nigwil_

The reason some of us MTBers switched: a single outing with rim-brakes in wet/muddy/dusty conditions would grind a set of pads to nothing (adding $25+ per outing for replacements), along with the wheel rim being ground thin to the point where the wheel wall would fail. Disc brakes last repeated use in adverse conditions and braking force remained consistent over many hours.

I think it is worth mentioning that this was Robert Dewar's second or third Ada implementation (depending on how you want to count them). Robert was involved with the original Ada/Ed implementation from the late 1970s/early 1980s at NYU (targeting VAX minicomputers), and the re-implementation of that into a C-based implementation that ran on MS-DOS. Ada/Ed was the first validated Ada implementation, and it used SETL as its implementation language which Robert was actively involved in through the 1970s (so he had a long track record of language implementations).

What we are missing about the Ada story is the long line of languages and tools that inspired the Green design that lead to Ada, that is the language LIS (Pascal/Simula inspired) and its toolchain that Jean Ichbiah and associates used as inspiration for the Ada design.

Excel Versus Excel! EVE...

Could use Automator with AppleScript:

  x@Mac-mini-M1 ~ % cat ClearClipboard.scpt 
  on run
   tell application "System Events" to set the clipboard to ""
  end run
  x@Mac-mini-M1 ~ %

Unisys has been very supportive of our efforts to find and preserve early Burroughs software and generously provided corporate time to arrange licensing and provide copies of anything they still had. Burroughs B5000 series now has a rich library of software and several emulator implementations (web-browser, simh and standalone). However the B6000/7000 family software recovery is sparse with critical pieces still missing, we are unable to bootstrap a working MCP as yet.

"In the case of CHERI, this was to change the user-visible abstract machine exposed by hardware in a way that hasn’t been done for mainstream hardware since the PDP-11." - the authors should take the time to familiarise themselves with the Burroughs B6700 (designed in the 1960s) which provided tagged memory, and a similar mechanism to CHERI architectural capabilities through the B6700 descriptor mechanism.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems_descriptors

The PDP-11 minicomputer was a low-cost and undoubtably successful for its time system but a low bar for architectural sophistication or an exemplar for state of the art in computer architecture particularly in terms of memory design.

CHERI is a welcome development in producing safer systems, but it is packaging ideas that have been around for 50+ years, long overdue of course, but finally hardware costs have commoditised such that these ideas can be baked into mass produced hardware.