I was also on BIX, then NLZ, same name as here. Even made it into the "Best of BIX" in the back of BYTE a couple of times.
Living in New Zealand, it wasn't easy to meet people — or for that matter to access BIX! I was fortunate that from mid 1986 my employer paid for access via X.25 [1] for several years until telnet was possible from Actrix BBS.
jdow took me to LASFS once in 1989 and I think I saw JP from a distance. But in 2004 I spontaneously caught a flight to LA for the historic SpaceShip One 100km high flight. jpistritto picked me up at the airport and we drove to Mojave. Parking at the XCor hangar david42 and his wife Rita pulled up next to us in an RX7. There was a party in the hangar that evening, I got to talk with JP and LN and many others, at one point helped Doug Jones (can't remember if he was on bix) make LN2 icecream. A lot of us slept in the hangar. In the morning I helped shadow cook bacon&eggs for everyone, before we all went out to watch the flight.
Also at other times got to meetups in Phoenix, New York (a lot of C++ crowd there), New Haven (people came down from Boston), Seattle.
Good times.
[1] NZ$13.20 per kilosegment (ISTR even more at first!) .. up to 64k bytes if you filled the packets, but possibly as little as 1000 bytes if there was only 1 byte per packet e.g. sitting there and hitting return: so I always filed all new messages to scratchpad and then did either SHOW or else download via X/Y/Z modem.
Interesting (but understandable pre-silicon) to see a couple of errors about the 6502 in that e.g. SBC needs SEC before it not CLC. The code examples could be improved too e.g. the 6502 memory copy has no need to use both index registers and increment them in lockstep with the same values. And better still, since you're copying fewer than 256 bytes, initialize one index register to COUNT-1 and copy from last to first.
On the other hand the 6800 code is buggy too. It's incrementing only one byte of the FROM and TO pointers — and the MSB at that on a bigendian machine — with no provision for crossing a page boundary, when the normal thing is to
LDX FROM
LDA 0,X
INX
STX FROM
LDX TO
STA 0,X
INX
STX TO
Still, as they say, much messier than 6502's...
LDA FROM,X
STA TO,X
INX
... even if the 6502 needs an outer loop to copy more than 256 bytes, at least the inner loop is fast.
Also no mention is made of `(ZP),Y` addressing mode which takes 6502 to another level entirely.
It became just another MS-DOS rag. In the early days it covered EVERYTHING, all ISAs, all programming languages (very famous Lips and Forth and Smalltalk issues, for example).
> CP/M did have a sort of revival in that it became common in low-end machines like the C-128
Amstrad were good late 80s CP/M machines. We got both those and C128 in New Zealand.
> the one RISC/CISC CPU thing that really mattered!
Not only indirect addressing, but also multiple memory operands in the same instruction — more than one VM page, really, though a single unaligned operand crossing a page boundary is also bad. Many machines trap on that case to this day and let software emulate it.
Not being able to easily tell how long an instruction is (and thus where the next one starts) is also bad, but can be overcome at some cost in the front end, and the back end is unaffected. Unlike x86 and VAX the 68k does actually tell you everything you need in the first 16 bits, but yes the complex addressing of the 020/030 were what killed it.
Yeah, I've got a complete collection from October 1978 to December 1991 (by which time they had became just another x86 PC rag). I bought a fair few individual copies myself from 78 or 79 until the late 80s, but the bulk of my collection I got for free from an elderly engineer in I think the late 2000s.
Here's a tweet I made packing them up when I was moving overseas in April 2015:
I cut down the December 2019 RISC-V ISA manual to just the things needed to get started with RV32I, to be even less intimidating.
I left out the end of the RV32I chapter with fence, ecall/ebreak, and hints. But included the later page (which many people miss) with the exact binary encodings, and also the chapter with the register API names and standard pseudo-instructions.
Airline pilots rack up a lot of hours but get very little "stick time", and what they do get is extremely sedate flying to not scare the passengers / spill their drinks. Their primary skills are pushing buttons on the autopilot and talking in the radio and transcribing clearances.
A military pilot gets more effective stick time. But aerobatic pilots, ag pilots (but I repeat myself), and glider pilots gain a LOT more experience and skill per hour flown than an airline pilot.
I was working with the example given which was weak on two points, John Travolta gets paid and while his hours are impressive they nowhere near full time professional hours.
Military pilots are also professionals, and of the glider pilots how many of the best are trainers. Ag pilots are professionals, as are helicopter mustering pilots who are incredibly skilled. The majority of acrobatic pilots are also professional pilots. I’m not suggesting that great amateurs don’t exist just that a great amateur who has gone pro can often beat one that hasn’t.
I understand the sentiment, on one hand if I was rich I would be able to devote my time into constant improvement, but then maybe I wouldn’t have the same drive to succeed as having my livelihood dependent on the outcome. There is institutional knowledge gained by working in a research org that would be hard to replicate as an independent scientist.
I've been a gliding instructor, sometimes doing up to ten flights a day, all summer (e.g. when I was unemployed for a time). In the NZ/Aus/UK style clubs you don't get paid for it, but then it doesn't cost you anything either.
reply