jonjacky

There is nothing in the repo that says it was made with AI, and there are none of the usual AI .md files. The amount, quality, and organization of documentation is much better than in most quickie AI projects.

"What zero-toolchain means

Reproducing these binaries does not require a compiler, assembler, linker, libc, package manager, or language runtime. Prompt2ELF still depends on an x86-64 processor, the Linux syscall ABI, the kernel's ELF loader, and a filesystem. The machine has not disappeared. The conventional source-to-binary toolchain has. ...

The longer-term direction is a small multicall executable, similar in spirit to BusyBox, generated directly from prompts and Linux syscalls."

Is there any connection between this product and the Pascal programming language?

In the last eighty years or so, humanity has created something called 'Computer Science' which is ingenious and even beautiful. Now much of it will be forgotten. When the present generations of programmers age out, almost no one will know how to program. In fact almost no one will understand one of the key sciences and technologies that our civilization depends on. Some might say, "no problem, the AI will know all that stuff so we won't have to". Somehow I don't find that very comforting.

BUT the Latin of 3026 will be the same as the Latin of 2026, 1026, ... and 26.

Yes, if Xanadu had taken off people might have had to pay a little to view its content. Just like we used to pay for books, records, movies, magazines, etc etc etc. It wasn't so bad -- those things were mass entertainment, not just for the rich, and they were certainly not a death knell for communication. I don't know how you came up with $10 to view a web page. When Nelson proposed Xanadu, mass market paperback novels -- hundreds of pages -- cost 50 cents. Kids (like me) could easily afford them. They were cheap because there was a huge market -- so communication could flourish.

It's not clear to me we are living in the best of all possible worlds. If the micropayments thing had taken off, it might have provided a way for large numbers of people to make some money by writing, etc. In our world, most of the money is made by a few corporations, and an increasing proportion of what's on the net is slop made by ... nobody.

Computer Lib/Dream Machines was not about project Xanadu, it merely mentions it on a few pages.

I recall Computer Lib/Dream Machines was the most influential thing Ted Nelson did, far more influential by than Xanadu. It was seen all over at the beginning of the personal computer era. Try to get a look at a copy if you can, it's fascinating.

This self-published book was very much of its time - it had the same oversize-on-newsprint format and DIY look as the Whole Earth Catalog, which was popular at the same time.

It was important because it pursuasively made the case that computing was about to become a medium for self-expresson - a "dream machine" - that was an unheard-of concept at the time. You can use a computer to produce graphics! To play games! How about that! He told about Sutherland's Sketchpad, Englebart's NLS, and the Arpanet at a time when these were completely invisible to almost everyone. Xanadu gets a few pages in the book but it is not at all a work of self-promotion - almost the whole book is about the work of others. It's a survey of the computing scene right before personal computers appeared.

This book was very timely and I think it provided a lot of inspiration for the personal computer movement. It made you want to try out computing! It has one page about microprocessors: "Here they come ... Microprocessors are what's happening" (the MITS Altair appeared the next year, in 1975).

I think Ted Nelson is one of those people whose main effects are through their influence on others, rather than through what they directly produce themselves.

Can you assume that pretty much any computer these days provides UEFI firmware that supports ThoreauBASIC, or might some computers provide only a cut-down UEFI that doesn't provide all the functions you need?

Is there some way to investigate the UEFI implementation on any computer? Can you get to the UEFI shell on any computer somehow or is the UEFI shell a separate application you have to download from somewhere and install?

I realize these questions are getting far afield from what you wanted to tell us about, but UEFI is still kind of a mystery despite being installed almost everywhere -- it's hard to find explanations about it.