ThomasBHickey

When someone says 'in about 5 years' it means they have no idea when.

I've read that people that deliver mail don't appreciate the bees.

Yeah, I saw a lot of those. Evidently people still use them with new lenses. I've read that its focal plane shutter made race cars look like they have oval wheels, something that got picked up in cartoons to show speed.

My father (Roy E. Hickey) worked for Graflex for many years as an engineer and designed several of the audio-visual products mentioned in the article. He said the company never made money after it moved to Pittsford (a Rochester suburb). I still have some Graflex prototypes/cameras. The weather wasn't great but the area is beautiful. I rember reading his Fortran manual in 1965 which he was using for designing optics.

WASM can be compiled to native code.

This whole discussion reminds me of work we did in the early 80's trying to convert typesetting tapes into TeX/Metafont for display/printing. One the things we tried was converting scanned images into rectangles which could then be typeset by TeX using 'rules' of various sizes. Another approach was to convert the scans into specialized fonts, either whole or in contiguous chunks that could be assembled.

Another list: https://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n82139094/

Being able to embed assembly instructions directly in the code gave much needed access to all the PDP-10 byte manipulation instruction. I loved BLISS, but some had trouble with the pesky dots needed to indicate value of rather than addresses of variables.

Used it for a couple of years in the mid '70s before moving on to SAIL.

There's an article in Wikipedia about a galaxy and its relative distance that touches on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDF_423

The three day book quarantine cited may have come from this study: https://www.webjunction.org/news/webjunction/test1-results.h..., https://www.webjunction.org/content/dam/WebJunction/Document...

Probably https://ams.nasa.gov/, a particle detector on the space station

Douglas Hofstadter's work might qualify

Long ago I was doing some analysis on a Sigma 5/CP-V machine. One of the few high level languages available was Xerox APL. For those without an APL keyboard they provided ASCII replacements (I don't rember what they were, but looked like $NDX, $ASG). After learning APL with the awkward mnemonics I was never able to read it with the special characters! J does a much better standard-character APL.

Mentioned only in passing as one of the languages that Java sqashed.

I always thought that was a major miscalculation by the Ada project. All they thought about was defense contractors and their approach of relying on commercial implementions (priced for those contractors) made it unused in academic environments.

Looking back at ALGOL-68, it looks like comparatively small language compared to many of our current languages, e.g. Java, C++ and Python. I loved the definition of it, but never got to use it.

Yup

https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6... "500+ years under proper storage conditions"

With an interesting and functional set of 'byte' instructions where you could specify the number of bits per chunk. IIFRC 6 or 9 bits were typically used for characters, but I think there was a 5 bit character set in use as well.

640 acres/square mile

I still have one of the original Apollo/Domain (DN300?) motherboards. It has two Motorola MC68000L8 chips on it. It was explained to me that Apollo found they needed both of them to make virtual memory work. 32 bit data width, 16 bit data bus.

I always thought Java should have just used Tk rather than developing AWT, which never worked very well.

20% is the energy gain of particles involved in each energy transfer, total energy available is 29% of the black hole's rotational energy according to Wikipedia.

Metafont supports both stroke-based and outlined fonts.

Not exactly: "Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology." IANAL, but I have no idea what that means.

There is GNAT https://www.gnu.org/software/gnat

I watched the whole Ada process (a series of reports that developed into the language spec). While often criticized at the time of being 'designed by committee' that wasn't really the case, but did have a lot of people critiquing it. It was a great language once you understood how to structure your programs. I think it would have had much better uptake if there were free/open source implementations of it back then, but I don't think the DoD even considered that, so it cost quite a bit of money to experiment with it and very few students had a chance to use it.

APL (or at least J) actually works quite well for string processing.

I started coding for fun while an undergraduate in the late 60's and spent much of my time coding until I recently retired, except for one year when I dedicated my time to directing a project that led to a major system for the company. Most of that time was as a researcher and I had the freedom to use whatever language seemed appropriate. The list grew to dozens (anyone remember Bliss, Metafont, SAIL or the great SIGMA assembler?), finally ending up in Python within Hadoop. Since retirement I've time with J after spending a year or two with APL in the 70's.

I find I'm losing the absolute need to code, but I can't think of anything else that could have offered me the variety, depth and engagement (not to mention a reasonable salary) that coding has over the last 50 years.

I knew Larry Roberts in the mid 1980's when he was on the Board of OCLC (a library network). At the time he was president of a company on the west coast of the US and another on the east coast. He claimed to visit both of them every week! He was excited about Group 3 fax that was going to rapidly change how libraries worked and tried to convince OCLC to replace our computers with a network of IBM AT's. Both ideas had just enough sense to be dangerous, but the software, networks and general infrastructure wasn't there yet and it was beyond our capability to build them.