JASON, an open source joke | Hacker News Reader

JASON, an open source joke

ollydbg.de

7 pointsanigbrowl7 comments

It may not be useful to everyone, but it seems like a sincere project (from skimming the website). Why is it being described as a joke?

FWIW, the first line of the linked page does read

Olly, the author of OllyDbg, presents his new open source joke:

Nice! It reminds me of the EDSAC simulator, which I find extremely important:

http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/

Why important, you say? Well, these old computers aren't around any more, and what better way to teach new computer-science wannabe's the values of 35-bit computing? ;)

Shall we play a game?

Honestly, the joke angle is lost on me - old computers don't die, their users just degrade them! A working computer, whatever the age, is still a damned fine machine to be using, User!

>Honestly, the joke angle is lost on me - old computers don't die, their users just degrade them! A working computer, whatever the age, is still a damned fine machine to be using, User!

I think that the likes of Richard Greenblat and Bill Gosper would disagree with you. Just from a description of the PDP versus the IMB mainframes it's obvious that the articles produced by DEC were superior machines.

See, thats where it all began - this malignant thought that 'old computers' are 'dead computers'. Computers don't stop being useful because of age - they stop being useful because someone makes the decision not to find a use for them.

I don't see what you're getting at. Those machines were produced in the same time period. Old machines that only have KB of memory do stop being useful because of age. At this point it would be an egregious use of power to run these things to do calculations that can be done by your cellphone in milliseconds. If you want to experience ITS, run an emulator.

At one point, 64kb was useful for something. There is an infinite number of uses for 64kb. Its only the decision being made that its not useful any more that makes it so - the users change, not the computers.

I still break out my 8-bit machines now and then for some fun, localized, minimal computing. Its amazing how much you can get done in a little bit of RAM, but the 'amazing' is just the result of an arbitrary decision, nothing more.

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