"The talk Whirlwind Software Restoration provides an overview of the Whirlwind real-time digital computer designed at MIT. When brought on line in 1950, Whirlwind was one of the largest computers in existence. We then focus on restoration of one application of Whirlwind, development and demonstration of an interactive real-time air defense application, using radar data to compute headings to guide piloted interceptor aircraft towards intruders. The 1951 demonstration ultimately evolved into the SAGE continental air defense system."
" C/C++ is a prevalent programming language. Yet, it suffers from significant memory and thread-safety issues. Recent studies have explored automated translation of C/C++ to safer languages, such as Rust. However, these studies focused mostly on the correctness and safety of the translated code, which are indeed critical, but they left other important quality concerns (e.g., performance, robustness, and maintainability) largely unexplored. This work investigates strengths and weaknesses of three C-to-Rust translators, namely C2Rust (a transpiler), C2SaferRust (an LLM-guided transpiler), and TranslationGym (an LLM-based direct translation). We perform an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of several important quality attributes for the translated Rust code of the popular GNU coreutils, using human-based translation as a baseline. To assess the internal and external quality of the Rust code, we: (i) apply Clippy, a rule-based state-of-the-practice Rust static analysis tool; (ii) investigate the capability of an LLM (GPT-4o) to identify issues potentially overlooked by Clippy; and (iii) perform a manual analysis of the issues reported by Clippy and GPT-4o. Our results show that while newer techniques reduce some unsafe and non-idiomatic patterns, they frequently introduce new issues, revealing systematic trade-offs that are not visible under existing evaluation practices. Notably, none of the automated techniques consistently match or exceed human-written translations across all quality dimensions, yet even human-written Rust code exhibits persistent internal quality issues such as readability and non-idiomatic patterns. Together, these findings show that translation quality remains a multi-dimensional challenge, requiring systematic evaluation and targeted tool support beyond both naive automation and manual rewriting. "
There were efforts to make XML 1. more ergonomic and 2. more performant, and while (2) was largely successful, (1) never got there, unfortunately - but seem https://github.com/yaml/sml-dev-archive for some history of just one of the discussions (sml-dev mailing list).
Interesting... What bothers me is that you'd think that with Mac Proc M2 having advertised support for "storage" cards and lots of PCIe slots, at least some SCSI HBA's would have drivers?
It does appear that MacOS still ships with SCSI drivers and that there people actively working on updating them to DriverKit - this is an interesting thread from last month (Dec 2025)
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/807791
I think it's even more than that - it birthed SAGE and many other descendants. The wild thing is how readable and recognizable the ISA is. Someone ought to build an emulator...
I considered the Linux box solution, and fear you're probably right, but it just feels like such a waste... for something that should be so simple with all this Mac Book horse power and Thunderbolt interfaces.
Hmm, what I see on Amazon is a lot of USB-to-SATA adapters, not SCSI. eBay has used, old USB-to-SCSI adapters, which is one of the options that's sometimes recommended.
"The computer code described here is that of Whirlwind I, an experimental computer using binary digits, single-address order code, parallel operation, and electrostatic storage. It is expected that computers of this type will ultimately achieve an average speed of 50,000 operations per second."
No dispute on the facts about Sun etc. "more than a year before" is not a lot of time in hardware launches, and that was a very dynamic time.
Regarding Sun, some good old HN discussion here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29082150
But the alternate computer history is interesting to imagine, could have been via x86 or PowerPC with IBM or something else. Same with Be.
In fairness, I think it wasn't obvious that Motorola would run into so much trouble with the 68k line, or that 80386 would be the far-away winner. Sun and many others were betting on 68k, too.
Perhaps this is something FEMA could try to encourage and lightly enforce. No new technologies needed, just a mandatory "old web" option for key .gov, state and news sites.
This is a good book. Also, any time this kind of book becomes available (be it a 100 year old one or a new one), it is worth looking into - great improvements in isnight and simplicity are possible above the "baseline" of US math education today.
So for example, I posit that the engineers or scientists you might admire from the 1950's didn't learn calculus or linear algebra the way you did.
Compiler know-how and resources available during compilations made very signicant progress between gcc and LLVM/clang era.
gcc was and is an incredible achievement, but it is traditionally considered difficult to implement many modern compiler techqniques in it. It's at least unpleasant, let's put it this way.