asciilifeform: btw i agree w/ mp_en_viaje's larger pt, if folx dun get up off arse and ~use~ asciilifeform's published instructions to actually replicate his 'magical' irons -- then yes will die of bolix plague !

asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: whole bolix cost me 5. cpu was briefly sold for 450/ea, nao absent entirely from market.

asciilifeform: 1) defo nope 2) 1 single bolix.

asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: 5 of bolix (not partic. relevant, does someone want ~that~ racked?!)

asciilifeform: ( on rare occasions, ends instead like bolix. but arguably similar enuff, fella who dies of heat and the other who -- of cold, still just as dead in the end)

asciilifeform: it is doable, and e.g. bolix's device driver coad was written that way. but is deep magic.

asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/trilema/2019-08-09#1926712 << it is entirely possible to have sane ~back end~ on which you, e.g., write in a lisp-flavoured skin when mangling trees, and a fortran-flavoured skin when want to run in constant space/time with fine control of flow; the bolix people -- had. in fact, arguably all machines have (presently piss-poor) incarnation of this concept, it is... the machine arch itself.

asciilifeform: mp_en_viaje: thinkin' moar re the 'monkeys' -- imho these were the folx continuing to build dec clones , crapples & other micros, and in the inevitable march to microshit hell. rather than the bolix/lmi folx. these, imho, did Right Thing. (even if ended by plugging embrasure with torso)

asciilifeform: mushroom rms's narrative is , granted, nonsense, where 'bolix sold soul to devil, lmi -- not sold'. both sold to devil, 2 diff devils. lmi's gambit was 'we'll self-fund by hand-soldering machines to sell back to mit'

asciilifeform: ( from strictly archaeological pov -- noftsker's bolix, with borrowed moneys, lived ~decade longer than lmi, and produced substantially moar interesting & intact ruins, but this is perhaps orthogonal to the orig q )

asciilifeform: mips, for all its schoolbook popularity, has whole buncha non-orthogonal instrs (e.g. movz/movn, beq/bne, etc. pairs, where only diff is negation; all the signed/unsigned pairs, wtf, if you want signed arithm, let compiler do the fucking sign extension ; and all the unaligned byte-addressing ops, fuck'em, let'em address on whole words like bolix, and suck it up, and bonus , lose 'endianism')

asciilifeform: i find it odd tho, that phf et al did not genesis, wtf, phf , didja use seekrit bolix tech in there ? what's the hangup?!

asciilifeform: single-phosphour crt, w/out shadow mask. hence razor-sharp ( and actually why bolix made the lispm console a b&w tube. was only way to get 1280x1024 in 1980s tube, with sharp text) . for this reason asciilifeform for many years had actual glass tty, when first started unixing, was 1 of the best junkyard finds ever imho

asciilifeform: on top of this, buncha other '19 material, in various stages of publication ( e.g. the mips ; massive pile of bolix material, O(1) adatronic db replacement for trb , not published yet; and coupla other ) ☝︎

asciilifeform: or for that matter, the bolix thread.

asciilifeform: there's a grain of truth at least in that the bolix docs are held much tighter than, e.g., nsa's malware srcs. quite likely a http://btcbase.org/log/2018-12-18#1881634 dynamic is in play, to this day. ☝︎

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-30#1910262 << if mircea_popescu invented how to turn asciilifeform's bolix dig into a snsa-able product, i'm all ears ☝︎☟︎

asciilifeform: serious $mil+ sem, even, not '80s museum piece. could just as easily photo e.g. cr50 as bolix.

asciilifeform: bvt: as for c, i described in the prev. mp thread re the subj, it can certainly ~exist~ as a zoological specimen on sane iron, as it did on bolix. sorta how you can put cobol on yer box nao if you feel like it.,

asciilifeform: ( iirc -- e.g. howard shrobe, 1 of the orig bolix people, went off into medicine. others -- elsewhere )

asciilifeform: that's how (as described upthread) bolix settled the matter, in '83.

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-23#1909527 << currently i suspect that tcc & similar is a mirage; and that an actual serious solution would moar resemble the bolix approach, where you have a proper lisp and a ~compact~ + readable c-to-lisp ~in~ it for use with legacy crapola while-needed ☝︎☝︎☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-04-23#1909401 << whatever else can be said re bolix -- they had the Right Thing pill for this. 'yes you can build a c proggy on this iron; no it won't win you 'speed'.' ☝︎☟︎

asciilifeform: while on subj, 1 of the lost atlantian technologies i intend to saw out of bolix, is the sane graphics stack

asciilifeform: granted i ~could~ have heathens bake coupla hundred dies, for the cost of e.g. that bolix

asciilifeform: 1st time i booted up that 'ivory' bolix, it actually listed a coupla 'and here ecc triggered, corrected x to y' when revving up

asciilifeform: !#s bolix ivory

asciilifeform: iirc that's how the bolix people did it ( 2 fonts on the machine , 1 - typewriter, 1 - horiz. variable )

asciilifeform: there must've been some wagner/cyanide in the bolix fuhrerbunker when folded, presently can't think of why else none of the tech had any later life

asciilifeform: ( there are afaik 2 bolix patents -- 1 , ancient, on the orig. 'l' arch, of 1980-82; other -- on some peculiarity of the video console )

asciilifeform: the bolix people actually did Right Thing -- ran multiphase clock and in fact 'put in 4? get 2x faster ram'

asciilifeform: in other noose, asciilifeform nao has what appears to be full pinout, timing, bus sequence, register, init magic, interrupts, etc. spec for bolix 'ivory' (won't, presently, say from where, unless source wants to be cited, plox to write in. ) ☟︎

asciilifeform: optical , btw, will handily do the bolix job, when comes time, with oil-immersion objective.

asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2019-03-24#1904623 << on paper same in all of reich academitardia; but mit is specifically famous for enforcing the 'you dun own yer face' thing. it's how the bolix story came to be, for instance. ☝︎

asciilifeform: for that matter, that same bolix, and the 1989 crapple it rides on, 100% orig parts ( save for http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2943 which i stuffed in preemptively )

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i expect ~99.99... of ye olde golden age opterons have been melted down by nao, just like bolix etc

asciilifeform: tho since we're on subj, i'ma add that the bolix, for what its faults, was entirely repairable, the only 'magic' part that aint off-shelf is the cpu

asciilifeform: and it aint even necessary to saw open a bolix to see why this was. they didn't have to have a did_machine_do_what_i_said(...) after ~erry line.

asciilifeform: consider the not-uninteresting fact, that on 370,000-transistor bolix, ada was 50kloc ; while on 3bil+-transistor x86, ada (gnat cum gcc cum deps) is , what, 1mil+ ? and their kernel was iirc ~50kloc, while ours...

asciilifeform: ( ditto gnat. the troo adatron would be a ~50kloc bolix-style ada on sane iron support, rather than crusty old gnat )

asciilifeform: ( y'know, ~that~ hat, the 'bolix' hat, from old mircea_popescu piece , 'last loom broke' )

asciilifeform: ^ verily it's quite like asciilifeform's 'i'ma make a bolix', in ways

asciilifeform: re those rivets : earlier this yr i tried to find where else used; turns out , hp ( who fabbed the bolix ) in late '80s also used on certain of their 'pa-risc' items, e.g. http://www.cpushack.com/gallery-1/hp/hp1fe4-0010-pa7300lc-b/

asciilifeform: http://www.loper-os.org/pub/amberglint_bolix_1.jpg ( via http://btcbase.org/log/2018-11-30#1876538 ) for comparison. ☝︎

asciilifeform: in the bolix board, i'ma pull the ics before it goes into the oven, they're all socketed, so sorta academic.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: hey, rms's bolix

asciilifeform: ( 1 nitpick -- no bolix xrays yet, only target practice ; still waitin' for crate of largeformat film to show up )

asciilifeform: i find it hard to picture how a sane cpu, where optimizing compiler is 10k loc and 'fits in head', could have no market. but then again the bolix people proved that it ~is~ possible to go broke with one.

asciilifeform: or the deathbed bolix people, who did ~99% of the job but sank on the titanic of the dec alpha, the only arch they managed to massage into compliance before ran out of dough

asciilifeform: it remains a serious wtf to me : think, bolix had ecc.

asciilifeform: re bolix back end, i suspect it aint very useful as starting point, because was far ~too easy~ item , in that the iron per se was sane (i.e. performed bounds and type checks, so much of what gcc is stuck doing in soft, was unnecessary ) ☟︎

asciilifeform: 2) bolix's

asciilifeform: ( this is where asciilifeform cannot resist to 'on bolix, you simply ask the box what all symbols are, and can get source for whichever you point at' etc )

asciilifeform: and it's exactly what asciilifeform intends to do to e.g. the bolix.

asciilifeform: i dun think it even makes sense to think of the problem in terms of 'write a new ada' tho. the way i see ada, is as a junkyard wars workaround against the retardation of pc arch, where pointerolade, overflowable arrays, etc. if you had a sane arch, you could program in moar or less whatever you want (e.g on bolix, ada, fortran, c, lisp, were implemented as simply skins around the arch, and all shared in the nonoverflowability etc )

asciilifeform: much of the complexity in the bolix system is, in light of modern tech, unnecessary, it was muchly constrained by the limitations of the period tech

asciilifeform: !#s bolix

asciilifeform: trinque: possibly at some pt i'ma start to pillage the bolix adatron, for this .

asciilifeform: originally intended just for the bolix, but nao thinking it'd make for a decent added molestation search for certain items.

asciilifeform: for extra mindfuck : the primary xtal in the bolix ( valpey-fisher vf155 ) is a <1ppm txco. ☟︎

asciilifeform: phf: on other front entirely, you may find interesting, asciilifeform built an xray machine, some time in coming weeks when i get coupla otherwise free hrs, will take pics of the bolix..

asciilifeform: fwiw a standard commercial cesium clock sells 2ndhand for about 2/3 of what bolix did..

asciilifeform: bvt: possibly the bolix machines also ( they did it in vertical microcode, iirc, tho, and in nonconstant time unsurprisingly )

asciilifeform: interestingly from the light of the 'tiger is a bolix' narrative, it was a quite close match despite the overengineer.

asciilifeform: i take a kind of perverse entomological interest in sad rsatrons. ( e.g.: bolix, interestingly, had a -- nonconstant time, of course -- bignum stack, but at least it was reasonably compact.. )

asciilifeform: 1 of the 9000 sane things bolix tried, valiantly , to do, within the limitations of the period irons.

asciilifeform: ( not even speaking of bolix or other 'holy war' fodders )

asciilifeform: research folx had research-grade irons , and ~separate ecosystem. ( pdp, then suns, hp, sgi, alpha, even bolix somewhere close to money printers, etc. but that 'atlantis' sank without a trace )

asciilifeform: but when, e.g. asciilifeform bought bolix, ~200 orcbux of its cost came back.

asciilifeform: hopefully he comes back soonish ( i'ma not even pester him re bolix, bolix is asciilifeform's personal war, learned not to expect help from anyone, and currently in refrigerator, i dun expect to spend much time on it while ffa undone )

asciilifeform: https://archive.vn/Ob6ti << ru army issues yet-others. whole subj shrouded in bolix-esque aura of seekrederpery, for decades.