Viewing profile — univacky

American here. I have to agree with this sentiment (without getting into the math of our deeply flawed election system). The administration could not do any of this without the sup…

An aircraft on a flight may not maintain the same identifier/callsign for the entirety of that one flight. Famously, President Richard Nixon departed Washington DC on Air Force One…

When Jordan Mechner wrote Karateka for the Apple ][, he used an array of pointers to rows. A team member realized that by inverting the order of the array, all graphics would appea…

Firstly: I'm a fan of Harbour Air's work and their electrification. Have flown that airline. Retrofitting electrical flight to a 1950s airframe will be, in the long run, not a grea…

I was there as well. I punched the cards and read the core dumps and programmed in machine language using the front panel switches and lights. I programmed the Burroughs machine in…

Additionally, von Neumann did not "architect" that design; it was named for him because he wrote a paper describing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture#Devel…

That's not true for many, many planes, and there are very many private planes that are not jets and the owners are not rich. Thousands and thousands are homebuilts. Go to https://w…

I was thinking The Terminal Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminal_Man_(film)

Filenames? We used to DREAM of having filenames! Writing COBOL on the UNIVAC 490 series (30 bit word, FIELDATA character set), our files were on tapes. A tape request was submitted…

There's a lot of interesting Greaseweazle-y floppy development being done at Adafruit right now. Some days they're posting multiple videos a day showing progress updates. https://g…

I can't be the only one who was waiting for this reference: https://xkcd.com/149/

Don't be too sure it's going to open again. https://livingcomputers.org/Closure.aspx

I have been running nothing but Linux since 1994. My last Windows was 3.1. I just installed Windows 10 for the sole purpose of running this flight simulator.

I learned awk for the purpose of playing Tradewars, running on DOS. Playing Tradewars on the local BBS in the mid-80s, I developed a system where I would spend the first night in a…

Are there any programming languages that treat, say, numbers like adjectives, as human languages do, and have units typing? Instead of an integer being a standalone noun, "5", it w…

It also was intended to have its name pronounced like "JIF", but you know what happens to intentions.

Compilers like MS and Turbo C used a clever technique - a program could be compiled with a software floating point library and shipped, and the existence of the FP coprocessor woul…

Seems almost hard to find that copy instead of this one: https://cpsc.yale.edu/epigrams-programming

Ice cream was popular in the 18th century, particularly known to be favorites of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Their homes at Mount Vernon and Monticello, respectively, b…

There has been one in Leesburg, VA for a few years undergoing testing and evaluation. It is the first in North America. It is currently in daily production use. https://www.leesbur…

I think that computer was built in 1971; the video mentions that the software used is Richard Wilson's player, which was written in 1975 (the DECUS entry is dated 2/11/1976).

You can watch and listen to it on an Altair 8800b and get the octal object code for toggling into your own Altar here: => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgYhVnmeWrk PDP-8 music he…

Oh, man, we're just looking at the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. There is a ton of new hardware for Apple 2s - replacement power supplies, sound cards, coprocessor cards, solid …

If you had a system with only one floppy, you still had an A: and a B: drive. Any access to (virtual) B: would prompt you to insert the other floppy, and I/O would continue until t…