Viewing profile — theodorethomas

I wondered if a city-wide synchronised Pulse-Width-Modulation of LED lights could allow astrophotography (or even naked-eye astronomy) to be possible again, with a filter synchroni…

Reading the Steelman document is like reading a shopping list of everything that's gone into modern Fortran.

I wonder how this combines with Richardson's Theorem.

Except the 486 had hardware floating point, essential for technical work.

The 486 and https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/history.html changed everything. Suddenly, it was possible to imagine running advanced software on a PC, and not have to spend 25,000 USD …

One consequence of that is that the Earth, as seen from the nearside of the Moon's surface, just hangs there, never moving, apart from a small wobble.

Apollo Command Module interior colour is similar, and gorgeous.

I remember a 120MHz Pentium Linux box arriving at a cottage in Crete, where, with the aid of a 56k USRobotics modem, we (my wife and I) worked remotely in 1995-6. She had a Mac SE/…

There are two ways of constructing software: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are…

The sheer amount of dedication is awe-inspiring. In the 80s, at Imperial College, London, Theoretical Physics Group, we came across some correspondence intended for one of the prof…

"The language assumes contiguous memory, column-major order, and no hidden aliasing between arrays." One out of three ain't bad. "Column-major order", that's the one. That just say…

Do as much as you can in a spreadsheet, then start a new spreadsheet.

Part I managed to miss the Antikythera Mechanism.

It is not suited to cases where the machine state is experienced by the user at all times (games, hardware-control, real-time transactions). It is very suited to cases where the ma…

Can someone explain to me why although we've known that classical physics is not a correct description of the hardware of the universe for at least 100 years now, we are still hook…

Before smartphones we had https://www.cambridge.org/turnleft

FORTRAN (IBM, 1956) introduced the "Computed GOTO". SSA (IBM, 1988) introduced the "Computed COMEFROM".

At my age, I assume that everything that "everybody knows" has a large dollop of fiction pasted around it. "Byzantine generals", anyone?

Ken, I love your work on the Apollo hardware. But here, you don't present any argument that your recommended course of action will have a desirable outcome, or any outcome at all. …

> why some of the very best theoretical physicists, who were entirely free to work on whatever they wanted, continued working on string theory Historically, it is not unusual for i…

https://wg5-fortran.org/N2201-N2250/N2212.pdf is John Reid's complete document.

Mid 1980s, trying to connect from one London University computer (at Imperial, a CDC Cyber?) to another (at Queen Mary?), to try some symbolic algebra package that was only availab…

I suspect not. Children are exposed to far less text than LLMs. LLMs are parlour tricks that teach us nothing about how humans do it.

The point is, it shouldn't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30022022 How ISO C became unusable for operating systems development

I don't see how C can match Fortran's abstraction level and still reliably control hardware that uses memory-mapped I/O. C, as an operating system implementation language, is tryin…