Mastodon bot hkrn@mstdn.social cross-posts the HN link
2 Sep 27 3:55 PM · 1d ago · 1 post · 1 source · development 2 of 3
An automated Mastodon account mirrored the Hacker News submission and its discussion link shortly after the original post went up.
Alan Kay Computer scientist, author of the Quora answermidnightfish Hacker News submitter
The whole story articlesposts the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
What people said 5 voices · verbatim
-
I had Claude Opus disassemble the CDC 6600 dead start panel. The hard part was finding a better image of the switches so the vision could read the bits.¹The content isn't very interesting, and Claude's comments aren't very detailed. Not bad for 2 minutes of work about a 62 year old computer though. Look out Ken Shirriff, AI is coming for you.²…
-
EDSAC as early as 1949 had an "initial orders" module. A boot-up ROM. There was a bank of rotary selector switches, to set the octal digits in each ROM word.David Wheeler (of subroutine fame) figured out the most sensible thing to put in the tiny ROM was a paper tape loader and mini-assembler that loaded the rest of itself from paper tape. So at…
-
I'm pretty sure Kay's not quite correct about the Eniac not being a stored program computer. In it's original form it obviously was not, as it had to physically reconfigured to solve different problems. However, after the war it was rebuilt to operate like any other stored program (von Neumann architecture) computer, as it was the first recipient…
-
DEC supplied optional boot rom cards for UNIBUS, starting with the BM792, which arrived as a 32 x 16 matrix of diodes. You had to remove some of the diodes by hand to set the boot code.Later cards used PROMs, and were pretty fancy. The M9312 had 512 words and included some basic CPU diagnostics. Different variants handled boot from disk, paper…
-
Alan Kay answering questions on Quora. What a cool gift to the world!This is one of the thing we lose as more and more of the conversations turn to people privately asking LLMs things, who do their best to scrape out answers from the existing info or make up a best guess. People are losing the ability to ask experts with real, unique knowledge and…
All 3 developments of Alan Kay's old Quora answer on ENIAC's BIOS resurfaces on… →
MastodonHacker NewsNewswires