I started programming in 1977/78 in CBM/PET Basic on a Commodore PET 2001 with cassette tape drive and 32k upgrade. I loved those days. My parents didn't understand what the deal was with the costly computer I saved up for at age 13, and why I thought it was so important. It also required many late hours on my part on school nights. I moved on to assembler and C and many other languages over the years. I had a renaissance for the low-level and small thanks to you. Oscar, I worked through your, "Programming Boot Sector Games" with much joy. Your books and writing have brought back some of that nostalgia and fun for me, so thank you for that, and keep it going! It's also resharpened some dead areas and gaps I have sustained from the multiple abstraction layers of today's modern software world.
This is so wonderful. I hope I can get your Transputer emulator running to try it. I wish I'd spent my teen years doing something so awesome.
One minor grammar thing: "didn't worked" should be "didn't work", because "do" in English as an auxiliary verb always takes the root form of the verb, just as "will", "may", and "can" do. Similarly "don't exists" should be "doesn't exist".
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.
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.
Get yourself a retro computer and you can appreciate all that joy with renewed vigour! :)
I regularly return to my old 80's 8-bit machine (Oric Atmos, FOREVER!) just so that I can remind myself how great we've got it in this day and age of near-infinite memory, the network-is-the-computer, and endless pixels for days. Nothing sharpens the mind stronger than a misplaced RTS or a failure to budget for room on the stack ..
Submitted title was "Released my full transputer OS, K&R C compiler and utilities (1996)". We've changed that to the title on the page.
(Actually we sometimes make exceptions when the author is the submitter, and I'd be happy to do that here, but the original title is pretty damn cool and will probably attract more readers!)
Thank you. A ton of work was done, in typing and debugging as well as creating. While some of us were cutting out teeth on nix clones... You made an OS. This is amazing* worthy of praise from Michael Swaine.
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.
An Apple IIc with an Apple II SCSI interface card will happily utilise the 1989 AppleCD SC. Apple IIgs maxed out at 8mb RAM or so; with only 128kb out of the box for the IIc for example.
CD-ROMs were outselling all other audio formats in the United States by 1991 for context.
The Spectrum did not have 128kB until near the end of its life. It started out with a choice of 16kB or 48kB and that was all you got until 1986.
It also didn't have a joystick port. Nor did it have floppy disks (although 3rd party interfaces existed). Amstrad added joystick ports when it bought the product line and brand from Sinclair Research, soon after Sinclair launched the Spectrum 128, based on a Spanish model.
CD-ROM block sizes were 2048 bytes (2k), so its not entirely unreasonable to design what we now consider low-memory devices around the technology, nor is it a requirement that huge-memory systems be tied to CD-ROM drives...
One minor grammar thing: "didn't worked" should be "didn't work", because "do" in English as an auxiliary verb always takes the root form of the verb, just as "will", "may", and "can" do. Similarly "don't exists" should be "doesn't exist".
This text makes me relive it!
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.
I regularly return to my old 80's 8-bit machine (Oric Atmos, FOREVER!) just so that I can remind myself how great we've got it in this day and age of near-infinite memory, the network-is-the-computer, and endless pixels for days. Nothing sharpens the mind stronger than a misplaced RTS or a failure to budget for room on the stack ..
(Actually we sometimes make exceptions when the author is the submitter, and I'd be happy to do that here, but the original title is pretty damn cool and will probably attract more readers!)
It were great times. Like aviation in 192x-193x.
Too bad the UK gov were so shortsighted, or that Atari, instead of making the ATW (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation)
should have simply used a T212 in the ST blitter socket as a coprocessor. That way people could have slowly gotten familiar with the arch :|
People are building new hardware to run transputers though: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/369254-pre-annoucement-atw... so maybe this amazing code can be resurrected on real hardware!
Edit: Found it. This is the paper on 3d parallel transforms: https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/611934...
Later transputers also had DSP instructions built-in.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18255845/
CD-ROMs were outselling all other audio formats in the United States by 1991 for context.
A quick google didn’t tell me anything so maybe I imagined it.
The Spectrum did not have 128kB until near the end of its life. It started out with a choice of 16kB or 48kB and that was all you got until 1986.
It also didn't have a joystick port. Nor did it have floppy disks (although 3rd party interfaces existed). Amstrad added joystick ports when it bought the product line and brand from Sinclair Research, soon after Sinclair launched the Spectrum 128, based on a Spanish model.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57231/Amstrad-Buys-S...
I may still have imagined it.
But it's not really a CDROM.
128k is enough for a lot of things.