@p
> Forth environment on a Z-80
That shit I came up with was somewhat hard to challenge, but you did! Respect! 😂
I'm just poking @iska for fun — pretty sure that it would be something more practical (but still unusable by the standards of a normal human being)
@realman543

@m0xee @iska @realman543

> somewhat hard to challenge,

Is it? I spend a lot of time thinking about living in a Forth environment on an old-timey chip.

@p
Strange that you don't own a PowerMac G5 rig then — having Forth right in OpenFirmare sounds cool if you're into that thing. To be honest, to me it's in the same category LISP is in though — something fun, but impractical 😅
As for Z80: https://oldbytes.space/@millihertz/112620912045955111
To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did.

@realman543 @iska

@p
To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did. I don't know how my parents did that, but I had a 80386-based computer when not every Soviet research instutute had PCs like that. And it was US-made — not the CPU, the whole box — a few kidnes got sold somewhere along the way probably 😂
@realman543 @iska

@m0xee @realman543 @iska

> I don't know how my parents did that, but I had a 80386-based computer when not every Soviet research instutute had PCs like that. And it was US-made — not the CPU, the whole box

Ha, wow, that's kind of amazing. Do you remember any specifics about the machine? Like, make/model?

The first computer I really owned, the first one that was mine, that was a 386, but assembled piece by piece, kind of a garbage pile computer that I kept swapping parts into and out of. The computer I'm using right now is the "same" computer, though it's the Ship of Theseus.
behold_the_ship_of_theseus.png

@p
I think I might be able to find some manuals it came with, but I have to dig pretty deep in my bookcase 🤔
The computer itself is long gone — I've also started upgrading mine with found and "donated" parts, at some point the PSU got fried and I couldn't afford a new one, so I donated the whole computer to my high school — I could use it there with their PSU. It wasn't a bad machine at the time, not the latest-greatest, but a 486 already with only the original case remaining — no one was against it as hardware in classrooms was even worse. But as the rest of the classroom were diskless machines booting from the network, this is where real fun began — mine had an HDD and could use removable media, eventually a friend of mine found an exploit for the NetWare they were using — no one was ever updating it: Internet wasn't yet a concern, machines were booting from the network and all files were written to and read from a network storage. We took complete control over the network!
I made a tiny TSR that was causing funny graphics glitches and that I could activate remotely, I've added it to a boot image the machines were using. People were genuinely panicking when that stuff started happening while they were doing their assignments and teachers were clueless too — it did look like the computers were malfunctioning. OMG, that was fun!!! 🤣
Our informatics teacher was the head teacher of school and she eventually started realising that we took over the network, but we were good in covering tracks and as it wasn't destructive — even compared to stealing balls from mice, we never got punished.
Now that I think about it, it was probably having access to technology earlier than my peers in my formative years, but not having things that were common is what got me into marginal CPU architectures 🤔 Same was with Macs — no one around me was using them, I don't think they were popular outside of publishing houses, but I was eager to embrace something non-Intel. Digital was on its deathbed already with SGI soon to follow, Sun was doing relatively well — you could find hardware from all of them at universities, but neither were even remotely affordable.
@realman543 @iska @m0xee

@m0xEE @iska @m0xee @realman543 Ha, that's a shenanigan.

I was reading "Stealing the Network" and there was a clever prank, a bored admin would take over someone's tty remotely. What people would normally do is type some crazy message, but he would just watch their typing speed and when they were typing really quickly, he'd just occasionally hit backspace once, like they'd missed a key. Drove people crazy, they'd replace keyboards and move to different machines. (It is fictional, but some of the stories sound a little less fictional.)

> Digital was on its deathbed already with SGI soon to follow, Sun was doing relatively well — you could find hardware from all of them at universities, but neither were even remotely affordable.

Ah, I picked up a lunchbox SPARC for about $10. Had a Boeing asset tag scratched half-off, that ws a lucky thing about being here in LA: all the aerospace companies and JPL are here, and they all need a lot of computers. So if you stopped by a surplus store near their offices (or stopped by the dumpster behind their offices) you could usually get a full workstation for almost nothing, as long as you could deal with "State of the art...15 years ago." You probably remember, though, that a 15-year-old workstation was still usually better than a top-of-the-line desktop system. Eventually (~2002 or 03) got my hands on a 2-CPU UltraSPARC, 24" monitor, Type-5 keyboard and...no cables. So it took me months to track down a cable that would fit the Sun monitor. In the mean time, I had a little 90MHz Pentium sitting on the floor next to it, I booted a LOAF distro designed for serial terminals: it would boot directly into minicom. So I'd talk to the Sun machine like that.

@p @realman543 @m0xEE @iska @m0xee

>Ah, I picked up a lunchbox SPARC for about $10...
Jealous just from reading that. I've been searching for an older SPARC box (1990-2000) for 2 years now and all I found were decommissioned Sun Fire servers from ~2006. Anything from around 2000 and older is almost unobtainable without importing it from Germany for ridiculous prices. The 486 sitting in the attic is likely one of the very few remaining working ones as everyone put those old computers to recycling centers.

@phnt @iska @m0xEE @m0xee @realman543

> Jealous just from reading that.

Unfortunately, I no longer have them!

> Anything from around 2000 and older is almost unobtainable

I have some 4U UltraSPARCs from 1999. They were given to an education software company that had an employee that had a friend at Sun and then sat in their server room because it was way bigger than they needed and then by the time they could make use of it, their shit was all "in the cloud", and then when I got them, they were obsolete; most of them have never been powered on. CDs and license keys for Solaris and Websphere and Netscape's web server and everything, I think most of the cables, plus some 300GB SCSI disks. (300GB in only 4U!) I mostly use them to get yelled at for having them around, taking up space; I took them because they came with the server cabinet. You wanna figure out how to get them from here to wherever you are, they're yours.

@p @realman543 @m0xEE @iska @m0xee Thank you for the offer, but sadly I have to decline. At least $1K USD for shipping to Czech Republic, couple hundreds for import taxes (thanks EU) and market price for you isn't something I can afford now. Maybe sometime in the future, but I can't guarantee that.

@phnt @iska @m0xEE @m0xee @realman543 Ha, I don't know what market price is, don't worry about that; I do not need them and I wish that they had a good home. (Plus I get yelled at for having them.)

Shipping is a serious bitch, though. They're like 100lbs. each. There shouldn't be any taxes on something that was basically free, though I have no idea how Europe works. If you blow through LA and have a really massive suitcase, maybe you can just take it on the plane back.

@p @realman543 @m0xEE @iska @m0xee
>I don't know what market price is, don't worry about that; I do not need them and I wish that they had a good home. (Plus I get yelled at for having them.)

Getting something this significant for "basically free" isn't something that I would ever allow.

>Shipping is a serious bitch, though. They're like 100lbs. each.

Yeah, the $1K was an approximate for two lighter (empty HDD bays) 4U servers.

>There shouldn't be any taxes on something that was basically free, though I have no idea how Europe works.

Customs use the total cost that would include shipping. EU is stupid when it comes to international shipping. To combat the zero import tax in EU, they have high taxes when shipping from outside EU (especially US and Japan.)

>If you blow through LA and have a really massive suitcase, maybe you can just take it on the plane back.

That is certainly an option, if I happen to be in/near LA. The plane tickets and extra luggage fee for that are basically the same as shipping it one-way.

@phnt @iska @m0xEE @m0xee @realman543

> Getting something this significant for "basically free" isn't something that I would ever allow.

I got them for free. The ed tech company had the office next to the one that we were sub-leasing a room from gave it to me because they would otherwise have been paying to have it taken away. If you get to them before anyone else, I don't need any money, but if you do something cool, send code or pics.

> two lighter (empty HDD bays) 4U servers.

One of the really appealing things about these machines is also the source of their inconvenience: they are massive and the cases are steel. I think they could probably survive being used as cover during a shootout without even rebooting.

> Customs use the total cost that would include shipping.

Holy fucking shit.

> EU is stupid when it comes to international shipping.

Yeah, I had some terrible experiences trying to *donate* hardware to open-source OS hackers. Last time I did it, the guy had to drive to Barcelona twice, I had to send a fax to Spain, he ended up paying more than the hardware actually cost, I think I apologized to the guy once a day and I didn't go into their IRC channel again.

> That is certainly an option,

It'd have to be a really big suitcase. Like, full-length 4U boxes, lots of steel as mentioned. Try to carry two of them back with you and you will wear holes in your shoes just walking through the airport.

@m0xee @realman543 @iska

> Strange that you don't own a PowerMac G5 rig then — having Forth right in OpenFirmare sounds cool if you're into that thing.

:apple_inc::blank::sun:
:virginbody::sf2vs::chadbody:

> the same category LISP is in though — something fun, but impractical

I have used both languages for actual work.

> https://oldbytes.space/@millihertz/112620912045955111

I paste that into the search box and cannot see the post here. The administrator's avatar is a picrew furry with red streaks in its hair. I click on the link and there are people that I will never talk to having a conversation about chips. They not only would not willingly have a conversation with me, but if they heard that you were having a conversation with me, they would not talk to you. I look at what they are saying and how they are saying it and I cannot relate to them. Every message I try to read in the thread has a "content warning" and I have to click "Show More". One of them has the opinion that a fun chip should "die"; I've heard what these people have to say about me. I click a couple of the other ones. They're listing their opinions, and I don't really have a personal relationship with them so I don't wonder what they think, and they use a grating cadence that reminds me of work emails written by a middle manager that wants to sound fun, or a corporate Twitter account. People that hate me and want to prevent me from reading their posts do not like a thing that I think is fun, and they require a lot of clicking on "Show More", so the thread can't even be skimmed, and their writing isn't even entertaining.

It was a depressing link to click on; even the sadposters around here seem upbeat by comparison: the sadposters are young and they are figuring things out and sometimes that makes you feel aimless and depressed on top of the usual nonsense that comes with being alive that they are not yet accustomed to. These people, though, are bitter, and are hating on chips that cannot affect them any more, they have spent most of the words in their bio on what sort of people they hate and the other half on rules that you must follow to interact with them. They have walled themselves off from the "bad" people and they think this is some sort of punishment rather than a mercy.

> To me it doesn't even bear any nostalgic value: I didn't own it when everyone did.

I do have some loose Z80s, Zilog's logo and everything, but I didn't have a Z80-based computer per se; I have spent a lot of time with the Game Boy, though. The Game Boy and the Game Gear and the NES (6502) and the ubiquitous TI-83 and a very large proportion of the arcade games. The Z80 also appeared in the Texas Instruments graphing calculators that basically every kid in the country used. It was as ubiquitous then as the ARM is now.

The Z80, 6502, 8080, and the custom chips in the game consoles, those overlap significantly, just a handful of instructions different, almost all binary-compatible, so it's a piece of computing history, one of these pieces of technology that were so widespread that they have come to represent an era, like the DEC VT100 or MS-DOS on an 8086.

And anyway, not just that, but the instruction set is basically all you need for Forth. If you sit down and do a Forth, you can really feel it, this clunky chip opens all the way up.

@p @realman543 @iska
It must be the instance, nothing sad about that thread in particular, it's a provocative post about Z80, but being a self-proclaimed hot take — it's supposed to be.
Or that account for the matter, I've never seen anything political there, it's purely technology-oriented. But anyway, here it is.

@m0xee @realman543 @iska

> It must be the instance, nothing sad about that thread in particular,

The things I described are depressing, they were from that thread. Those people are depressing. The two people in the screenshot you posted depress me. The first post in the screenshot, that is the post that depressed me, I quoted it. The rest of the thread depressed me. I'm not doing a bit or a shitpost, those people depressed me. Please do not take it personally, as I do not think you could have anticipated that those people would seem depressing, but those people depress the shit out of me, so I'd rather stop discussing them. Thank you, friend.

> I've never seen anything political there,

Check the bio.

@p
> I have used both languages for actual work.
Sure, both are viable, but despite not being new it's not like they are becoming household names… ever at this point, they are now "meme" languages, sure choice when you need a marginal language in a joke — that's what I mean by placing them in the same category, despite them being different.
@realman543 @iska

@m0xee @realman543 @iska

> they are now "meme" languages,

Well, you say this, but I wrote an ad-hoc assembler in a Forth a couple of years ago because it was faster to fire up a Forth and look at a chart and emit the instructions I needed than to track down an assembler that would handle the weird shit I was doing and also run on my machine and then get it to compile. 30 minutes: program's done, blob's produced, anyone else would still be stumbling through search results and reading the README in someone's Github repo to see if it even targets the right chip. It's wonderfully expressive, the code comes out compact and readable, and if you're doing a "real" Forth on a small system, you can save a lot of memory: 40 or 50 bytes of opcodes turns into three two-byte addresses.

All the way on the opposite side from bitbanging on tiny machines, I have embedded stack-based languages in applications to use as DSLs for scripting. One of these was just internally facing, but it cut the length of most of the endpoints to two lines, one to extract/escape the user-supplied parameters and one to invoke the little runtime with the generated program and get the results out.

It's not even rocket-surgery stuff, it's easy stuff to do if you've done it once, but if you think it's a meme, you won't try it the first time and it's a tool you'll never have.

Same goes for Lisp; I've used it less often but it's a nice language. (Lisp-1s like Scheme, anyway; I don't like the separate function namespace stuff CL does.) I wouldn't wanna use Lisp as an entire environment if I could use Forth, but it'd be serviceable.

...Not on Itanium.
these_things_are_real_i_do_not_make_them_up.png

@m0xee @iska @realman543 Actually, now that I'm looking at that code again, some of this is kinda cool. Like, there's $call, so you'd push an address onto the stack and call $call and that would emit a call to the appropriate address. But then there's this bit for forward calls and it's kinda clever, it works the same way you would do it in Forth, it leaves a little gap in the memory and then leaves an address on the stack, pointing to the place where the mark is supposed to go, and when you know what address it's calling, you write it to the address on the stack. This is fun shit.
that-s_kinda_clever_i_do_not_remember_doing_it.png

@p
Oh, for this stuff — sure! I'm currently reading a book, that touches systems programming in examples, and it gets explained how CHIP-8 works, how instructions are decoded, how arithmetics works, how calls work, the author goes on to explain how memory management works, what endian-ness is (for those who don't know it).
Weird shit is — it's a Rust book and all examples feel… AWKWARD to say the least, everything is wrapped in unsafe {}, system calls are used directly, etc 🤪
@realman543 @iska

@p
I mean it's great in a way that it shows what's happening under the hood instead of "just use this crate", how smart pointers and reference counters save your ass, but why they might make things noticeably slower, but it feels weird, when every example shows how the language is against you doing things like that.
Knuth didn't come up with MIX to explain algorithms for nothing after all 😆
@realman543 @iska

@m0xee @realman543 @iska Wonder why a person would do that in Rust.

@p @realman543 @iska @m0xee its freaking safe and cute, p.

@pernia @iska @m0xee @realman543 What was the name of that movie?

@p @realman543 @iska @m0xee paul blart mall.cop

@pernia @realman543 @iska @p @m0xee cc @11112011 I wonder if blitz is p's secret shitposting account when he wants to troll people. Just joking but it would be a funny scenario

@Dicey @11112011 @realman543 @iska @p @m0xee did u know p and i are the same person

@pernia @11112011 @realman543 @iska @p @m0xee yeahh

@Dicey @pernia @11112011 @iska @m0xee @realman543 What the fuck does that have to do with computers, you idiot?

Apparently, I do some completely uncalled-for shit once in a while, they forget I'm him.
bixnooded.png

@p @11112011 @realman543 @iska @pernia @m0xee calm down, it was a j o k e

@Dicey @11112011 @iska @m0xee @pernia @realman543 No.
miscarriage.jpg

@p @11112011 @realman543 @iska @pernia @m0xee Forgive me if this is too personal but are you neurodivergent? Like on the autistic spectrum?

@Dicey @11112011 @iska @m0xee @pernia @realman543 You have absolutely nothing to say about matty's hairline?
miserable-bastard.jpg

@Dicey @p @iska @m0xee @pernia @realman543 i see u guys had a nice sunday

@Dicey @p @iska @m0xee @pernia @realman543 are u retarded dummie or both?

@pernia @iska @m0xee @realman543 No, no, that's stupid. The other one.

@p @realman543 @iska @m0xee what does it have to do with rust

@pernia @iska @m0xee @realman543 Did you watch it, man?

@p @realman543 @iska @m0xee no.

@pernia @iska @m0xee @realman543 YOU HAVE TO WATCH THE TRAILER PERNIS
untraceable-trailer.mp4

@pernia @iska @m0xee @realman543 UNTRACEABLE.
untraceable-trailer.mp4

@p
I think it just demonstrates the anti-patterns like: this thing here is thread-unsafe — but if you don't care, you can still use it. It does a decent job explaining why there are a couple of dozen types for string, why there are boxes, arenas, rc, arc and their friends, in addition to regular pointers which you can still use, but you'd better not, if you can live with borrowing, lifetimes and all that.
@realman543 @iska

@p
It's exactly the kind of book on Rust I want, but the one who intended to use it for web microservices and picked up the first book in the nearest store, probably indeed goes insane reading all this 😂
@realman543 @iska

@m0xee @p @realman543 @iska

look at floorplans seriously they are wonderful. colorForth & esperForth are important even if they're underrated.

"meme languages" are /g/ cope.

@0
Aren't both Forth and LISP /g/'s darlings? At least I think this is where half the SICP memes come from 🤔
And when I say "meme-something" it doesn't inherently mean that it's bad — it's just that people use it more often in conversation than in practice. (Have anyone using "Freudian slip" ever read a page of Freud?)
In a lot of cases it means that it's something impractical — but again, not necessarily.

@realman543 @iska @p

@m0xee @0 @realman543 @iska

> Aren't both Forth and LISP /g/'s darlings?

The things that are popular in places like that do not need practical application, just smugness.

@m0xee @realman543 @iska @p

I only ran into forth using it directly on a chip that interested me and I have not spoken about it with anyone. It's possible that it's a meme language in that sense otherwise, but I wouldn't be aware of it.

@0 @m0xee @iska @realman543 IT IS SO GREAT

@p @realman543 @iska @m0xee

Freebase your computer.

@0 @iska @m0xee @realman543 This is how the divine revelation happens.
eatcomputerEATCOMPUTER.jpe