111–120 of 149 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't smaller chips make the problem worse?
I think it jocularly meant "use something with fewer gates and a smaller cross section", not "use a smaller feature size". Or I could easily have misremembered: this was all last century.
Don't understate the difficulty of remembering. This was all last millennium.
The Oberon book (by Wirth, updated in 2013) is excellent in that it describes the entire Oberon system, from the processor on up in a single volume. https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.System.pdf
Part 2 is: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.Applicatio...
Part 3 is: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/PO.Computer.p...
A fun point about the 3rd part. If you've ever been flummoxed by the basics of floating point math, part 3 discusses the fundamentals in 2 pages with a big fonts. One of the most succinct discussions I've seen on FP.
I can't seem to find the original 1992 edition in PDF. It feels like a lot of information (not just source code) is culled from the later versions (2005, 2013) of this book.
The zooming reminds me of Prezi, except that Prezi is in 3D... (maybe Oberon is where they got their original idea from?). As interesting as it sounds and looks, I cannot imagine constantly zooming in and out (or panning) just to switch windows. Maybe I am so indoctrinated with the standard Windows task switcher concept that I don't want it to work in any other way. I was also completely lost when I tried to create a…
Instead of zooming I think a better approach is Windows-within-Windows. Or is that the same thing? You don't need to "zoom" so much as "enter" into a sub-desktop. Which is different than multiple desktops side-by-side. Smalltalk had/has this feature. You create a new "project-window". You can then "enter" it and within it you can open any number of windows including project-windows. This works really well with progra…
Dangit. This is the sort of thing that's equal parts frustrating and exciting, in that I've had a lot of these ideas independently and this is the first time I'm discovering that someone has implemented them. Especially this infinite canvas idea, which I'm very confident would work wonders for me (and many other people) mostly owing to the power of "spatial memory," which I feel like is a wildly underused human featu…
> Oberon is very much in active use at ETH Zürich. We used it as one of our main operating systems. The article being from 2009, this must've been an interesting period for the students, as back then the introductory programming course was using Eiffel, taught by Bertrand Meyer himself.
Ah. Found some traces: https://www.ifr.mavt.ethz.ch/research/xoberon/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you meant it fit on 3.5” floppy drive (1.44 MB). Fitting on a 1.44 foot floppy disk would be much less impressive :P
Bigger is better! I'd love to see that disk. Maybe you'd wheel it out on one of those TV carts all my teachers had.
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Bigger is better! I'd love to see that disk. Maybe you'd wheel it out on one of those TV carts all my teachers had.
I think they did make 14" WORM optical disks at some point: https://i.redd.it/dgvtw0tmgxk81.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Floppy_d...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it jocularly meant "use something with fewer gates and a smaller cross section", not "use a smaller feature size". Or I could easily have misremembered: this was all last century.
> Or I could easily have misremembered: this was all last century. Don't understate the difficulty of remembering. This was all last millennium .
I am interested in alternative GUI tech. If you find this interesting you might find my declarative frontend idea interesting called additive-guis https://GitHub.com/samsquire/additive-guis The idea is you define how the GUI should appear by describing it. The GUI changes in real time based on what you describe. And I also designed a GUI primitive I called GUI thunking, inspired by Haskell. The idea is you can chain…
Additive guis seems like a really cool approach that I wish we had more of these days given that everything seems to be web-based anyway. Most interfaces sadly want to be a mishmash of MacOS and a catch-all mobile operating system.
