"Think of the children!" No, think of the absentee parents rationalizing invading our privacy because of their laziness. All of this ID requirements bullshit is just about invasive, authoritarian control. Hell no!
A lot of veterans live in TX because they have reduced or no property taxes, and also no income taxes. It's probably ~ 8-10% of disabled vets in my neighborhood.
It's all about that 80-bit/82-bit floating point format with the explicit mantissa bit just to be extra different. ;) Not only is it a 1:15:1:63, it's (2(tag)):1:15:1:63, whereas binary64 is 1:11:0:52. (sign:exponent [biased]:explicit leading mantissa bit stored?:manitissa remaining)
Other pre-P5 ISA idiosyncrasies: Only the 8087 has FDISI/FNDISI, FENI/FNENI. Only the plain 287 has a functional FSETPM. Most everything else looks like a 387 ISA-wise, more or less until MMX arrived. That's all I know.
I'm curious what the CX-83D87 and Weiteks look like.
Keep up the good work!
PS: Perhaps sometime in the (near) future we might get almost 1:1 silicon "OCR" transcription of die scans to FPGA RTL with bugs and all?
> I'm curious what the CX-83D87 and Weiteks look like.
The Weitek's were memory mapped. (At least those built for x86 machines.).
This essentially increased bandwidth by using the address bus as a source for floating point instructions. Was really a very cool idea, although I don't know what the performance realities were when using one.
haha - took me a while to figure out that's Mauro Bonomi's signature
iirc the 3167 was a single clocked, full barrel shift mac pipeline with a bunch (64?) of registers, so the FPU could be driven with a RISC-style opcode on every address bus clock (given the right driver on the CPU) ... the core registers were enough to run inner loops (think LINPACK) very fast with some housekeeping on context switch of course
this window sat between full PCB minicomputer FPUs made from TTL and the decoupling of microcomputer internal clocks & cache from address bus rates ...
Weitek tried to convert their FPU base into an integrated FPU/CPU play during the RISC wars, but lost
Hehe. In the "someone should make a website"™ department: using a crap tons of legacy protocols and plugins semi-interoperable with modern while offering legacy browsers loaded with legacy plugins something usable to test with, i.e.,
- SSL 2.0-TLS 1.1, HTTP/0.9-HTTP/1.1, ftp, WAIS, gopher, finger, telnet, rwho, TinyFugue MUD, UUCP email, SHOUTcast streaming some public domain radio whatever
- <blink>, <marquee>, <object>, XHTML, SGML
- Java <applet>, Java Web Start
- MSJVM/J++, ActiveX, Silverlight
- Flash, Shockwave (of course), Adobe Air
- (Cosmo) VRML
- Joke ActiveX control or toolbar that turns a Win 9x/NT-XP box into a "real" ProgressBar95. ;)
(Gov't mandated PSA: Run vintage {good,bad}ness with care.)
To be fair, we have Flash emulators that run in modern browsers, and a Shockwave one as well, though it seems to be slowing down a bit in traction. Man, VRML brought me back. Don't forget VBScript!
I think it was a fun PR joke that was cool and funny itself and showed they didn't take themselves too seriously.
PS: What I miss from growing up - being awoken about 7:35 am to my next door neighbor's Solar Gold LS Wankel rev shifting from 1st->2nd as he commuted to Spectra-Physics.
There needs to be a category of "super" Chindōgu (珍道具) that fail the first rule by being possibly useful despite being impossibly impractical. Maybe 超良い奇妙な道具.
> I would say his main argument is that you should not use closed source software.
His argument/s go beyond that and {wa,i}s actively hostile towards uses and interoperability if code, other libraries, systems, services, and users aren't pure enough. That was the progression from GPL2 -(TiVo)-> GPL3 -(Mandriva )-> AGPL with ever more extremism and less choice and usability.
There's no need for anyone to mirror his entire philosophy or much of it, but that some bits can be replaced by the choice of the user/developer without being forced by others into another walled garden (licensing tainting) that claims to be "free".
YMMV. Take with a grain of salt. Ask your doctor if licensing is right for you.
(One of my late friends had a falling out with rms over XEmacs development.)
I'm personally a fan of a DWFL license model of FOSS as a gift and giving up control rather than an exclusionary battle for utopian purity. Either create secret groups of code sharing that aren't public or give code away; trying to tell other people what they can do with gifts is as absurd as subscriptions for windshield wipers. I guess I'm neither a communist nor Marxist, sadly, merely a variation of a socialist who values freedom and choice not imposed by others. At the rate the current crop of billionaires are mismanaging things and running roughshod over us little people, the blowback in some land(s) will lead to a "Soviet Union Dve" rhyming of history with even more strife, same as the old strife.
Yeap, it comes across as anemoia false nostalgia pining for a "utopia" than never existed. I had Weird Al and Metallica on cassette and a cheap-o, bulky Walkman and Koss Porta Pros. It didn't really ever play at a constant speed and ate batteries like they were free. When CDs came out (which was actually around 1981), they were a million times better, but it took forever to get the Discman down to a halfway decent price and not skip like crazy on the slightest bump. A good example of a portable CD player that worked well was the '94 Sony D-828K Car Discman that also wasn't just for cars.
And the 80's and 90's weren't that great. The best thing that happened was George Carlin on pirated analog HBO telling us how Americans were morons and that everything sucked. ;o)
Flash storage bit rots. As do consumer writable optical media. RAID HDD or you ain't got nothing.
I dunno but it seems like anemoia. Maybe a few folks want to listen to a mixtape from their teen years that's gathering dust but is likely to break than play properly.
Also, it's difficult to top the school bus yellow Walkman Sports photo from Playboy that pretty much crystalized the zeitgeist.
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