apricot

Asking marketing people not to lie. Good luck with that. Might as well ask water not to be wet.

Reading Knuth is always a pleasure.

From the paper:

"It is clearly better to write programs in a language that reveals the control structure, even if we are intimately conscious of the hardware at each step; and therefore I will be discussing a structured assembly language called PL/MIX in the fifth volume of The art of computer programming"

Looking forward to that!

"The Montreal Symphony Orchestra is the only orchestra that owns one of these unusual instruments"

They actually have three. https://www.osm.ca/en/octobasses/

I hate them, and will not buy a laptop that has them.

OP is probably little-endian.

> It seems fascinating how much more efficient Windows apps were back in the nineties

I remember everyone complaining about how bloated they were at the time. Pretty sure someone in 2055 is going to run today's Office on 2055 computers and marvel at how streamlined it is.

If you elect a clown _twice_, how can you not expect a huge circus?

Calculus by Thomas Apostol (also from the sixties) teaches integration before differentiation as well. Great textbook!

Sadly, Marcel van Kervinck (one of the two creators of the Gigatron) passed away in 2020. You can still buy PCBs on Tindie, and the parts are easy to procure, it's all standard 74HCT chips. You can find a detailed bill of materials on gigatron.io, and the PCB files are there as well.

The one unavailable part is the fancy wooden box.

Ben Eater's breadboard CPU is a good way to learn the basics, but since the focus is pedagogical, it's very underpowered for the quantity of chips it uses (and you better enjoy forming wires). For a much more powerful computer built around the same number of TTL chips, see the Gigatron.

I am so glad I saw this today! I am in the market for a new dishwasher and was about to buy a Bosch tomorrow on the strength of online reviews. Not anymore! And you bet I will be asking to read the user's manual before buying, to make sure the manufacturer isn't trying similar shenanigans.

Don't forget the best pocket calculators ever made.

Night Mission was great. It felt so different from other Apple II games. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there was something about it that felt like a real arcade game in a way other programs (and certainly other pinball simulators) didn't.

Bruce Artwick's Flight Simulator was one of the programs that blew my mind in the very early 1980s and convinced me that computers were the best thing ever. Other programs in the same category are muMath (symbolic math with a side of LISP) and Visicalc.

I use a small paper planner that I keep in my pocket at (nearly) all times. People are taken aback and ask why I don't use something more modern, but why should I? This works better, for me, than anything else I ever tried.

Gotta admire the way they worded the dialog box.

"uBlock Origin was turned off. This extension is no longer supported. Edge recommends that you remove it."

I have a few decades of experience with the Internet, and even I understood the dialog box as saying that Ublock didn't work anymore. In reality, as the text says, it still works if you click "Manage Extension" and turn it back on.

This infuriates me.

The tools are different, but this feels exactly like cracking Apple II copy protection in the 1980s using boot tracing. Some things don't change.

The only thing I know about Far Rockaway is that Raymond Smullyan was born there.

Implementing shift-and-add multiplication and division algorithms in assembly, and analyzing them, is a very formative exercise in my experience.

Besides, if assembly language is good enough for Knuth to express all the algorithms in TAOCP, it's good enough for me...

Oh, nice. I wished for a similar addressing mode in the 1980s. I see they also added instructions to increment and decrement the accumulator as well.

(Actually, what I wished for was slightly different: only the high byte of the effective address would be fetched from zero page, the low byte being the Y register. In this way, one could keep both bytes of the pointer in zero page, LDY the low byte and use my zp indirect mode. The first use of a pointer would cost an extra instruction / 2 cycles, but further uses of the same pointer would be cheaper.)

Hehe, I also got the box set at a huge discount when 4B came out. Amazon took their sweet time (and I had to confirm I didn't want to cancel the order), but they came through and I got my box set. It will be my son's graduation present.

> Multiplications/divisions need to be hand-rolled.

In the context of someone's first contact with assembly language, that's a good thing! Translating various multiplication and division algorithms to assembly is a great way to learn it.

> It is impossible to create a "generic" memory pointer with an index >255 without auto-modifying code.

Sure it is. Just store your pointer in zero page, set Y to 0 and use the (ZP),Y addressing mode.

AI assistants are this generation's Clippy.

"We are working towards a public launch, currently planned for Mid 2023"

Hmmm...

Heck of a high school senior project, my hat's off to you.

The USA has some great schools. OP goes to Phillips Exeter Academy, which is an exclusive private school that ranks among the best high schools in the country.

Chicago does it: https://malort.com/

I had one too (and a 770 before it). Great idea, so-so implementation. It was slow (and slowness is a cardinal sin, since you're always reminded that you're using a machine -- in my opinion, the way Apple products react so much faster to user input than competing products is a huge factor in their success, and Apple knows it) and the touch screen was terrible.

> Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money?

Thank goodness you're not a doctor.