MIT want to make $12 Apple II clone

On 5 Aug 2008 at 15:44, Cameron Kaiser wrote: Perhaps the name is UCSD-specific, but it's far from being the first. "Incremental compilation" to pseudo-code has been around for a long time--at least from the 1960's. One advantage is that your pseudo- code can have features that the native machine architecture lacks, such as virtual memory, relocatability, large memory space, etc. If done well, the speed can rival (and in some cases, exceed) that of direct-to-native code. I know of a fellow who did a COBOL compiler and run-time back in the 60s that worked inside of a CDC 6000 series PPU (4K of 12 bit words). (Was there ever a COBOL for the 4K PDP 8/L?) I worked with him around 1971 to implement a inter-dialect COBOL translator. He knew nothing about the machine that we were working on--that was my job. He basically invented an abstract machine with an instruction set that operated on COBOL lexical elements. He wrote the translator using mnemonics and syntax that he invented. My job was to implement the machine--first as an interpreter and then later as a series of assembly macros. The darned thing pretty much worked right out of the box and when finally done in macros was a speed demon--and was easy to modify. A few years later, I used the same technique to write a business BASIC that compiled to an intermediate stack-machine code that ran on an 8085--and multitasked with no special hardware. At one trade show, there were some guys dragging around a benchmark that was pretty string-heavy. We beat the pants off of every BASIC there, including BillG's new compiled BASIC. We realized earlier that many business apps weren't so much arithmetic as they were report generators and string manipulators. So we optimized the devil out of our string routines. I still have my original design document, printed on a brand-new OEM- ed Teletype model 40 line printer. OT--there's a recent ad for a working TTY mod 40 setup (terminal, keyboard and printer) here: http://forums.qrz.com/showthread.php?t=169580. Cheers, Chuck