ThomasBHickey

7 ms·

1.
by ThomasBHickey 11mo ago
As an undergraduate in physics in the late 60's, he was just a name on a door. Never saw him.
2.
by ThomasBHickey 1y ago
Try starting with a 2x2, then 3x3, etc. image and manually list all the possibilities.
3.
by ThomasBHickey 2y ago
'Fundamentals' by Frank Wilczek explores this: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/554034/fundamentals...
4.
by ThomasBHickey 2y ago
I always thought Desk Set was a bit crazy, but it seems remarkably close to what AI is currently providing (including the warts).
5.
by ThomasBHickey 2y ago
Mostly nostalgia.
6.
by ThomasBHickey 2y ago
I was a Science Reference Librarian at John Crerar Library in Chicago in the early 70's, and this sounds very familiar, although we tended to get a slightly more focused set of questions (and our boss Mr. Quinn was much more pleasant!)
7.
by ThomasBHickey 2y ago
Me too (and yes, I'm old)
8.
by ThomasBHickey 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oxy-fuel_combusti... It's not easy or free. Others are trying to do this as well.
9.
by ThomasBHickey 2y ago
I can remember the days! I suppose as problems grow in size, it's not too surprising that older methods of coping with what seemed like lots of data are still applicable.
10.
by ThomasBHickey 2y ago
A friend of mine wrote a book about what happened in Germany: Scientists under Hitler : politics and the physics community in the Third Reich by Alan Beyerchen. I'm about a third of the way through it, but they mixed politics with the
11.
by ThomasBHickey 2y ago
PostScript's magic is subtle. I once tried writing a PostScript interpreter in ADA. Got far enough to display the turkey example and realized that PostScript code can modify itself and decided I didn't want to go there.
12.
by ThomasBHickey 3y ago
I use an oral sleep appliance fitted by a dentist that specializes in treating sleep problems. Works well, but does take some getting used to.
13.
by ThomasBHickey 3y ago
I think he meant it depends on how you define 'swim'
14.
by ThomasBHickey 3y ago
They did indeed use multiple 68K chips. In fact I have one of the motherboards down in my basement (sadly not operational).
15.
by ThomasBHickey 3y ago
I started programming in college in the late 60's and it was cards up until the mid 70's when I got access to a PDP-10 with TECO as an editor. Online editing made longer and more ambitious programs much more feasible. Cards were
16.
by ThomasBHickey 3y ago
I remember the Apollo reps moaning that the speed of Motorola's 68k chips weren't keeping up the the x86. I still have an Apollo motheroard with two 68k chips on it -- a work around to enable virtual memory.
17.
by ThomasBHickey 4y ago
APL/J/BQN?
18.
by ThomasBHickey 4y ago
Back in the day I worked quite a bit with Knuth's early SAIL (an extended Algol on the PDP-10) implementation of Metafont. They could have used some of the documentation the later WEB versions had as he tended to get tricky with squee
19.
by ThomasBHickey 4y ago
I read my first Fortran manual about 1964 (my father was an engineer), but didn't have access to a computer until college in '65/'66. I always had my choice of languages, so I've used a couple dozen fairly seriousl
20.
by ThomasBHickey 4y ago
I worked as a librarian there in the early 70's. It was a different world!
21.
by ThomasBHickey 4y ago
Publication in an ACM journal involves a lot more than just accepting a paper as-is.
22.
by ThomasBHickey 4y ago
Well, normally, but you can write it directly in the text format (.wat). It's doable.
23.
by ThomasBHickey 4y ago
Having done some production assembler coding in the late 70's, I expect most new assembler work is now done more for fun than by necessity. Unless the code is well commented and laid out, working with existing assembler code can be ve
24.
by ThomasBHickey 4y ago
Ada
25.
by ThomasBHickey 4y ago
You might try worldcat.org (most books as cataloged by libraries are there). Just tried my home town (village in NY state) and the results looked pretty good. Easy to just look at just fiction, biography, etc. Disclaimer: I worked at the
26.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
Those were good times. I got a copy of the SAIL Metafont and managed to port it to Tandem's TAL language (rather like BLISS, but stack oriented on a 16/32-bit machine). There was some serious bit-twiddling in the code using ever
27.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
COBOL isn't older than all of us!
28.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
WASM is a nice 'assembly' language to play with.
29.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)
30.
by ThomasBHickey 5y ago
Our research group used Apollo's for several years and the feeling that they were all one big system (which never failed) was wonderful. Not being pure Unix was the main drawback.

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