All that and he has the name Oscar Toledo. I am pretty sure he’s going to be the subject of a Wes Anderson movie within five years.
Why, did Wes Anderson make a movie about his father?
If not, somebody definitely should.
My teen years: The transputer operating system
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow! Thank you!
Thank you. A ton of work was done, in typing and debugging as well as creating. While some of us were cutting out teeth on nix clones... You made an OS. This is amazing* worthy of praise from Michael Swaine.
Michael Swaine dreams of being able to do what Oscar Toledo G. can.
Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system
#33CD-ROMs and only 128k of RAM? Sorry, that doesn't pass the smell test. Once CD-ROMs were available, 2-digit megabytes of RAM were standard (and affordable) for home PCs.
The standard home PC in rural Mexico at the time was a mechanical typewriter—if you were lucky. Oscar Toledo E. designed and built one from electronic components, such as the Zilog Z280 CPU mentioned in the article. As I understand it, he and his son Oscar Toledo G. wrote the operating system for it in assembly.
Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system
#34Play his engine here in 3D: http://chess.hulha.net/
Wow I suck at chess.
Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system
#35I realized just this month I miss the days of being able to crash my computer completely with a typo. Such a weird feeling. I was debugging some pcie passthrough issues this week and the feeling that the computer could go dark whenever I started the VM was fantastic. It took sooooo much time, and I loved it. Of course, I hated it at the same time. But I got the same feeling as when I was writing ring0 code at 14. Thi…
One of my favorite pastimes on my TRS-80 and TRS-80 color computer was to type in a simple basic program that would poke random values into random memory addresses and see how long it would take to crash or do something else. Sometimes the value would wind up in the basic program itself and it would stop. Mostly it just locked up and I had to hit the power button and try again.
Ha! I did that with the first machine I worked with. A TRS-80 Model III.
Not only was finding interesting memory locations fun, it generated interesting ideas for program features.
I found the address for the line length constant 64, used by the screen scrolling loop. I think the screen was 16 lines x 64 characters. By setting the scroll width to less than 64 I could protect the right side of the screen from scrolling.
So my first games had an area on the right for a non-scrolling title, author attribution, and game state info. It seemed to be a unique feature - I didn't come across any other programs that did that.
Some of my first programs were text adventures. Looking back, I should have put a short room description and usable object list on the right, updating in response to actions. That would have been a significant improvement over having to type "look" over and over, as was typical for those games.
Crazy times: 64x16x1 byte = a 1,024 bytes screen. Total memory was only 16k -> Today that is just a 64x64 rgba (4 x 8-bit channel) icon. But we always found a way to create our programs. I had a 4k RAM TRS-80 handheld and was able to create a tiny version of Zork on that, with a few starting and iconic rooms.
Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system
#36I started programming in 1977/78 in CBM/PET Basic on a Commodore PET 2001 with cassette tape drive and 32k upgrade. I loved those days. My parents didn't understand what the deal was with the costly computer I saved up for at age 13, and why I thought it was so important. It also required many late hours on my part on school nights. I moved on to assembler and C and many other languages over the years. I had a renais…
Thanks for sharing! Mine was a pretty similar experience in the eighties, because you could learn so much just by reading books and doing experiments. Recently, I got three Commodore 64 (the descendants of the PET) and I just want to type some BASIC games and start learning. I'm very humbled by the experience of writing "Programming Boot Sector Games", because like you, many people have told me about having a nice experience reading and learning with it, and I'm glad the effort was worth it.
Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system
#37CD-ROMs and only 128k of RAM? Sorry, that doesn't pass the smell test. Once CD-ROMs were available, 2-digit megabytes of RAM were standard (and affordable) for home PCs.
It is something you can download and test, and it includes the source code for the emulator, the operating system, the C compiler, and everything else.
Just provide the emulator with an ISO CD image, and once it boots up, type DIR D: this single operation requires just about 28 kb of transputer RAM memory for the operating system, the command-line processor, and the buffers.
There's a file browser embedded in the text editor, so you can navigate using the arrows keys and choosing text files to read.
In fact, we need very little info to read CD-ROM directories. A directory search only requires a 2 kb buffer and some variables to keep track, read until you find the first part of the path, read that block, and repeat recursively until you find the desired file.
Reading a file from the CD-ROM can also be done just keeping a 2 kb. buffer and some position variables. My transputer operating system is inefficient in this because it reads the CD-ROM discs in terms of 512-byte sectors, cached by the host system.
Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system
#38Submitted title was "Released my full transputer OS, K&R C compiler and utilities (1996)". We've changed that to the title on the page. (Actually we sometimes make exceptions when the author is the submitter, and I'd be happy to do that here, but the original title is pretty damn cool and will probably attract more readers!)
That's hilarious
Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it was definitely in the Amstrad era, not the rubber keyboard. Spectrum +2 / +3 had 128k, and joystick ports. The +3 had a disk drive. I may still have imagined it.
Okay, I did not imagine it - https://spectrumforeveryone.com/features/inside-codemasters-... But it's not really a CDROM.
:-o
Wow! I defer.
A CD not a CD-ROM, but you're right.
Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system
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