Coetzee writes a bit about his early programming career in his autobiographical novel Youth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth:_Scenes_from_Provincial_...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth:_Scenes_from_Provincial_...
1. https://blog.adacore.com/cubit-a-general-purpose-operating-s...
I read somewhere that the mathematician John von Neumann drove across the country over twenty times in the late 40s and early 50s -- between Princeton and Los Alamos, I would guess. I also read that in the late 40s some of Norbert Wiener's grad students drove from Boston to Mexico City for a cybernetics conference --- they were gone for months!
Earlier, in the 1930s, there was the migration of Oakies from the dust bowl to California, as described in The Grapes of Wrath, which, come to think of it, is another road novel.
In 1957 my family, a young couple with two little kids, moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, driving in our Plymouth station wagon, camping along the way. I was very young but I recall stopping for a flash flood, and another time we had to stop for a cattle drive that was crossing the highway, driven by actual cowboys on horseback! I remember it as one of the great adventures of my life.
The next step up is to use a hex keypad to enter 16 bits at a time. Some single board computers from the 1970's provided this. It was marginally practical - I used to enter programs of a couple of hundred bytes into a KIM-1 this way, it only took a few minutes.
Those computers did provide a simple monitor in ROM to support this, but that code was very small - Steve Wozniak's Wozmon monitor for the Apple I was 256 bytes. You could probably design some circuitry not much more complicated than in this article to replace its row of switches with a keypad.
Some of us already do something like this by keeping a big ever-growing notes buffer with the date at the beginning of each day's work.
The usual alternative to Forth on those systems was assembly language.
https://www.fugue.co/blog/2015-11-11-guide-to-emacs.html - Recreates (Jef Raskin's) Archy-like philosophy and workflow in emacs, including some customizations: "Ace Jump Mode ... works a bit like Jef Raskin's Leap feature from days gone by." Explicitly references Archy's predecessor, the Canon Cat
But now clicking on that URL brings up something completely different.
The most interesting part of the talk is the last 5 - 10 minutes, when he discusses what worries him about AI. His last slide:
Four Steps to the Apocalypse:
Existential (the Terminator scenario - he doesn't think this is likely. what really worries him is the next three)
Sociological (AI makes us stupid)
Disciplinary (AI makes us lose something core to our discipline --- our confidence that computation is understandable)
Consolidationist (Centralization of computing power so innovation only happens where it is 'supposed' to --- but historically, innovation often comes from unexpected places)
He very briefly proposes a remedy -- something computer scientists can do -- which is a not at all overtly political or social, but instead is a new direction of computer science research. Something about enabling a computation to be made comprehensible outside the organization that computes it. Also, changing incentives so organizations are rewarded for correctness of the result rather than the amount of computation they do. His next to the last slide: "Paying for results, not effort". His third-from-last slide: "We're building an OS for distributed computing that represents computations as first-class (not processes, containers, VMs, lambda invocations)"
I didn't find this remedy to be very clearly explained or convincing - it's crammed into the last few minutes of the talk.
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Python/ceval.c
It's 3619 lines. It's explained in this 515 line file:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/InternalDocs/
For comparison, there is a pure Python bytecode interpreter, its VM is here:
https://github.com/nedbat/byterun/blob/master/byterun/pyvm2....
It's 1043 lines.
The power of this computer seems roughly comparable to the Olivetti Programma desktop computer, which was produced at about the same time and was commercially available -- and of course the packaging was much slicker. It has been mentioned on HN many times:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This post links to the Programma 101's architecture and internals, which you can compare to the article linked in the original post.
There are dozens and dozens of new operating systems listed here. Most are experiments -- what you might call hobby projects -- but there are some interesting ideas implemented among them.
Er, the term "AI" was coined almost 70 years ago, in 1956.
By the mid-1960s AI was in full career, with ChatBots (Eliza and its variants), neural nets (Perceptrons etc.), and many applications including chess playing programs, etc.
Science fiction writers and other authors were well aware of all this - it got lots of coverage in the popular press.
There was a huge, huge AI boom from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, mostly based around the technology of rule-based expert systems. Venture capital flowed copiously -- lots of startups made a big splash -- some lasted several years -- Intellicorp, Symbolics, etc. -- but now they're all gone. Money also flowed from big government programs: The Fifth Generation in Japan, Strategic Computing in the US. It all collapsed in the AI winter that started in the late 1980s.
The Cyberpunk genre began during the 1980s AI boom. I recall Neuromancer appeared in 1984, at its very peak.
Do people really not remember any of this? I'm an old guy, but it wasn't that long ago. Isn't there any institutional or community memory in computing? The 1980s AI boom was huge -- in its time it was similar to the excitement around LLMs now. I can't forget that it all disappeared without a trace, as I observe the current wave.
1. https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article-abstract/15/2/117/35...
2. https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article-abstract/15/3/195/48...
3. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/an-open...
Clever name --- it's worth an upvote just for that!
Seriously, it's an interesting project and I appreciate the description of your experience with the chatbots.
a 'suddenly erupting decision in favor of ignorance, of deliberate exclusion, a shutting of one's windows, an internal No to this or that, a refusal to let things approach, a kind of state of defence against much that is knowable, a satisfaction with the dark, with the limiting horizon, a Yea and Amen to ignorance'.
quoted in 'To Know or Not to Know', by Costica Bradatan, review of Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know by Mark Lilla, in TLS Apr 25, 2025, p. 12