Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My teen years: The transputer operating system

nanochess.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 70 posts

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#41

Post by bitwize »

ralphc wrote: post #27
bjoli wrote: post #12

I 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.

Pretty sure I broke a VIC-20 or two doing something like this.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#42

Post by bitwize »

karparov wrote: post #7

CD-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.

CD-ROMs were available long before the mid-90s and even 8086-class machines could be equipped with them. They were just very expensive, and there wasn't a consumer market for them until the "multimedia" craze hit which required a 386 or 486 with at least 4 MiB of RAM (8 or more was better). But public libraries, for instance, had InfoTrac machines as early as the late 80s, which were XT- or AT-class machines that pulled magazine data off a CD-ROM catalog.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#43

Post by cjohnson318 »

kragen wrote: post #30
nanochess wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the suggestions! I've updated the article.

I'm delighted to have been of some service.

I'm a native English speaker and the article reads very naturally. I've been learning Spanish over the last two plus years, and I'm jealous of how regular and consistent Spanish is compared to English.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#45

Post by kragen »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #43
kragen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm delighted to have been of some service.

I'm a native English speaker and the article reads very naturally. I've been learning Spanish over the last two plus years, and I'm jealous of how regular and consistent Spanish is compared to English.

The orthography, maybe? And there are no phrasal verbs, which is nice. But you have gender, you have plenty of irregular verbs, you have a significantly more complex inflection system even for regular verbs (including the subjunctive mood and the conditional tense in the indicative), and its allophonic phonotactics are tricky (though English has a fair bit of mess here too).

Zapotec sounds like it would be a lot more difficult, but I think really all natural languages are equally difficult, because if it takes children more than about five years to master them, they get simplified, and if it takes children less than about five years to master them, they accrete irregularities, idioms, and metaphorical sense extensions to compress the representation of low-entropy concepts.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#46

Post by leptons »

This is amazing. Nice job, I'm going to have to check this out sometime.

Back around 1985 I was 15 years old and very interested in transputer processors, so much that I called up SGS Thompson, as I wanted to get the datasheets for the chip. The guy at the company was so surprised to be getting a call from a 15 year old. He didn't send me the technical info I was seeking but he did send me some brochures. That's as close as I got to a transputer :(

I daydreamed about transputers and how they could be the future of computing, while I was hacking way on assembly language on my Commodore 64. I'd draw all kinds of network topologies between transputer chips in my high school english class. I had dreams of a system where adding more computing power meant just adding some more transputer chips. In my ideas, connecting a printer would also add more computing power, because the printer would also have a transputer chip in it to control print functions, but when it wasn't printing the rest of "the system" could use the CPU. Of course none of that came to pass, but it was great to daydream about the possibilities.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#48

Post by [deleted] »

leptons wrote: post #46

This is amazing. Nice job, I'm going to have to check this out sometime. Back around 1985 I was 15 years old and very interested in transputer processors, so much that I called up SGS Thompson, as I wanted to get the datasheets for the chip. The guy at the company was so surprised to be getting a call from a 15 year old. He didn't send me the technical info I was seeking but he did send me some brochures. That's as c…

[deleted]

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#49

Post by karparov »

zamadatix wrote: post #28
karparov wrote: post #7

CD-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.

When something doesn't match your expectations you (and others reading along) can often learn a lot more if you start with the assumption you had missing information rather than the assumption it's just incorrect. Even in cases where the story really does have an error by asking about it instead of asserting it you are more likely to hear something additional you didn't know before.

When somebody questions a description that by the face of it violates general sanity checks then you (and others reading along) can often contribute more to the discussion by providing the context in which it makes sense, rather than berating the commenter for being critical and not just buying into any claim posted on the internet.

Re: My teen years: The transputer operating system

#50

Post by karparov »

kryptiskt wrote: post #26
karparov wrote: post #7

CD-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.

CD-ROMs were pretty widespread in 1990-91 before RAM prices fell, I had a CD-ROM drive in a 386SX with 1MB RAM.

Sure. Not common, but possible. Still 8x as much as what I responded to, and thereby even as an uncommon case an order of magnitude more. Further contributing to my point.
Post reply on HN