"Nicklaus Wirth felt that something more suitable to operating systems and application development was needed so he began work on Modula. This became Modula-2 and would be essentially finalized around 1984 or so."
@tuparev@jbzfn wow! I learned a bit of Prolog by looking at sources of accompanying programs in Turbo Prolog, and even managed to run the GeoBase natural language query tool…
I also tried (and succeed!) to resolve “Einstein’s riddle” 1 in Prolog 2 after resolving it by hand… but I only read a bit of Modula-2, and would not have dreamed of doing what you did, kudos!
「 The 32-bit programming model was quite different from what DOS and OS/2 1.x programmers were used to, but it was simple. For the most part, paging was entirely transparent and programmers didn’t have to worry about it.
Just as importantly, the flat memory model made porting from other platforms much easier, because it was similar to the programming model used by 32-bit UNIX platforms 」
「 Multics was experimental and therefore ambitious, complex, and designed by trial and error. It was delivered late, early on had performance problems, and in 1969 Bell Labs withrew from the project 」
Mural by Julian Nowicki in Bydgoszcz (Poland) dedicated to Marian Rejewski, a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who in late 1932 reconstructed the sight-unseen Nazi German military Enigma cipher machine
„Odszyfrowany Rejewski“, czyli #mural upamiętniający Mariana Rejewskiego, matematyka i kryptologa, który w 1932 r. złamał szyfr Enigmy, najważniejszej maszyny szyfrującej używanej przez hitlerowskie Niemcy. Wielkoformatowy portret zdobi ścianę kamienicy przy ul. Gdańskiej 10 w Bydgoszczy. Powstał w 2017 r., a zaprojektował go i wykonał Julian Nowicki. Fot. @xlenka
📑 The Rise, Fall, and Surprising Survival of dBase | Another Boring Topic
「 Esber then moved on to attacking a new front, stating that the dBase programming language, the language that dBase developers used to create dBase database, was proprietary, and required Ashton-Tate’s permission to use. He was then quoted as referring to the third party companies in the dBase ecosystem as “parasites” 」
「 Chaosnet was developed in the 1970s by researchers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. It was created as a part of a larger effort to design and build a machine that could run the Lisp programming language more efficiently than a general-purpose computer 」
A good book and accompanying DVD is Designing Interactions / Bill Moggridge. They covers some of the earlier days of computing. On them it shows a few other Xerox mouse designs that are totally different from what is used today. Also shows the first laptop. The book and DVD also cover up-to mid-2000s interviews looking back. Also has more than one interview / perspectives more than one for the mouse and palm pilot.
@clive Sorry I did not include you too Clive Thompson. A good history of about the first few decades of computing with interviews throughout the early to mid 2000s with some of them looking back in time and others up to that point (it was published in 2007). In the book and the DVD in the back sleeve. Each part on the DVD is ~3-5 minutes and the book a few pages for each.
🌊 The Land Before Linux: The Unix desktops
— The Register
"You could argue that macOS, based on the multi-threaded, multi-processing microkernel operating system Mach, BSD Unix, and the open source Darwin, is the most successful of all Unix operating systems."
@juandesant@jbzfn macOS I a certified Unix. I never think of iOS as Unix as I can not do anything g there. And most likely the bsd core is gutted beyond recognition at this point :-(
Wow I forgot I had ordered this! Two volumes (plus extras) of Shift Happens including slip case. Having just flipped through this book already makes me unreasonably happy! #keyboards#ComputingHistory#ShiftHappens
@nil Me too! Such amazing photos... I had thought I'd skim through the boring typewriter stuff to get to the interesting mechanical keyboards volume. But I'm enthralled with all the typewriter lore and history too. Delightful!
⌛ After 34 years, one of the ’Net’s oldest software archives is shutting down
— Ars Technica
"New Mexico State University (NMSU) recently announced the impending closure of its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15, 2024. For over three decades, the archive has been a key resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors, which once competed fiercely with Microsoft Windows."