tralarpa

> otherwise it would look weird

Weird? It looks much more elegant, if you know what I mean. They should also remove the "WR" sign. But I guess Casio knows what sells and what doesn't.

You were in good company. The Xerox Alto CPU used four 74181 ALUs.

Somes lines in PDP-11 assembly from 2.11BSD:

  mov r1,-(sp)
  mov $1024.,-(sp)
  mov $outbuf,-(sp)
  mov fout,-(sp)
  jsr pc,_write
  add $6,sp
  mov (sp)+,r1
  tst r0
  bpl 2f
  jmp wrterr

I've looked at a few dozen of the designs featured on the front page, and most of them don't make sense. What is the purpose of this?

The 80s kid me lived in a small town with no access to technical manuals or people who could help. The developer manuals for $80 each or a compuserve account to get access to the source code examples of the manufacturer were completely out of reach. What could I have built with the information that is now available for free...

> This is true of any language

Is it? Java has changed a lot, but in such a way that it's still easy to mentally map new features to the old ones, provided you have understood the core language. IDEs can even convert your code from old to new and back.

They still do.

Spanish vale and English value have the same Latin origin. Persian bale is an Arabic loanword.

When reading an article written by Bjorn Lomborg, you should also do the effort to read the cited sources. This is not an ad hominem attack, just an observation. Do it and you will see.

The title says "dialects" but most comments here are only about accents.

Can people here give examples of non-standard grammar or vocabulary (that goes beyond some temporary slang or subculture words)?

Great article.

Wish list of topics to add:

- branch predictors that can detect patterns (edit: I guess it's already covered in the paragraph about raising prediction accuracy)

- LRU-approximations in L1 caches

- Data prefetching (sequential, stride)

- Return address stack

Concerning μops, I think the 68060 did that, too.

I highly recommend the NHK documentary "10 years with Hayao Miyazaki" that shows how he works (and also his sometimes difficult character).

Ah, that makes more sense than my theory. It's a weak copy protection method, though, as you can just try and see what happens, and I think they dropped it in M&M3.

A few years ago, I decompiled a good part of the PC version of Might & Magic 1 for fun. According to Wikipedia, it had been released in 1986, although I don't know whether that refers to the PC version or to the original Apple II version.

It is a quite big game: the main executable is 117KB, plus around 50 overlay files of 1.5 KB each for the different dungeons and cities, plus the graphics files. I guess it was even too big for the average PC hardware at that time, or it was a limitation inherited from the original Apple II version: When you want to cast a spell you have to enter the number of the spell from the manual, maybe because there was not enough memory to fit the names of the 94 spells into RAM. Apart from that and the limited graphics and the lack of sound, the internal ruleset is very complete. You have all kind of spells and objects, capabilities, an aging mechanism, shops, etc.. The usual stuff that you also see in today's RPGs.

The modern uninstall.exe that came with it (I bought the game on GOG) was 1.3MB big.

VisiCalc was published in 1979.