asciilifeform: in the end when you try an' make this, you end up with essentially the bolix chip.

asciilifeform: but rather, e.g., bolix 36bit word had 4 type bits, that actually change what the contents mean ( and can create transparent 'wormholes' to elsewhere in memory, for hardware gc) and hence not actually meaningful on iron that doesn't have same mechanism

asciilifeform: ( prototyped, incidentally, on a bolix lispm )

asciilifeform: iirc a lurker/reader. was also the d00d who wrote to asciilifeform re the bolix genera thing.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it is quite impossible to 'unconsider inconvenient problem' in a thread about bolix

asciilifeform: phf: a bolix-style machine that -- hypothetically - could have cost-competed with the 'i can't believe it's not butter' state of the art, would imho count as 'resolve'

asciilifeform: the analogy is not a whim of asciilifeform's, it is quite exact -- what bolix et al did, was a 'stretch' of the tech of the time, quite near its breaking point

asciilifeform: bolix box would then be me262.

asciilifeform: possibly part of it is that the bolix font does not look pixellated.

asciilifeform: the bolix screenshits, interestingly, i do not find ugly

asciilifeform: there was nothing inherently graphical about erlang (it did not come with a bolix-style editor, or any similar exotica)

asciilifeform: gabriel_laddel_p: phf has it. use kalman reti's infamous bolix movie as a guide.

asciilifeform: the bolix folx got this right in 1981.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: like bolix!111

asciilifeform: ain't this exactly what i said re the bolix collectors ?

asciilifeform: today -- can afford them, your cpu's tlb cache alone is 50x the size of the bolix total transistor count.

asciilifeform: the bolix -- also needs full rewrite. 99+% of what was in it, was to work around the frightening limitations of the tech of the period.

asciilifeform: speaking of demise of bolix, one of the oddities behind the princely (like entire bulldozer!111) cost of the machines, was the crt, at the time there was NO mass manufacture of high-res (1152x864 iirc) crt, anywhere on planet3; they had'em custom-blown.

asciilifeform: 'we live in the best of computings, bolix died on own power' etc

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu is free to be as 'unpersuaded' as he wants. fact: his machine -- can overrun an array; bolix -- could not; his box -- crashes, cannot be examined or uncrashed (yes) -- bolix -- could; and various other aspects, well covered in teh logz. ☟︎

asciilifeform: !~later tell phf i dug out my crate of dead bolix boards, turns out i'm a chump, the pcb in question was a dead xl1200 ~i/o~ board. the only cpu on it is what looks like a z80! 0 smbx silicon. ☟︎☟︎

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: since '09 or so i was one of very few people publicly interested in reversing the bolix gear. and apparently ~all of the aficionados, saw me as 'dangerous fool' who 'might piss off dks'...

asciilifeform: phf: if there is one thing bolix aficionados is not, is poor.

asciilifeform: made friends with d00d who worked in ai lab, he gave me a working alpha (i was a student, and had $0) and FULL set of bolix docs. which i still have.

asciilifeform: and tells something about why to this day we don't have an fpga bolix.

asciilifeform: phf: http://www.loper-os.org/pub/Symbolics3600Keyboard.png and -- laboriously extracted empirically !! -- http://www.loper-os.org/pub/bolix_keys.txt ☟︎

asciilifeform: and if we can get performance on par with, e.g., my 4mhz bolix 3620 - it's a win. of sorts.

asciilifeform: the five grand does not buy 'same as your pc', it buys something quite rather more like what is in my bolix 3620.

asciilifeform: phf: the bolix was a special, really, case

asciilifeform: adlai: of what? of http://www.asciilifeform.com/bolix/bolix.png

asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: tried the emulated bolix ?