asciilifeform: also he had an actual nation, properly speaking, and made full use of the fact

asciilifeform: not much of a talker, but he was quick enuff on his feet ( pointedly unlike the su gerontocrats )

asciilifeform: ( tho i liked the other one -- http://btcbase.org/log/2014-07-28#774690 -- moar ) ☝︎

asciilifeform: aha !

asciilifeform: and for how long.

asciilifeform: against the mcbeast.

asciilifeform: but the moar i dig into ro , the more astonishing the level of fight it was able to put up

asciilifeform: it isn't an invincibility pill

asciilifeform: possibly, but not discovered yet.

asciilifeform: ideology is the only working pill against 'market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent'

asciilifeform: ( see also http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-07#1733724 observation ) ☝︎

asciilifeform: aha

asciilifeform: right.

asciilifeform: until mid '90s nobody even in bad dreams considered it a threat to industrial iron tho.

asciilifeform: hm ok i see it

asciilifeform: the 'mouse spores' were indeed, yes, present

asciilifeform: by that token jobs existed in '77 neh

asciilifeform: ( e.g. my 3620 was circa '86 )

asciilifeform: 1980-86 approx yea

asciilifeform: the 2 were not contemporaneous.

asciilifeform: the winblowz item still strikes me as anachronistic, rather like the supposition that men killed tyranosaur.

asciilifeform: but originally -- worked. or how do you suppose the 'ivies' got, and stayed, fat.

asciilifeform: at this point that describes their whole civilizational shebang, the hollow husk

asciilifeform: superficially their scheme works to this day -- i.e. 'you can elect anyone you like, but he'll be a harvaprinceyalton graduate, muhahaha'

asciilifeform: ( he worked entire fictional portrait of what imho is proper university... )

asciilifeform: ^ as depicted in stephensen's 'anathem' aha !

asciilifeform: the fact that it was solar-powered ?

asciilifeform: oxford was a kind of su, or ro if you like, self-fueling

asciilifeform: they move to amish countryside and make lispms out of grass ?

asciilifeform: what would this look like

asciilifeform: re ai lab -- mircea_popescu how do you picture a buncha taxpayer-funded academics not-'failing-to-republic' , hypothetically ?

asciilifeform: sorta how northrop does not see itself in competition with cessna

asciilifeform: re (b) neither of'em was pictured as in same market at all, any moar than pepsicola

asciilifeform: near as i can tell, he was the proverbial nursing home patient described on trilema, who says 'died, whaddayamean, died, where is jane?! we were USED to her' re every colleague who went off to bolix or lmi

asciilifeform: he wasn't the director of lispm group or anything of the kind

asciilifeform: d00d was in no sense in control tho

asciilifeform: i suspect that he simply did not even think about it.

asciilifeform: mit was never in the business of selling comps

asciilifeform: it was never clear to me from rms's surviving writing what he thought mit ought to have done with the lispm, if not to license to manufacturers

asciilifeform: greenspun, on other hand -- was

asciilifeform: rms was not ,in so far as i can tell, involved in the http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-14#1738171 aspects ) ☝︎

asciilifeform: ( re rms specifically )

asciilifeform: none of the code in question -- at least in so far as it is accessible to modern archaeologist's eye -- was particularly deep

asciilifeform: iirc rms was most incensed re the luring away of ~people~, rather than lifted code

asciilifeform: ( died with the sunken atlantis, nothing afaik heard of it since 1990 )

asciilifeform: ( really, 'refal'-m )

asciilifeform: su had, interestingly, early and stillborn attempt at lispm

asciilifeform: phf: aha, it was why scheme(orig. '79') cpu, evaporated

asciilifeform: hey if pyongyang or bucharest were running a lispm project and invited defectors, i suspect folx would've come

asciilifeform: same reason for ~90% of closedsourcedriverism today, say.

asciilifeform: 'must hide my theft'

asciilifeform: and yes if you publish , patent troll could easily use it against you, so culture of seekrecy

asciilifeform: they were ~same as su academics , in that respect

asciilifeform: mit was not involved other than as patent licensor/troll at that point

asciilifeform: ( can't even say i have any outrage over this, there was no logical reason to publish )

asciilifeform: these folx had no notion of making any of the details public.

asciilifeform: it was ALL ephemera.

asciilifeform: plenty of unanswered q's re the arch.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: wish i knew ! sorta why i wanted the thing microscopied.

asciilifeform: but modern silicon instead gets 2million transistors for motherfucking tlb cache so that winblowz can page less.

asciilifeform: asciilifeform ( and quite a few other folx, i suspect even earlier ) realized in ~2005 that it was eminently practical with modern silicon

asciilifeform: item grew as the iron became available ( i do not even say 'affordable' , thing was a 'cost no object' design, like aston-martin )

asciilifeform: fwiw the 3600 series ( pre-ivory ) were 36b

asciilifeform: whole thing was a valiant effort to make a thing that was just short of technologically impossible.

asciilifeform: as it is 40b broke the back.

asciilifeform: they'd happily have made 512b words, if the iron existed.

asciilifeform: and no such thing as untagged, on whole box. that was the whole strength of the edifice.

asciilifeform: there was ONE size of word

asciilifeform: hybrid of bulldog and rhinoceros on every level

asciilifeform: recent (~decade) x86 has 128, and even 256b, registers also..

asciilifeform: worse

asciilifeform: well yes. hence typical pc has 128+b wide drams

asciilifeform: it's generally ~square, geometrically

asciilifeform: matrix

asciilifeform: what's the use of simultaneously lighting up a whole line, simply to blow the clock cycle on reading 1 bit ??

asciilifeform: )

asciilifeform: but even with the widest, you will need quite a few to make machine with, e.g., 8192-bit word. ( and your cpu now needs 8192bit regs 0

asciilifeform: ( using x*1 strictly )

asciilifeform: at one time they were uncommon, and a stick of memory tended to have as many chips as the bus bitness

asciilifeform: you can also buy x * 4, x * 8, x * 9, 16, 18 ( most common sizes )

asciilifeform: ( e.g. 0000000000000000 input gives you the first of'em )

asciilifeform: so you can readily buy, e.g., 16x1 i.e. 65536 bits of ram, addressable 1 bit at a time

asciilifeform: chip is typically 'x * y' where x is input bitness and y -- output

asciilifeform: let's consider how ram is typically sold

asciilifeform: ( the 1 exception where the cost is nonlinear may be the barrel shifter )

asciilifeform: with same transistor cost

asciilifeform: i have noted in the past that it is possible to have, e.g., wider regs but fewer of'em

asciilifeform: there being a relationship at all, comes from the fact that the two types of bucket regularly get emptied into one another

asciilifeform: well orig q was 'why is there a relationship' but seems like mircea_popescu is really asking 'why pc regs so tiny'

asciilifeform: but a page is simply a fixed qty of addressable machinewords

asciilifeform: ( they are only reflected in iron at all, on 'optimized for c' abortions where have 'iron pagetable' )

asciilifeform: pages are not a fundamental unit tho

asciilifeform: mult is necessarily 2b wide ( where b is the reg bitness )

asciilifeform: lessay ram is fetchable in 11bit chunks but regs are, say , 17 wide

asciilifeform: how would memory-to-reg and reg-to-memory MOV look on this iron ?

asciilifeform: let's suppose the contrary

asciilifeform: i dun either

asciilifeform: aha

asciilifeform: ( src, another d00d who was there, infamous crackpot http://fare.livejournal.com/168016.html )

asciilifeform: ividual bought the assets and Kalman spent 4 years as a "captive consultant" for him. Since 2002, when he ran out of money, I've worked for Ab Initio (doing nothing with lisp except emacs hacks).'