Видео

Just a little nitpick concerning the name Zuse. It's pronounced something more like 'Tsoozah".

Interesting video, although i personally see (or rather hear) one issue - mispronunciation of Zuse's name throughout the entire video was pretty hard to swallow. Best not to assume the pronunciation if you're not sure and just check before recording.

16:35 that was very brave especially during that period they had no mercy if you got caught

Clicked SO FAST. Zuse is fascinating.

I managed this with a terrible shell script that spawned a background copy of itself before getting on with it’s designed task in the later ‘80’s. Totally bogged down a University server and taught me to not run shell scripts in the background. Or at least, not to re-spawn at the start….

%0 | %0

I wouldn't be surprised if the "Jedgar" pronunciation stemmed from the Laugh-In skit where Lily Tomlin called the FBI, to talk with "Jedgar Hoover."

There’s some explanation of why not Xenix in a RUclips: Dave’s Garage episode titled: “Linux-Xenix-Unix vs OS/2 and Windows: Dave Cutler Interview”. The TRS-80 business line of computers after the Model II (the ones with 8inch floppy disks) could run Xenix. The Model II and Model 12 could with hardware upgrades. But it was mainly on the Model 16, Model 16B and Model 6000 that were the Xenix targets. All those systems were targeted at business use. Price-wise no home user would be ponying up for that line of computer. Xenix even on those systems could handle multi-user as well as multi-tasking. There was a TRS-80 DT-1 dumb terminal even so you could connect via serial to a Xenix system. Lots of demos on RUclipsr TJBChris channel - he covers those systems very well.

Great story!

Ok Ok, but makes me think. Was someone ever fired for SELLING IBM?

this podcast is so underrated it is criminal.

Love these kind of stories

Just letting you know: the audio is glitching out hear and there on this episode. I checked the RUclips upload and the audio mp3 from RSS, both have the issue.

are these scripted or unscripted?

You made a significant conflation in the intro; you conflated the assembly language (specified by the chip designer) and the assembler program specifics (macros, directives, labels, variable names, and in some cases, different mode notations). Some 6502 computers lacked all the symbols used in official 6502 addressing modes, and so you have tthis assembler specific dialect. Many early 6502 assembler programs lack targets and variables; most recent ones allow targets, and a few allow variables (implemented essentially as a label to a specific memory address picked by the assemler.) Which is to say, there isn't one 6502 assembly dialect, but several, and those dialects are less hardware specific and more assembler program specific. Robin (sp?) of 8-Bit Show and Tell has shown several different assemblers for C64. A thread discussing the issue of C64 assemblers is on lemon-64 www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=75344 ... I've seen (but am not searching for again) similar discussions for apple II line and for the various z80 CP/M assemblers.

I really enjoy your videos. No nonsense. Keep it up!

another thing we take for granted that didn't exist in the early days .

Xerox invented the PC *several* times. Jobs swiped GUI idea but not the Smalltalk/oop dynamic self referential part.

Linux Torvalds

"Hutspiel" or "Hütchenspiel" are the German equivalent of the english "shell game" or "thimblerig". Maybe an ironic reference to skillfully papering over the kludges in this simulation. I also found an interesting article on Substack by Aaron Reed "HUTSPIEL and Dr. Dorothy Clark". (I dare not put the link here, because YT will the delete this comment as spam).

Could it be that it's spoken like the German Hut and Spiel? 😏

intel and the promise of compatibility. Being “historically grown” rather than cleanly designed and engineered (i4004 -> i8008 -> i8080 -> i8085 -> i8086 -> Pentium -> ... and so on for all eternity!) the so-called x86 (also the 64 bit variant of it, which is sometimes called x64) actually has no inherent advantages over other, more open, cleanly designed and engineered ISAs than the “compatibility promise” that (then still) INTeL made at some point. Ultimately, x86 is so bad (“a wart on a wart on a wart”) that this is the only reason that: a) x86 (and successors) b) intel still exists. As soon as intel abandons it (there have been several attempts), customers will stay away. Best example: Itanium (which also had other problems, such as specifying the instructions to be executed in parallel at compile time). Some did get involved with the Itanium, but the project ultimately failed. This promise prevents intel from trying anything other than x86&Co. It is their fate. _lars P.S.: You can hardly blame INTeL (the old one) for their architecture being the way it is. It was the first attempt and if it doesn't fit 100% but insists on compatibility, then it will be difficult: as a first mover, INTeL had no experience with computer architectures (but they could have consulted mainframe manufacturers) and all the possible pitfalls that lurked there. INTeL decided to go down the compatibility route and was then lucky enough to be chosen by IBM for their PC and then to be widely used as clones. I give INTeL credit for this pioneering work. intel, on the other hand, I can no longer stand. One reason for this is of course their fearful clinging to x86. If they are as good as they always say they are, then they could also produce a first-class RISC-V or ARM chip. But they don't dare! Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Excellent podcast as always. Love your work

Old PC jr user here who 47:55 bought some circa late 70s early 80s S100 cards made in Canada by Dynalogic, the company that would make the Z80 computer, the Nabu. I see you're talking about the z80. One of the cards I have for the S100 bus is a z80 card you can see it in a RUclips video I've posted here

"Big Computer Games" from 1984 was reissued by the Apple PugetSound Program Library Exchange (A.P.P.L.E. still very much in business!) in 2022. With a new preface by David Ahl. As the title suggests, it has longer type-in Basic games, which he says were originally written for time-sharing systems.

type ins were from before my time i did end up renting a lot of outdated books in the library in the 90s and being surprised that you could do that even if the games they showed were quite dull to my spoiled 90s mind. it was quite confusing learning about computers as a young kid in that period because the library just had layers of random books from the 1970s to 1990s and they were all quite different and even books from 5 years earlier were obsolete .with other topics like biology or chemistry and history the old books were just fine. 20 years is almost nothing in those fields but with computers things were moving way too fast but i got internet a few years later . the 80s books also mentioned loading from cassettes we still used cassettes for music at this point but i didn't know it could be used for data floppy discs were almost obsolete at this point but the books said it was a high tech luxury. but the oldest book they had with computers was from 1972 but it was about all kinds of electronics going from simple things like lamps and dishwashers to phones to radio to tv to computers but the chapter about computers was quite in depth and had some examples of code. but it wasn't basic i wish i still had the book so i could tell what it was. i had one even older encyclopaedia from the 1960s that mentioned computers but it was just a short description of what a computer is and books from before the 60s seem rare regardless of what it is about. if we count all kinds of electronics i had a 1920s book but it was so old that it was hard to read because it seems like the Dutch language changed faster than English. in English you can read everything from after the industrial revolution some languages changed even more slowly but i am getting off topic .

Mr. Ahl's 101 Basic Games was notorious amongst my friends as pretty worthless; most needed heavy modifications for the various mumblesoft¹ flavors. (I had a copy of the '78 available the same time the TS1000 was.) "Microsoft Basic" was NOT a unified standard! And you glossed over a source in the intro: School Math Texts. Many upper elementary (aka intermediate) and middle school texts in the late 1970's included BASIC snippets; some included LOGO turtle graphics. My 6th grade math book included several in basic... they didn't run on my TS1000, They did run on dad's mainframe at work. They were intended to reinforce the math concepts, with osmotic learning of BASIC... but like Ahl's work, they generally were broken as written save on the flavor originally written for. Bitsavers has the '75 dec version. www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/_Books/101_BASIC_Computer_Games_Mar75.pdf Annarchive has the '78 14th print. annarchive.com/files/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomputer_Edition.pdf ¹: mumblesoft was a common derrogation of MicroSoft; in this case, specifically MS OBASIC and MBASIC for CP/M, MS BBASIC for Altair, Applesoft for Apple II, Commodore Basic for Commodore 64, Atari BASIC for 8-bit, and even the first MS basic for MSDOS (which was pretty close to CP/M MBASIC.

Enormously underrated podcast. Working my way through the episodes one at a time!

Its a podcast yes but surely on youtube some visuals wld help?

Motorola was EVIL, but the MC68000 was good.

42:55 Have you or a loved one been injured by edge notched cards? If so, you might be eligible for compensation. Please contact ...

Fascinating! One of the questioners asked about Paul Otlet, and you said that what he did was at least very close to hypertext. What about Zettelkasten ("slip box"). This has received a fair amount of attention in recent years. This, too uses a unique identifier for each card and can link cards together.

26.10 "This is pretty cutting edge technology" 🥸

"Fast processor chip takes instructions directly from forth" sounds like a porn title to me wtf lol

i am always amazed at how "big" the computer industry already was back then considering when i talk to most people that were around back then they know nothing about computers and struggle with a point and click interface. even a lot of people that were born a few years after this happened cant handle them when i tell them this existed they deny such things existed at the time. to be fair i am starting to say similar things about 90s internet and cell phones because i didn't get access to those until the 2000s .

Thank you! :D

Thanks for getting back to TRAC Language™.

Thanks once again for this episode. I hope the talk goes well!

Awesome and criminally underrated podcast! I am fascinated by mechanical and analog computers/calculators but I didn't know this one about betting! And yes it doesn't feel right that there is so little about those discoveries. I wonder if you have an episode about hollerit tabulating machines used for science, for example in the work of Leslie Comrie "On the Construction of Tables by Interpolation". Further I am checking every now and then the history.computer but still no first issue.

I had a friend who bought one of these when they came out so I have some first hand experience. I already had some knowledge of Forth through the Byte magazine issue about the language and a few hours of actual hands on use convinced me to write a version of the language for the Vax 11 we used at university. I picked up a copy of "Threaded Interpretive Languages" by Loeliger and had something up and running in a few weeks. I've always been a bit puzzled why Forth didn't make more of an impact amongst hobbyists at the time; it seemed much more expressive and more efficient in both cpu cycles and memory than Basic when those things really counted. I think implementing Forth is still a great first step into writing compilers in general.

Great job. But i must prostest... holes, notches, rods are digital to the core, binary even 😅

Asteroids was pure garbage. Pitfall was cool.

I had a Jupiter Ace back in the day. Hardware wise, it was pretty crappy to be fair. But I still felt like I was king of the nerds for having one. Forth is like a nice old Unix system in that you can do so much with so little.

The wonder of Unix back in the old days (and by "the old days", I'm coming up to about 1990) was that there was hardly anything there at all. It's hard to believe looking at the bloatware that is a Linux system. But, in the world of Unix, "all that software" wasn't really "all that" at all.

Very cool, looking forward to your update with the results of your compiler adventures.

See also: Coherent by Mark Williams Co.

Fascinating. Thanks for this. Why couldn't MITS (or others) create an "S200" backplane, which would be backwards compatible with S100 because it would be S100 plus 100 more lines (or however many), similar to 16-bit ISA being 8-bit ISA plus more? Then you could still plug in S100 cards, but also have the option of plugging in S200 cards, including new CPU cards? It would be limited by the lowest common denominator (e.g., S200 drive controller card would operate at S100 if CPU card is S100) but would pave the way for full S200 implementation. Was that not feasible?

I wonder how Minix and PC-XINU do it without an MMU on 8086 then? I remembered looking at the Memory Manager code in Minix in an OS class in late 2000, but I forgot.

Of course there was XENIX for Z8000, its not a vaporware at all. Please, find article named "XENIX -- Microsoft Short-lived Love Affair with Unix" on the softpanorama website. Here is citation from there: " I joined an ISV and VAR called Databix in 1986 which was using Zilog boxes running Xenix as its main Unix development platform."

Thank you so much for this episode. Monday morning 10am here and I needed it.