asciilifeform: sysop kicked the drum disk to get it goin'.
asciilifeform: asciilifeform's brother worked on 1, in '90 or so. thing powered a hall of 32 glass terminals , occupied ~24/7 by hungry undergrads
asciilifeform: ( or boot sysv unix, if yer a masochist )
asciilifeform: 4MB aint enuff to e.g. trb inside. tho 1 could rsa in it.
asciilifeform for yrs nao has wanted to build some boxen around sovok k1801, but was never able to justify the sweat in light of war effort -- the demand for iron wallets and similar , even among folx with 3rd eye open, seems to be pretty minimal.
asciilifeform was given 'mk61' at same age i think diana_coman's kid is nao☟︎
asciilifeform: ( before mircea_popescu answers 'holy mother of fuck, this is chemically-pure wankery' -- yes, it was. but imho still beats shit out of redditism. )
asciilifeform: for folx who dun ru -- eggogs had 'depth', which referred to how many ops you persisted with after already eggoging
asciilifeform: and all cuz the folx at 'angstron' didn't have laser, like intel's, to snip off the defective chunk of the ic on conveyor, lol
asciilifeform: one could actually ffa on that ( if somehow find one ! )
asciilifeform: very decent chip, btw, 150,000 16-bit multiplications / sec., and addressed 4MB.
asciilifeform: ( interestingly, still produced! at privatized 'angstrom co', but not sold to humans afaik )
asciilifeform: in ru there are some decent microscopists ( not the 1 phf went to, but apparently others. ) for instance, very recently found that К1801 ( sovok 'pdp-11' single-chip ) was ~not~ in fact a photoclone of dec's (only the early '80s demo ver was!) but , turns out, entirely indigenous orc design, with coupla x ~fewer~ transistors and yet faster max clock☟︎☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: ( surprise ? they had smt pcb in sovok )
asciilifeform: ( and think, that was a ~hand-drawn~ chip, with coupla thou. transistor. )
asciilifeform: this sorta thing happens to this day.
asciilifeform: so produced garbage ( but ordered!111 and therefore fascinating!111 to certain folx ) garbage.☟︎
asciilifeform: what found, was that the 'eggog instrs' were meant to be various floatingpointisms, that didn't work out in the last chip revision, and so left out of the manual
asciilifeform: but for 30 yrs the aficionados had nfi what thing actually did when eggoged. until microscopist.
asciilifeform: much noise was made re the peculiar results of running various
asciilifeform: i.e. exploring undefined instructions
asciilifeform: ^ ancient sovok programmable calculator. had entire subculture, of , among other things, 'eggogology'
asciilifeform: but requires a bit deeper cut than 'i'ma run $snippet and time'
asciilifeform: and it's exactly what asciilifeform intends to do to e.g. the bolix.
asciilifeform: with thinking, rather than brute force ( nobody will live to see even 2^128 bit of phase space walked via brute force, do the arithm )
asciilifeform: also did not say that profiling is useless, profiling -- worx, and is a must for anyffin where you actually give a fuck re performance. but what we aint got on pc, is anything like an actual grasp of wtf the thing does and precisely why.
asciilifeform: which is not to say that you can say ~nothing~ -- can say many things (e.g. the point re the reorder lock, stands for all current x86 irons)
asciilifeform: it aint a z80, thing is finite yes, but coupla MB of state .
