Viewing profile — housel

I worked for him as well, from 1988 through 1990. He mentored me as I helped sysadmin various BSD machines the university was beta-testing (CCI Tahoe and Gould NP-1), and supervise…

The ADM3a was just a UART chip, RAM chips, character ROMs, and a bunch of 74LS chips to glue it all together. No CPU, and no way to generate graphics.

Given that it's an essential/definitional issue, I would have preferred that the author at least showed awareness of the differences between languages intended for marking up text …

Yes, we overlapped around then.

I was a student part-time administrator/systems programmer at the Purdue Engineering Computer Network at the time. Our OS installs had enough local mods (and we had enough non-VAX,…

"clang -Xclang -ast-dump=json" will take you partway there.

Though "null pointer" and "null value" are correct, for bytes it should be "NUL byte", since ASCII code point 0 is NUL.

Depends on when "back in the day" was; even in the mid-to-late 80s, especially if you were on a multi-user system, on BSD 4.2/4.3 local and networked printer access went through th…

At a previous employer we generated assemblers and disassemblers for various DSP cores based on an Excel spreadsheet that the software tools team shared with the processor architec…

There is the Inkplate ( https://www.crowdsupply.com/soldered/inkplate-5 ), which has an ESP32 and so should be just as hackable as a Linux system.

While I couldn't find any characters with more than three or four readings in this list, the Taiwan list ( https://language.moe.gov.tw/files/people_files/%e5%88%9d%e7%... ) has one…

Overall this is helpful, but it seems a bit ranty, and doesn't do as much as (for example) John Day's Patterns in Network Architecture to provide a positive alternative model.

A lot of Douyin content ends up on YouTube Shorts if you know where to look.

This is a serious criticism... even if it's not likely to catch on enough to have a real effect on the sea level, it is a complete waste of energy to accomplish something that coul…

There's no special "bootstrap compiler"; you can download a binary release for your platform from the page you linked, and then use that to bootstrap a newer version from a source …

(Open) Dylan is surviving just fine, and we expect to do a new release later this month.

I think it would be great to experiment with building this sort of thing for an e-ink tablet, adding an enhanced layer of interactivity to by-hand notetaking.

I have a hard copy of this issue; it predated my subscription to Byte by a couple years, but I was able to purchase it as a back issue some time in the early 80s.

Fairness doctrine made sense at the time because broadcast spectrum was a very scarce resource. When cable and Internet are available to disseminate a broad range of viewpoints, it…

Supabase is featured in the latest episode of the IEEE SE-Radio podcast: https://www.se-radio.net/2022/05/episode-511-ant-wilson-on-s...

The name CodeWarrior is now used by NXP for development tools targeting legacy (old Motorola/Freescale) platforms; see for instance https://www.nxp.com/design/software/development-…

At that point it was probably the free Franz Lisp that was included in BSD Unix 4.2 or 4.3, which had an interpreter and compiler (with basically MACLISP semantics so it could run …

TeX (and Metafont, and the original Tangle and Weave) were written in Pascal, which is much more rigid with respect to ordering than early C was. The CWEB used for the Stanford Gra…

I got a TRS-80 Model I when I was 14. For the next four years, I didn't have a disk drive, and was stuck with the 500bps cassette interface for storage. When I finally did get a di…

https://maskray.me/blog/ has plenty of solid information on the LLVM and GCC/Binutils toolchains.