> -----Original Message-----
> From: lisard(a)zetnet.co.uk [SMTP:lisard@zetnet.co.uk]
> Sent: March 18, 1998 15:19 PM
> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
> Subject: Re: Robots again
>
<snippage all over the place>
> however, we'd urge you to take a look at some other object oriented
> languages. smalltalk, common lisp, self, oberon, etc. *much* nicer.
> and
> then grab a forth and roll your own :>
>
I have done some lisp, (in (mostly Emacs)), so I'm a bit
confused about you grouping Common Lisp with object oriented
languages... could you elaborate? I am somewhat amused by your mention
of forth. I maintain that HP managed to create a good implementation of
an object oriented Forth - RPL. (Maybe they should have called it FORTH
1 +) (Objoke: there is now an object oriented COBOL. It's called ADD 1
TO COBOL GIVING COBOL (yes, before you flame me there are better ways to
increment a variable but I've luckily never had the displeasure of
having to use COBOL. (ObCC: but I _do_ have a COBOL interpreter for my
C= SuperPET - but I only fired it up once to see if the disk was OK. I
also have APL which is _way_ cool.)))
> :I'be not tried VB, and almost zero Java, but I had to use Ada for
> :three years.
>
> oh, someone else. we had to do that, thanks to bradford university's
> oh
> so wonderful degree course. and to think that the oxonians were
> moaning
> about modula-2...
>
I remember the hilarious (mis)feature of Moduala-2's
"dual-tasking"... This was the language we had to use for "Intro to
Operating Systems"... <shudder>
> ada is a disgusting language, not because it is verbose or hard to
> program, but because it introduces another language - and a vast one
> at
> that - without giving anything *new*; it doesn't give value for money.
> size without content.
>
The going joke is that somwhere inside Ada is a wonderful,
small, efficient language screaming to get out... anyone remember who
wrote this?
--------------------------------------------
Joachim Thiemann
DSP Coder, Castleton Network Systems
I doubt therefore I might be.
Thanks for this tidbit, Allison.
I started searching but I turned up nothing at digital's website
show nothing about 4000VLC thin pizza box. The Oscillator chip says
100mhz. Only have one internal Qbus slot that is taken by that
"dumb" video VRAM RAMDAC / sound / keyboard i/o daughterboard and one
internal SCSI port driven by NCR 53C94 chipset.
The needs:
BIG help is to get info and what is options can be used with this
boards? I would love to use it but problem is locating one monitor,
s/w, keyboard and bit of help to work with that thing. :)
> <Finally now i have that name to 3 motherboards I have of that kind!
> <Thank you! :) How good are these boards for and how powerful
> <compared to other vaxstation?
>
> 8vups or better depending on model. No slug.
>
> Vt320 was available in amber, green, P-white.
Whoops looks like mangled formatted and I missed it! I liked them
but I have VT420 already. Nicer one 14" at 70HZ. Whew!
>
> Good price but I think shipping may be understated.
Maybe... possible.
Jason D.
>
> Allison
>
>
>
email: jpero(a)cgo.wave.ca
Pero, Jason D.
I now have sitting on my desk six modules from an IBM 700 series
mainframe, destined for the Mill at RCS/RI. Of course, six modules does
not make a computer, but I think we should at least try them out, just to
see how badly they perform.
Does anyone here have information on these things (pointing my finger at
Mr. Pierce)? The things are not on circuit boards, so they could be traced
out, but I really do not want to that.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net
I've never bothered to go into pawn shops for anything because even the most
worthless junk is way overpriced. for example, one place had two IBM 5155
machines and wanted $179 each! i bought my two for $10 each, and one was
upgraded with a hard drive and expanded to 640k. i've had better luck at
thrift stores and primarily at radio rallies, of which one is coming up next
month. those are the best places to find old interesting stuff, computers or
not.
david
<< What kind of stores are you hitting that you are having such luck?
Today - I stopped into a local pawn shop - a rare place in the suburbs -
and picked up an Atari 520ST and an Atari SF354 disk drive sans cables
and power supplies. My first pawn shop find. I passed on a IIgs they
had, but I was tempted. What I'm really looking for is a IIe.
Mike
>>
lawrence wilkinson:
:But a digital computer can represent rational numbers exactly as you
:have (e.g. Smalltalk has a rational data type which behaves just
:like any other number) but irrational numbers cause problems. But
:then can an analogue machine represent irrational numbers exactly?
probably not, but even if it could, how would you measure it to
verify..? the strength of analogue is that it can vary smoothly, so the
errors are different in character. sometimes digital is preferable.
sometimes analogue is.
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
On 1998-03-16 classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu said to lisard(a)zetnet.co.uk
:>Am I to understand that you don't like SNOBOL? :^)
:What exactly is SNOBOL? The library here has two books on it, I
:have looked at both and couldn't really figure much out.
as perl is to c, so snobol is to fortran.
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
On 1998-03-16 classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu said to lisard(a)zetnet.co.uk
:Very interesting. Please elaborate. My reasons for disliking OOP
:stems from the fact that a Windows app in C++ is much harder to
:understand than one in plain non-oop code. Who started oop anyway?
simula was the first oo language, and it was pretty good (except that
nobody using it realised what they had :> ). the xerox parc team who
developed smalltalk did the real ground-breaking work on object
orientation, and anything they wrote (alan kay, adele goldberg are two
names to look out for) is worth reading.
microsoft have never understood object orientation. and because of this,
they have killed it (seen COM? ugh). it's a very powerful technique, and
you don't necessarily need an oo language to use it. windows was written
in c, designed to be called from c, and not object-oriented in the
least. no wonder things are harder to use from c++. and mfc only makes
things worse. take a look at nextstep sometime, if you can, to see a
better approach.
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
spc:
:Well, that's because on the VAX (to bring classic computers into
:this) had an ENQUEUE and DEQUEUE (I think those are the mnemonics)
:instructions which handled double linked lists (of which queues and
:stacks can be built out of).
*sigh* never mind. did anyone ever use the polynomial evaluators, too?
:Why the need for PALcode to do that on the Alpha is a bit odd - all
:you really need is an instruction that does an atomic "test and
:set" to ensure atomicity (hmmm, it could be that instruction they
:added, although it seems strange because DEC Unix supports multiple
:CPUs and you NEED that for multiple CPUs).
test and set can ensure serialisation, but not atomicity. if the os
isn't counting what other processors are accessing its memory, it needs
atomicity because the serialisation won't be listened to. however,
doubly linked lists are one of a class of things that can be tackled
with a two-word compare and swap instruction (as on the 680x0) - see the
synthesis description for actual algorithms, url unknown, sorry - which
makes them atomic. we'll dig out the pages and post the algorithms if
you wish (if they aren't too self-referential).
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
On 1998-03-17 classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu said to lisard(a)zetnet.co.uk
:>> make sure you set the "send mail as text only" property somewhere
:>> obscure in the settings.
:>Doesn't that shut down HTML for ALL mail though? You'd think a
:>person could specify what type messages (easily) to each person
:>individually instead of as a whole.--
:You CAN. The IE bashing is ill-informed. It's a great product.
:However, in specific response to the above, you simply select that
:mail is responded to in the format it was sent. Quite simple and
:obvious.
we road-tested it extensively for work. it isn't a great product, it's
an adequate product, and every version has its own little collection of
bugs. ill-informed? not when the company's future is riding on it. we'll
have to go to ie4 eventually, and it's better than ie3.02, but it is far
>from great.
(however, we'll qualify that. if you use xml, it is great, since it's
the only xml browser readily available. other than that...? use netscape
instead, it may not be in bed with your desktop but hell, ain't that a
benefit...? :> )
--
Communa (together) we remember... we'll see you falling
you know soft spoken changes nothing to sing within her...
