '17

Evan/docents at the museum, Don't forget simH. I really like this platform for OS monitor, DOS, and programming of emulated hardware environments. I have been putting simH on the new gen of single board computers and they work great for demoing by connecting to a serial device. Low power you can run off a battery. I like the Next Thing Co CHIP as well as the Rasp Pi Zero. So cheap! The CHIP is $9.95 and comes with wifi, bluetooth, storage built in. Ready for headless serial port access out of the box. Network and control remotely. For cases that one wants to avoid harming or simply does not have working vintage hardware it works pretty well. For example I Know Corey was talking about attaching the PiDP8 with its simH emulation of PDP 8 OS/8 to a printer for museum demos of.the real PDP 8. There is other hardware in the museum that could be demoed that way, such as the VAX, Altair, SWTPC 6800, Sol20, etc. where running the real thing has proven to be not practical and prone to failure. Bill Degnan twitter: billdeg vintagecomputer.net

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