Post AyEdDC9MUMay7HXk0W by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
(DIR) More posts by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
(DIR) Post #AyEct5tg1lhIvoccZU by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T15:50:30Z
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@nina_kali_nina Base 32 and right to left, no less.
(DIR) Post #AyEdDBAk7k6d5HBKWO by cocoaphony@mastodon.social
2025-09-15T13:21:45Z
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@nina_kali_nina makes sense. He’s just using the teletype’s encoding directly (which does make sense even if it is obnoxious). I don’t know why I imagined he was trying to make it easier on the operators. :)
(DIR) Post #AyEdDC9MUMay7HXk0W by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T15:54:07Z
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@cocoaphonyThere was not enough machine resources to do symbolic translation.ASCII was designed to be able to be machine collated, etc.ITA2 was designed to minimize wear on adjacent metal levers. E, S, space, etc used one bar or lever. Wait til you read about FIGS and LTRS. @nina_kali_nina
(DIR) Post #AyEdPn6stjfcDlOI4m by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T15:56:25Z
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@nina_kali_nina @cocoaphony
(DIR) Post #AyEdbuG49CFHriSj9U by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T15:58:36Z
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@nina_kali_ninaThe LGP 21 "terminal" has the opcode keys in different colors. A2345 typed became literally the machine op stored and executed. @cocoaphony
(DIR) Post #AyEfqzkMDt6z8jxB2W by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T16:23:45Z
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@nina_kali_nina Ummm ... Some time ago I transmuted the mark 2's arch and instruction set into modern terms. On ye olden dayes they worked right down in the weeds and nuts and bolts. Us spoilt children demand symbolic representation. In 2004 literally no one gave a shit about this stuff. I never typed it up. Mk2 has a pretty nice instruction set. Three levels of memory. I think mk2 has branch instructions, which turning left out as unnecessary. Needless to say there are no subroutine linkage mechanisms.
(DIR) Post #AyEfzwbhGWxI0bAb5s by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T16:25:22Z
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@nina_kali_nina Also if you look closely at the Bletchley code work, decrypting systems like enigma, memorizing a teletype code page is something you do in the morning for the days work.
(DIR) Post #AyEgdYk7PZ0JZw00CO by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T16:32:31Z
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@nina_kali_nina The /@ instruction is normalization! "Sideways adder" derives parity. Sophisticated multiplication. B lines! (Index register -- array!)Turings work in computation was an easy decade ahead of the rest, in some ways, like these. The B-exceptional instructions.... I'm not sure I ever worked out what they did. I have a note that says EEK! lol. Some conditional behaviour within the machine when doing something iterative.
(DIR) Post #AyEmXhLD86cKEVw9Z2 by andrew_shadura@mastodon.social
2025-09-15T13:28:02Z
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@nina_kali_nina, thanks, makes more sense then, although still not great to let the internal details leak into the user-facing encoding.
(DIR) Post #AyEmXiie0SxKVTuNjE by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T17:38:38Z
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@andrew_shaduraThis is kinda hard to grasp today: symbolic representations, I/O abstractions like character to code... not only were there little resources to do this, ... *This was the only computer in the world*, essentially. Wanting or needing and external representation requires at least imagining an external; there was no external. There was only ACE.Certainly these folk knew of the two or three other computing machines in the world, but they were all so wildly different from each other, and the challenges of having a machine stay consistently running, we're almost overwhelming. None of this has ever been done before. They were hand sorting radio tubes to find types that worked. If you're willing to spend the time puzzling out the weird world, this book I think is the best bridge: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Preparation_of_Programs_for_an_Electronic_Digital_ComputerEDSAC is almost a modern machine. They still had this awful way of expressing what the machine did inside, I find it almost impossible, hence my attempt to map ACE to a modern instruction set. And some stuff, like having to climb up stairs to finish booting the machjne, are still hilarious. But it's a great book. British computing was absolutely the most advanced in the world and EDSAC is pretty neat. @nina_kali_nina
(DIR) Post #AyEqnPRvoksRC2pNzM by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T18:26:21Z
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@nina_kali_nina Oh probably not a surprise! Lol.
(DIR) Post #AyF9Eu6JlMLRFayhlo by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-09-15T21:53:00Z
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@nina_kali_nina I too was shocked when I heard what engineers learn in recent years. But so little is experimental these days; even I don't breadboard, at all. Idea to paper (idea sketches, I like the eye-hand-visualization) to Kicad to boards delivered my door. Few today bend over a bench for long deep dives into new hardware. Assuming commodity digital, of course. But I can't worry about any of that, everything I or maybe "we" do is crazy and wrong by standards of an industry that's gone all sorts of toxic, anyway.In Andrew Hodges' book (TURING: THE ENIGMA, great book!) you can hear how turing was often his own worst enemy. For his first pass at ACE he left out all conditional, branching instructions, you'd simply compute them. Today we laugh, but it makes very Turing sense. He was a total weirdo and certainly massively neurodivergent. And a bit of a perv.I absolutely do not want to know about his opinions on class and race. On the former, though, he def had relationships with lower-class folk, like that teenager he got busted for breaking into his house (and triggered his own doom).But he was adamantly out of the closet at bletchley!There's some evidence that von Neumann got his ideas from Turing's work; and typical for the americans at the the time, the idea that the mill might be able to grind its own instructions was blocked by design, by JvN himself. None of them got it. Turing did.I think it was Flowers who said, in A HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY, "We didn't know Turing was homosexual until after the war. If the secret service had known, we might have lost the war."!(Those two books are absolutely amazing resources. The latter was referred to me by a fellow punk at Gilman St in the 80s.)But Turing got lower-cased. There's no higher honor in mathematics! (turing machines etc)