drfuchs

8 ms·

1.
by drfuchs 12d ago
Can I decode my DVD collection now?
2.
by drfuchs 18d ago
TeX was developed on DECsystem-10/20 machines (36-bit words, your choice of byte size). The various operating systems (Tops20, Sail/Waits, ITS) were superior to Unix in a few ways, one of which was that when a process was suspend
3.
by drfuchs 1mo ago
Wait til you see the DigiComp II! It has flip-flops driven by marbles and gravity. Truly astounding.
4.
by drfuchs 1mo ago
Hey, DVI was my suggestion and initial implementation; Knuth's comments in the TeX source code acknowledge this, and they mention plenty more people than Frank Liang who made significant contributions to TeX82: Leo Guibas, Michael Plas
5.
by drfuchs 2mo ago
Also, Nixie Tubes were absolutely not “tiny.” Typically, they were about the same size as a vacuum tube you’d find in the back of your radio or TV. They were universally used on electronic equipment; less so on consumer devices.
6.
by drfuchs 4mo ago
Nope, that would be Michael Plass (thesis title: "Optimal pagination techniques for automatic typesetting systems," though his line-breaking work is what showed up in TeX) and Frank Liang ("Word Hy-phen-a-tion by Com-put-er&q
7.
by drfuchs 4mo ago
Earlier additional great info from svat (and ramblings by me) are at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006525 One point concerning Metafont and Computer Modern (and TeX): A key overall goal of the whole kit and caboodl
8.
by drfuchs 4mo ago
Not so about the Linotype. Back in 1980, I personally ran the Alphatype CRS phototypesetter (bought by DEK for the purpose), in the basement of Margaret Jacks Hall, that produced the entire camera-ready copy of The Art Of Computer Programmi
9.
by drfuchs 4mo ago
Kind of astonishing that they managed to retain the institutional / folk knowledge to be able to create a new vacuum tube product, never mind the machinery and inputs to manufacture them.
10.
by drfuchs 4mo ago
I did some assembly programming on the Fairchild F8 mentioned in the prequel article. Quaintest feature: Doing a “long” jump (more than 127 bytes away) would cause the accumulator register to be clobbered. Presumably, there was nowhere els
11.
by drfuchs 5mo ago
Burbank Airport used to get recognizable celebrities to record the canned public announcements in their own style. I seem to recall Joan Rivers, Henny Youngman, Jerry Seinfeld, etc. It took some of the edge off while you waited around, at
12.
by drfuchs 5mo ago
Relatedly, there's a steganographic opportunity to hide info in machine code by using "XOR rax,rax" for a "zero" and "SUB rax,rax" for a "one" in your executable. Shouldn't be too hard to a
13.
by drfuchs 7mo ago
Also https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/02/joe-halpern-towerin...
14.
by drfuchs 7mo ago
From who now?
15.
by drfuchs 7mo ago
Can they re-raise it in Series Rust?
16.
by drfuchs 7mo ago
But they left S, X, and Z rotationally symmetric, so if you choose a non-palindrome vanity plate with only those characters, you can mount it upside-down and fool plate-readers.
17.
by drfuchs 7mo ago
Well, ackchyually, the first releases of FrameMaker were created on Sun 3/50 workstations with 4MB of (unexpandable, soldered-in) RAM on a 16Mhz 68020. Most customers had the same model, and could work on modestly-sized documents with
18.
by drfuchs 8mo ago
Colossus: The Forbin Project is simply a renamed release of The Forbin Project, a few months after the later had a poor opening. Didn’t help the box office much. I liked it, back when it was easy to dismiss as an impossible dystopia.
19.
Waymo temporarily suspends service in SF amid power outage(sfgate.com)
2 points by drfuchs 9mo ago|2 comments
20.
by drfuchs 9mo ago
Waymo halted service in San Francisco as of Saturday at 8 p.m., following a power outage that left approximately 30% of the city without power. The autonomous cars have been causing traffic jams throughout the city, as the vehicles seem una
21.
by drfuchs 10mo ago
It still says "44 characters" when I click the link.
22.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Oops. Anyway, I remember attending a talk by one of the IBM engineers back when they first released the XT/370. He said that they looked at all possible ways to integrate their production line as a kind of secondary track off of one
23.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Any chance it was for the "IBM Personal Computer AT/370" that nobody remembers (perhaps because nobody used)?
24.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Yeah, and I suppose you’re going to tell me that Han didn’t shoot first, either. Did you refer to an original 1980 70mm release print, before all the fiddling around they did on subsequent releases? And newspapers and fanzines from 1982 t
25.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
The high sale price was due to the fact that this was a rare "REVENGE of the Jedi" rather than the normal "RETURN of the Jedi" poster. The back-story is that the movie title was originally going to be "Revenge...&q
26.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Indeed. Take a gander at the last screenful of ziglang.org
27.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Real programmers would have donated $524,288. But seriously good news nonetheless.
28.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
That’s a ZipCode.
29.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Typical TOPS-20 and VMS hardware of the time would have less than a gigabyte of spinning disk space, to be shared among many dozens of users. Full copies of files were saved, and there were strict per-user disk allotments. Creating Generat
30.
by drfuchs 11mo ago
Not being able to chown() caused us grief developing Frame Maker back in the 80s. The responsible way to handle "save" was to write the document into a new file mydoc.new, then rename mydoc.cur to mydoc.backup and then rename myd

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