stmw

One of the interesting things they have is an in-browser visual simulation of the 6502 die - http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html - "In the summer of 2009, working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip.

This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their 'high' or 'low' logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the 'clock') on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done."

Previously posted by me here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46182669 - but didn't get any interest, not complaiing, good that it got noticed this time.

Indeed, it is often amazing to me to see what catches on and what doesn't. However, the concept of cooperative, event-based processing coupled with an existing and popular language is probably what was decisive wrt Node.js.

Sorry, that's annoying indeed - not my site..

"General Radio was founded in Cambridge in 1915 by Melville Eastham and four other investors to manufacture radio measuring instruments and parts. Initially, the company focused on transmitting and receiving components and precision measuring instruments, as well as a few complete receiving sets. ... By 1924, General Radio began its decades of dominance of the high-end instrument market. During the time, the company introduced a host of unique instruments, including the first commercially available oscilloscope. Two products developed in the 1930s found major uses during World War II: the Variac variable autotransformer and the Strobotac, the first commercial strobe light. "

Am I the only one who read this to mean a Urinary Tract Infection has afflicted the latest versions of MacOS and iOS, perhaps some special case of markdown ens--ttification?

But apparently no, it's good news.

"The superjunction (SJ) charge balancing concept has been successfully implemented in silicon (Si) MOSFET power devices. Greater focus is now being placed on improving the performance metrics of wide bandgap (WBG) power devices with this technique. In this article, we summarize initial results that show promise in the application of the SJ structure in a lateral gallium nitride (GaN) Schottky diode."

There are few in the same category, perhaps Widlar or Gilbert for pure analog circuit design, or Bill Atkinson in later Mac software? It's a very short list.

Indeed. I have often wondered why university courses tend to use their own made-up machines to teach this stuff, as opposed to using the Apple II (or some of its near-contemporaries).

Agree, that's why I think it is so interesting - but it's also a rule that works in both directions (hardware->software and software->hardware).

The copy-protection stuff was completely puzzling back when it mattered, but of course makes complete sense now.

I hadn't seen the applesaucefdc.com stuff, that's great.

Not for this data, but in the past, yes - there is persistent pressure to do that for any maker of password managers, be it independent, in-browser or in-OS. (Source: I was a cofounder of a company that made a password manager as part of our product).

“When building structures are designed and built to required codes and standards, they have margins against failure, meaning they should be able to support much more load than they are expected to bear,” said Mitrani-Reiser. “In the case of Champlain Towers South, however, these margins against failure were too narrow from the start.”

This is great! We need something similar for knowledgeconstructiond and several other overly insistent Apple software components.

Truly a better time - today we worry about using Rust 'unsafe' too often. They had a smoking room on a hydrogen airship!

/j

Thank you for sharing your story, and I'm so glad it worked out in the end. This story however is also why algorithmic interviews and the supposedly "irrelevant to the real job" programming interviews are not going anywhere soon.

Having done a lot of hiring, it's surprising how many candidates do not actually know how to code despite experience and looking good on paper.

The article includes a link to https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc - virtual AGC which is interesting. Although the github repo itself is not new news (see github dates), it's still good news this history is preserved.

^ dang This seems to be a fake user with all prior comments being some variation of the above.

Only thing missing is a SCSI hard drive, it's a shame for the Adapter controller to only have the CDROM connected to it. Perhaps an external SCSI RAID array?

They are indeed excellent, as are other MIT engineering publications of that era.

"The name Radiation Laboratory, or "Rad Lab," was chosen to be intentionally deceptive, creating the perception to those on the outside that the laboratory was working on nuclear physics, a discipline that was seen as too immature to have an impact on the war effort. During the fall of 1940, the Rad Lab sprang to life on the MIT campus, and by December, a primitive two-parabola system had already been emplaced and was undergoing initial testing on the rooftop of Building 6 at MIT.

During the next five years, the Radiation Laboratory made stunning contributions to the development of microwave radar technology in support of the war effort. Inventions included airborne bombing radars, shipboard search radars, harbor and coastal defense radars, gun-laying radars, ground-controlled approach radars for aircraft blind landing, interrogate-friend-or-foe beacon systems, and the long-range navigation (LORAN) system. Some of the most critical contributions of the Radiation Laboratory were the microwave early-warning (MEW) radars, which effectively nullified the V-1 threat to London, and air-to-surface vessel (ASV) radars, which turned the tide on the U-boat threat to Allied shipping. In November 1942, U-boats claimed 117 Allied ships. Less than a year later, in the two-month period of September to October 1943, only 9 Allied ships were sunk, while a total of 25 U-boats were destroyed by aircraft equipped with ASV radars (Buderi, pp. 155–169). "

Sad end of an era - not bc there aren't good reasons for it, but bc there was a lot of good opportunities for shared code and skills between NGINX and k8s with this approach.

Fascinating to read a discussion of these matters 10 years ago.

Agree re: different types of JITs producing wildly different results but don't agree about language semantics - even a Java JIT has to give up speed due to certain seemingly minor language and JVM issues. So both matter - no matter how good of a compiler engineer you are, some semantics are just not optimizable. Indeed, the use of a "trace JITs" is a proof of that.

Some languages are much harder to compile well to machine code. Some big factors (for any languages) are things like: lack of static types and high "type uncertainty", other dynamic language features, established inefficient extension interfaces that have to be maintained, unusual threading models...

Good blog post, good balance. One thing to add is that in systems programming, very often the struct is not arbitrarily defined by the programmer - it may be defined by the hardware or another system entirely. So the Data, including its bit-by-bit layout, is primal. It kind of makes sense to have procedures to operate on it, rather than methods.

Some may argue that the real problem here is the unstated assumption of wanting to have a garbage collector in the first place.

Not to be confused with the uncle, August Dvorak, inventor of the keyboard, who apparently served in the US Army against Pancho Villa, and later in the Navy in both WW I and WW II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Dvorak

the destruction of the em-dash is really a shame; and "--" is under suspicion..

Exactly, this is why USB was very unattractive for peripherals when it first came out.

Related to recent HN discussion re: SCSI version of same. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46636571 Of possible interest.