Viewing profile — drallison

Amazing work. A whole block of cool research to track.

The undocumented instructions in the 8085 were described in detail in Dr Dobb's Journal shortly after announcement of the 8085 (with no mention of the "new" instructions).

The 6600 was not a superscalar machine but simply a pipelined processor. Superscalar machines first appeared in the floating point processor of the IBM 360/91 and may well be due t…

The People's Computer Company published many BASIC games in its publications (PCC Newspaper, People's Computers, Dr. Dobbs Journal, Recreational Computing) and in the book, What to…

I worked on the MUMPS Standard when I taught in the Medical Informatics Committee at UC San Francisco. When I first encountered the language, I was appalled. For example, in pre-st…

Wait. We are exploring boundaries and understanding and not necessarily maintaining the present system. Money? Lend? Ownership? Business? Protecting money? Payments? Privilege? Ban…

Why do we even need banks? What does the financial industry provide? If we were to restructure everything, what would make sense? What are the invariant properties of a viable fina…

Everyone should read this summary/review of the "debate". More important, everyone should read the paper being debated: Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, Richar…

Eric Mitchell will discuss the problem of detecting machine-generated text followed by an open forum Q&A. Part of EE380, Stanford EE Computer Systems Forum.

Don't believe this article. If adding automation and robots to the mix does not decrease cost, it is not going to happen. Labor is the only free variable.

It is a real loss, Gumby. Carl and I were friends and spent hours on the telephone solving the problems of the world and playing polymath math. Hardly a day would go by without an …

It is a real loss, Gumby. Carl and I were friends and spent hours on the telephone solving the problems of the world.

Amen. Fuel out of thin air: CO2 capture from air and converted to methanol takes way more energy than can be recovered from the created fuel.

Just a quick reminder: Fred Brooks did much more than write the Mythical Man Month.

Most of what passes for crypto isn't. The hard problem is not providing an encrypted channel, it's doing the rest, particularly key exchange. When you can construct an encrypted ch…

It is unlikely that there is a way to avoid obsession and addiction Supply an ipad with a reliable high bandwidth "works anywhere" network connection, lots of memory, lots of proce…

Dave Hodges died Sunday, November 13, 2022. Dave was an Electrical Engineer, an Emeritus Professor at UC Berkeley, and an Ex-Dean. Details are on LinkedIn. More particularly, he wa…

The 1979 HP APL\3000 compiler was pretty cool. As I remember, the project was led by John Walters who led the IBM 360 assembler development and was unique in how it managed data re…

No, I do not believe engineer founders have problems getting hired. They are "experienced" and "know the ropes". Startups rarely fail because of a boffo in engineering.

I second this choice. Be sure to get the second edition and to read the various fascicles for Knuth's Volume 4 of Art of Computer Programming. Volume 2 has some useful content as w…

If you become one of the best programmers in the world, what will you have achieved? What is there about programming that captures your passion? Will that be sustainable for the br…

July 29. Sue Tredennick, Nick Tredennick's wife, reports the sad news that Nick has died. Two days ago, Nick was riding his ATV from his office to the downhill barn. He had an acci…

Archive.org (the Internet Archive) is doing important, critical work to build and maintain an archival copy of everything. If you have not used the system, spend some time and disc…