Posted in game programming, games, history on June 26th, 2009 No Comments »
Here is a good article outlining the Z-machine. This is the machine that runs all of the Infocom text adventures including Zork for which the virtual machine is named. This is some really interesting engineering and you can still see the modern fruits of this online in the Parchment project
Posted in history, software development, thoughts on March 21st, 2008 No Comments »
I was recently reading another multi-core doom and gloom article.. My daughter looks over my shoulder to ask me what I’m reading.
Me: Computers are getting faster
Daughter: Ours?
Me: No, new computers
Daughter: Oh…
The truth of the matter is that we can spend all the time we want worrying about the ‘coming software crisis’ but really the vast [...]
Posted in history, programming on May 16th, 2007 No Comments »
As a big fan of computer history and folklore I found this extremely interesting .
http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/altair/index2.html
“SyntaxCheck (RST 1)
Here is a truly beautiful piece of code, it’s Golden Weasel richly deserved. It’s used at run-time to check syntax in a very cool way : the byte immediately following an RST 1 instruction is not the following [...]
Posted in history on April 16th, 2007 No Comments »
This is a good read for anyone interested in computer history: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html
“After the TMG version of B was working, Thompson rewrote B in itself (a bootstrapping step). During development, he continually struggled against memory limitations: each language addition inflated the compiler so it could barely fit, but each rewrite taking advantage of the feature [...]