Somebody at IBM built an interactive APL interpreter that ran on the 1620, but it seems this was never released:

Experimental personalized array translator system https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/364520.364573

Is there any connection between this product and the Pascal programming language?

In the last eighty years or so, humanity has created something called 'Computer Science' which is ingenious and even beautiful. Now much of it will be forgotten. When the present generations of programmers age out, almost no one will know how to program. In fact almost no one will understand one of the key sciences and technologies that our civilization depends on. Some might say, "no problem, the AI will know all that stuff so we won't have to". Somehow I don't find that very comforting.

BUT the Latin of 3026 will be the same as the Latin of 2026, 1026, ... and 26.

This is completely wrong - it was the British who used computers to break codes during that war. Colossus was built for that purpose by the British. ENIAC was built in the USA but did not become operational until after the war and was not used for codebreaking.

I quit watching after that. I don't trust anyone who garbles well-known history that badly to tell my why we should write software in Latin.

Instead, let this other guy tell you why you should write software in Latin -- and show you how! He's the real deal - he programs in C89 with Latin keywords, by using the C preprocessor:

https://github.com/farant/rhubarb/blob/main/docs/old/latina....

Yes, if Xanadu had taken off people might have had to pay a little to view its content. Just like we used to pay for books, records, movies, magazines, etc etc etc. It wasn't so bad -- those things were mass entertainment, not just for the rich, and they were certainly not a death knell for communication. I don't know how you came up with $10 to view a web page. When Nelson proposed Xanadu, mass market paperback novels -- hundreds of pages -- cost 50 cents. Kids (like me) could easily afford them. They were cheap because there was a huge market -- so communication could flourish.

It's not clear to me we are living in the best of all possible worlds. If the micropayments thing had taken off, it might have provided a way for large numbers of people to make some money by writing, etc. In our world, most of the money is made by a few corporations, and an increasing proportion of what's on the net is slop made by ... nobody.

Computer Lib/Dream Machines was not about project Xanadu, it merely mentions it on a few pages.

I recall Computer Lib/Dream Machines was the most influential thing Ted Nelson did, far more influential by than Xanadu. It was seen all over at the beginning of the personal computer era. Try to get a look at a copy if you can, it's fascinating.

This self-published book was very much of its time - it had the same oversize-on-newsprint format and DIY look as the Whole Earth Catalog, which was popular at the same time.

It was important because it pursuasively made the case that computing was about to become a medium for self-expresson - a "dream machine" - that was an unheard-of concept at the time. You can use a computer to produce graphics! To play games! How about that! He told about Sutherland's Sketchpad, Englebart's NLS, and the Arpanet at a time when these were completely invisible to almost everyone. Xanadu gets a few pages in the book but it is not at all a work of self-promotion - almost the whole book is about the work of others. It's a survey of the computing scene right before personal computers appeared.

This book was very timely and I think it provided a lot of inspiration for the personal computer movement. It made you want to try out computing! It has one page about microprocessors: "Here they come ... Microprocessors are what's happening" (the MITS Altair appeared the next year, in 1975).

I think Ted Nelson is one of those people whose main effects are through their influence on others, rather than through what they directly produce themselves.

Can you assume that pretty much any computer these days provides UEFI firmware that supports ThoreauBASIC, or might some computers provide only a cut-down UEFI that doesn't provide all the functions you need?

Is there some way to investigate the UEFI implementation on any computer? Can you get to the UEFI shell on any computer somehow or is the UEFI shell a separate application you have to download from somewhere and install?

I realize these questions are getting far afield from what you wanted to tell us about, but UEFI is still kind of a mystery despite being installed almost everywhere -- it's hard to find explanations about it.

I am investigating whether it would be feasible to do something similar for Python.

https://principia.lib.uiowa.edu/about.html

"The goal of this project is to make clear structural connections between different parts of Principia and to make analyzable data about the theorems, definitions, and primitive postulates in its text. We do this by providing three digital tools ..."

For example here is their take on the celebrated proof in PM that 1 + 1 = 2

https://principia.lib.uiowa.edu/?n=110.643&n=110

We've come to this. The mere existence of AI is discouraging people from pursuing creative ideas. This is a catastrophe! It's not just taking the fun out of life, it's destroying alternative futures we might have built.

There is this advice for dealing with tyrants and would-be tyrants: "Do not obey in advance." In your case that means pursuing and implementing your exciting ideas.

... it might still be worth having something like that.

Yes! Good luck with it!

Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908271

9 days ago, 182 points, 104 comments

"... Working a corporate job had enough drudgery to begin with, but the last year it has become more necessary than ever to have a place of accomplishment which is simple and fun. ... Having a project where I can directly use my skill on distinctly human tools is a breath of fresh air that has kept me sane and happy.

If you feel like me, I highly recommend thinking about how your tools and craft can be distilled so that other people can pick them up, use them and eventually modify them. Keep them distinctly human. Even before AI, us software developers loved to add complexity to solve problem like scale, "performance", and things the "user" would need. Build like you are the only user and most complexity will melt away. Write your tools to be fast for O(H), where H is human use only. The editor I write in is pure-lua and yet has zero latency despite asynchronously syntax highlighting the file. I've designed it to be able to load and edit million line files using only KiB of added memory. Sometimes problems seem harder than they really are. ..."

Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman (2005)

Weiner himself wrote some autobiographies, including Child Prodigy and I Am A Mathematician.

https://josephoswald.nfshost.com/circuit-sim/woz-machine-hw-...