18:53:03
##forth
<ajhidd>
forth: LOAD ini.fth
18:53:09
##forth
<ajhidd>
forthBot: LOAD ini.fth
18:53:09
##forth
<forthBot>
File ini.fth with MOON loaded
18:53:33
##forth
<ajhidd>
forthBot: S" Cow horn with number PI written on it "S IMAGE
18:55:55
##forth
<ajhidd>
forthBot: QUIT
18:55:55
##forth
<forthBot>
Environment for ajhidd has been freed.
23:14:44
##forth
<veltas>
PolyForth manual looks really nice, hate to admit as it was made in Word 2010
23:15:09
##forth
<xentrac>
haha
23:15:18
##forth
<veltas>
I think Elizabeth Rather probably knows all the Word hacks, Word is dreadful but if you're a Word whisperer you can make good stuff with it
23:15:22
##forth
<xentrac>
enough effort can wring good results from the worst tools
23:15:33
##forth
<xentrac>
but it's disappointing that it wasn't made in PolyForth
23:16:23
##forth
<veltas>
A LOT of technical stuff is made in Word, e.g. most of the specs I rely on at work
23:16:53
##forth
<xentrac>
but the Unix manual is made in Unix, the W3C specs are made on the Web, the Cedar manual is made in Cedar, the TeX manual is written in TeX, and the Emacs manual is written (and read) in Emacs
23:17:10
##forth
<veltas>
I think it's cool that K&R C and the ANSI C standard was written in what was essentially an in-house typography system
23:17:26
##forth
<xentrac>
well, that was kind of how they got the project funded internally
23:17:34
##forth
<veltas>
Why it annoys me that in later C standards they changed to LaTeX
23:17:54
##forth
<xentrac>
Unix was a word processor for the Bell Labs patent attorneys
23:18:08
##forth
<veltas>
A crazy amount of old computing tech was about printing and typography
23:18:36
##forth
<veltas>
Xerox was a huge deal in tech for ages, and invented loads
23:18:50
##forth
<veltas>
Never seemed to capitalise on it
23:19:02
##forth
<xentrac>
yeah. Cedar was one example of that
23:19:31
##forth
<xentrac>
hmm, well, I think they made a fair bit of money from selling laser printers
23:20:59
##forth
<veltas>
They drove a lot of stuff regarding personal computers, GUIs, WYSIWYG, LANs; yet it all slipped right through their fingers
23:21:26
##forth
<xentrac>
yeah, but they made more money selling laser printers than it cost them to develop all the rest of that
23:21:32
##forth
<veltas>
I think blamed on upper management for being too focused on numbers and the core business, neglecting the fruits of their R&D
23:21:48
##forth
<xentrac>
they also got a chunk of Apple stock IIRC
23:22:23
##forth
<veltas>
E.g. look at Microsoft, they've not made that mistake, they're not sentimental about Windows at all. It's annoying as a regular Windows user, but fiscally I can't blame them.
23:22:26
##forth
<xentrac>
laser printers sold because the world was full of personal computers with WYSIWYG editors and GUIs that could share the printers over a LAN
23:23:07
##forth
<xentrac>
Microsoft is sort of the opposite: they made business deals to kill good technology on many occasions if they thought it might compete with them
23:24:28
##forth
<xentrac>
Xerox did make some effort to sell personal computers with WYSIWYG editors and GUIs themselves, but they were totally incompetent at it
23:26:51
##forth
<
xentrac>
speaking of in-house typography systems, I spent some time digging into the history of Hershey fonts, and I learned that Hershey put together a whole in-house typography system at the National Bureau of Standards https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0662398/page/n1/mode/2up
23:28:06
##forth
<xentrac>
except that it was a lot more manual with respect to positioning things
23:28:32
##forth
<veltas>
Interesting
23:30:30
##forth
<xentrac>
The original version was on some IBM mainframe, maybe Stretch
23:30:59
##forth
<xentrac>
the markup format is kind of what you'd expect for early-60s punchcard mainframe code
23:39:21
##forth
<veltas>
That's why we've all got not-made-here syndrome in software
23:39:38
##forth
<xentrac>
why?
23:39:44
##forth
<veltas>
We've all got PTSD from some licensing incident or proprietary printer driver
23:40:02
##forth
<xentrac>
hmm, well, that does happen
23:40:25
##forth
<xentrac>
also though as I've become a better programmer the build-vs.-buy tradeoff changes
23:40:46
##forth
<xentrac>
(where "buy" also includes things like open-source libraries)
23:41:16
##forth
<xentrac>
when I started programming, BASIC was *magic*
23:41:59
##forth
<xentrac>
I had no idea that the BASIC interpreter was just another program not very different from the programs I wrote in it
23:42:12
##forth
<veltas>
I feel like the price vs quality graph has an almost negative correlation in software
23:42:51
##forth
<xentrac>
I remember a friend told me he once heard someone watching a starfield screensaver ask, "Is that a real program or is it something someone wrote?"
23:43:05
##forth
<veltas>
That 5K BASIC ROM that came built-in with the Apple II sounds good, I'd like to try that some time
23:43:40
##forth
<xentrac>
I think the Integer BASIC ROM is easily obtainable
23:43:53
##forth
<veltas>
I wouldn't be surprised
23:43:59
##forth
<veltas>
I'm sure there's a nice disassembly somewhere
23:44:06
##forth
<xentrac>
the full source was published in IIRC Byte
23:44:36
##forth
<veltas>
The starfield screensaver I know from Windows is basically an example program in the original OpenGL red book
23:44:41
##forth
<veltas>
Not sure which came first
23:44:42
##forth
<xentrac>
link dump:
23:44:47
##forth
<xentrac>
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/misc/Apple%20II%20Original%20ROM%20Info.pdf #Apple II ROM information from 1997/2004; includes a hex dump of the 12KiB of the ROM, the SWEET_16 source code and documentation, the #floating-point package source code, etc. #history #pdf
23:45:34
##forth
<veltas>
"Integer BASIC" sounds much more forthy than a normal BASIC interpreter
23:45:42
##forth
<xentrac>
but what I was saying about build vs. buy is that when you're a beginning programmer "build" is hopeless because you can't program your way out of a paper bag
23:45:44
##forth
<veltas>
Also 5K sounds more Forthy lol
23:46:24
##forth
<xentrac>
but as you get better, you become able to build bigger and higher-quality things, so there are things that it makes sense to write yourself
23:46:53
##forth
<xentrac>
and as you continue getting better, you get faster at that, so things it wouldn't have made sense to write yourself a few years ago become sensible
23:48:50
##forth
<xentrac>
and of course ego tempts you to inflate that estimation ;)
23:49:25
##forth
<xentrac>
because when you think "I could write that in a weekend" you aren't thinking about the three hairy bugs you're going to write and then spend a week tracking down
23:49:45
##forth
<tpnix>
hahah
23:50:21
##forth
<xentrac>
how've you been, tpnix?
23:51:30
##forth
<tpnix>
xentrac, Ive been excellent thanx xentrac, Im running Nixos on this PC now and life is very good, how about yourself ?
23:51:59
##forth
<veltas>
"there is no original assembly file for Integer BASIC. The entire program was written out by hand." based
23:52:35
##forth
<xentrac>
oh, of course. because what would he have written it on? an HP 3000 at work?
23:52:44
##forth
<xentrac>
tpnix: not dead yet! glad to hear about NixOS
23:53:53
##forth
<tpnix>
xentrac, not dead yet is good, it means we can finish more projects
23:54:57
##forth
<xentrac>
LSP? excellent!
23:54:58
##forth
<tpnix>
veltas, back in those days, many didnt have a 'printer'
23:55:04
##forth
<veltas>
I actually quite like writing stuff out by hand, and Forth is especially good at being hand-written
23:55:26
##forth
<xentrac>
I think Wozniak's only computer was the Apple I
23:55:47
##forth
<xentrac>
though I don't know why he wouldn't have written an assembler on the Apple I
23:55:57
##forth
<tpnix>
I remember my first printer, it was a A3 Centronics dot matrix on a stand I bought at a auction with a SWTP6800 dev system
23:56:08
##forth
<xentrac>
I've written a certain amount of code out on paper, though less now that I have a cellphone in my pocket
23:56:14
##forth
<veltas>
I was writing some Z80 on paper the other day, trying to figure out the fastest way to divide by 10 and get modulus by 10
23:56:34
##forth
<veltas>
With different requirements
23:58:12
##forth
<xentrac>
what did you come up with?
23:59:26
##forth
<veltas>
Mainly noticed that I can calculate modulus by 10 fast by calculating modulus by 2 (low bit) and modulus by 5 (binary, hex, bytes etc you can add them all up without affecting the value mod 5)