amoroso

amoroso, 24 days ago (edited 23 days ago) to space

These unofficial Mastodon accounts of space agencies are bots that merely share news items the agencies publish elsewhere, yet the accounts have quite a lot of followers:

• NASA: @nasa 71K followers
• ESA: @esa 1.4K followers

There's an unfulfilled demand for public institutions to communicate on open and independent platforms.

#nasa #esa #space #mastodon #fediverse

amoroso, 6 months ago to retrocomputing

Retrocomputing is a multiverse.

It's a multitude of parallel universes in which every classic computer and software achieved success, and gained the ecosystem and love it always deserved.

#retrocomputing

amoroso, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to mastodon

On Mastodon, it's okay to publish a thread. But, if you want to post the full text or a long excerpt of a blog post, or you already published some longform piece, feel free to just toot a link to the post.

This is the open web and posts with links are not penalised as on traditional algorithmic social platforms. Let's re-learn to visit websites.

#mastodon #fediverse

amoroso, 6 months ago to ai

White Flame discovered the Interlisp sources of AM and EURISKO, the seminal AI programs by Doug Lenat for discovering concepts in mathematics and other domains. These sources, partially shrouded in mystery, were long thought lost.

https://white-flame.com/am-eurisko.html

#ai #interlisp #retrocomputing

amoroso, 5 months ago to retrocomputing

My visit to the Ctrl+Alt Museum retrocomputing museum in Pavia, Italy, blew my mind. Why? The hundreds of photos I took speak for themselves, go see them now.

Opened a year and a half ago, the museum is a new and little known geeky gem packed with all sorts of vintage computing hardware and stuff. It's run by a non profit group of passionate collectors, enthusiasts, and makers who also do outreach and education activities.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/A6HF2Tv1Q4asX4Ks5

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #museum

amoroso, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

Those who dismiss or deride BASIC don't go beyond the language. Guillaume Chereau points out there's more to BASIC as on early microcomputers it provided a full development environment too, almost an IDE.

I'd say BASIC also supported a REPL-based, exploratory programming style similar to Lisp's.

https://gcher.com/posts/2023-12-24-basic/

#basic #retrocomputing

amoroso, 7 months ago to wordpress

This is really big. NASA switched to WordPress its flagship website nasa.gov:

https://wptavern.com/why-nasa-chose-wordpress-for-revamping-its-flagship-website

Congrats to the WordPress team and community, which is part of NASA's decision.

#WordPress #nasa #foss

amoroso, 4 months ago to retrocomputing

Retro Programming is a delightful but sadly abandoned blog about programming retro systems, particularly the Spectrum and Z80 devices.

However, the archive is full of great posts on Z80 Assembly, Forth, BASIC, and more. Lots of interesting technical details and project ideas.

http://www.retroprogramming.com

#retrocomputing #assembly #forth

amoroso, 1 month ago to VintageOSes

It's been 50 years since Gary Kildall demonstrated the first working prototype of CP/M.

https://computerhistory.org/blog/fifty-years-of-the-personal-computer-operating-system

#cpm #retrocomputing

amoroso, 6 months ago to Lisp

Interlisp has been supporting syntax highlighting of code since before it was cool. Here the code of some Lisp functions is shown in SEdit structure editor windows, all under Medley Online on my Chromebox.

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

amoroso, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Lisp

In the 1980s the chat program TALK of Interlisp-D supported rich text and images in messages.

It's built from the TEdit rich text editor and the Sketch drawing program which expose their functionality as Lisp APIs. Think of TEdit and Sketch used this way as widgets of a GUI framework that applications can incorporate.

This screenshot is from the documentation of TALK:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zUYWlj2e8F95uHj2VEFBSL457i6DlmDr/view?usp=sharing

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

amoroso, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to retrocomputing

I found a great winter holidays reading. The book "Write Your Own Retro Compiler" by Nils Holm, which has just been published, describes the development of a self-hosting compiler that targets the Z80 on CP/M.

https://t3x.org/t3x/0/book.html

#compilers #z80 #retrocomputing

amoroso, 5 months ago to Lisp

Do you have any questions on the Medley Interlisp language, environment, tools, history, or project? Ask and I'll try to answer here.

I look forward to your questions as they'll provide valuable feedback on the system and help flesh out the FAQs on the project site.

https://interlisp.org

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

amoroso, 1 month ago to Lisp

The ACM Digital Library now gives free access to the full text of the classic "Anatomy of LISP" by John Allen (McGraw-Hill, 1978). A great historical and practical resource.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/542865

#lisp #retrocomputing #books

amoroso, 11 months ago to gaming

This was doomed to happen. Play DOOM in Teletext:

https://github.com/lukneu/doom-teletext

#retrocomputing #games

amoroso, 4 months ago to blogging

From "Blogging is where it's at, again":

"[...] I’ve always believed the blog is the “natural form” of posting on the web: a site of your own, that you control and set your own rules on content and discussion; where you can post whatever you like without worrying about “The Algorithm”."

The post also mentions a cool OPML feature I wasn't aware of.

https://chrismcleod.dev/blog/blogging-is-where-its-at-again/

#blogging #IndieWeb #rss

amoroso, 5 months ago to programming

The Obfuscated C Code Contest is fun and all but can we also have a Clear Code Contest?

A competition to reward code that's easy to understand and modify, well designed, extensible, modular, documented, and properly commented.

#programming

amoroso, 5 months ago to usenet

Google Groups is killing support for Usenet starting on February 22, 2024:

https://support.google.com/groups/answer/11036538

I found this list of free and paid web-based Usenet clients (I'm not interested in local clients):

https://www.newsgroupreviews.com/web-usenet.html

Any other recommendations?

#usenet #google

amoroso, 4 months ago to books

I still have my copy of "Project Oberon: Design of an Operating System and Compiler" by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht.

The book is more than a tribute to Wirth and a manifesto of his life and work. It's also a fine piece of system design documentation and technical writing.

#wirth #books #retrocomputing

A hardcover technical book spread open on a light wooden surface. One of the pages has two illustrations, one of which is a screenshot of a black and white 1980s graphical workstation screen.
A hardcover technical book spread open on a light wooden surface. The pages have illustrations, one of which takes up a full page and is a screenshot of a black and white 1980s graphical workstation screen.
A hardcover technical book spread open on a light wooden surface. The pages also have illustrations of software data structures and source code.

amoroso, 2 months ago to retrocomputing

A short history of software version control over the past two decades, which covers both open source and proprietary systems.

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/twenty-years-is-nothing/

#versioncontrol #git #retrocomputing

amoroso, 1 month ago to retrocomputing

I'm curious about Xerox 1980s office workstations like the Star and their document centric systems. And besides I'm a sucker for that black and white aesthetics, so I'm checking out the Dwarf Mesa emulator.

Here the ViewPoint 2.0.5 desktop environment is running in Dwarf under Crostini Linux on my Chromebox. The system is really intuitive and capable, even by today's standards.

https://github.com/devhawala/dwarf

#ViewPoint #xerox #retrocomputing

amoroso, 6 months ago to RaspberryPi

This is the AArch64 binary release of Medley Interlisp running on my Raspberry Pi 400 under 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm.

Medley is so slow you can see the characters being printed one by one, likely because X goes through Xwayland. So I'm trying to build from source the SDL version of Medley to see if performance improves.

#interlisp #RaspberryPi #lisp

amoroso, 20 days ago to emacs

The rootwork v0.2 blog posted about the author's journey through text editors, from classics such as vi(m) and Emacs to tools I've never heard of. They explain what they use the editors for and why.

https://write.as/hobbsc/wandering-words-on-text-editors

#TextEditor #emacs #vi

amoroso, 5 months ago to retrocomputing

What was it like to work at Xerox PARC at its peak?

This guide for newcomers to the lab, published 40 years ago in 1983, introduces the computing and social environment of PARC. Lots of quirky systems and obscure lore.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/Exploring_the_Ethernet_with_Mouse_and_Keyboard_Jun83.pdf

#retrocomputing #ComputerScience #parc