Follow-up question: how did Woz get BASIC into ROM?

The handwritten interpreter is fairly common knowledge since Woz has told that story many times, but I don't recall any accounts of how he bridged the gap from paper to silicon. All of the discussion about the machine language monitor doesn't really address the question. At best, it moves the question from programming a ROM for BASIC to programming a ROM with the machine language monitor. Even with the monitor, additional hardware would be required to program a ROM. At the very least, a latch would be required to hold the address and data. Of course, it is possible that he did it without the computer (using a rig that let him "toggle" the pins). It is also possible that he used another computer to program the ROM, but, as he said, he didn't have the money to program BASIC on a computer so why would that be different for a ROM?

> Follow-up question: how did Woz get BASIC into ROM?

See: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/18321/how...

He used equipment at his day job at HP

Edit: Actually, I think the Apple I only had the monitor in ROM; Basic was typed in using the monitor, and then saved/loaded using cassette. Apple II put Basic in ROM; the shipping version used mask ROM; maybe they used PROMs in development, although at the time PROMs generally had half the capacity of mask ROMs.

Which is why technically HP would've owned some of the IP for the Apple I. I remember hearing some account in a book where he told jobs "Wait a second; I did some of this at work, I used their equipment, I think my employer owns this." But then they got HP to sign a release that they had no interest in the IP, and then they were all good to start the company and get funding. Bet HP is kicking themselves for signing that release, though.

> There is a parallel situation happening with the “just buy an ESP32” arguments. If an ESP32 solves your problem, you also probably shouldn’t have been in the market for a Raspberry Pi.

I have mixed feelings on that.

For the longest time it was safe to say "just buy a Raspberry Pi" because they were cheap enough and powerful enough. If memory serves me correctly, the base board cost roughly the same as an Arduino Uno and offered considerably more. (Of course, there were cheaper Uno clones, but those depended upon support offered by official Arduino software development tools.)

While there are some projects which would only be possible with something like the Uno, there were far more projects that would only be possible with something like the Pi. So if you wanted to give generic go-to advice to a novice, the Pi it was.

The right advice is to use the right tool for the job, but that is something that a novice (or fly-by-night forum posters) aren't prepared to handle.

Of course, things change. There are more inexpensive microcontroller development boards and the microcontrollers themselves are much more powerful. While that doesn't negate the benefits of a Linux SBC, it does raise questions now that those SBCs are considerably more expensive.

> I'm all for AI safety, but this sounds more like corpo preference safety to me.

I would consider the defining line between reverse engineering a product and a meaningful breach of security. For example: finding a remote vulnerability, bad. Finding a vulnerability that requires physical access, perfectly fine. While you can do harm with the latter, it is much more probable the person is the owner of the device. Finding a vulnerability in an embroidery machine, fine. Finding a vulnerability in a phone, bad. In the former case, it is highly unlikely to contain personal data. In the latter case, it is highly likely to contain personal data.

I realize not everyone is going to agree with this, unfortunately security is a very real concern these days and people don't appear to be willing or able to say how their data is collected and stored.

I don't think they were saying it was a bad idea, though they may have been suggesting it is a bad investment.

Personally, I wasn't impressed by the press release. It is so vague that it makes it look like they don't know the history of their field or they are outright ignoring it to make their product sound novel. The former is just as problematic as the latter. There are reasons why parallelization is typically offloaded onto coprocessors and reasons why the introduction of new CPU architectures are rares.

It is definitely in the spirit of the story of Mel, since Tom was exploiting an intimate knowledge of the machine to achieve the impossible by using instructions in unintended ways, but always remember that Tom is not a real programmer:

  Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
  Not FORTRAN.  Not RATFOR.  Not, even, assembly language.
  Machine Code.
  Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
  Directly.

That said, I prefer Tom's story. It's more about the joy of understanding the machine than it is about the framing of a legend.

> Probably most of the relevant functions of a library can be accomplished by other more efficient means.

Two points:

Many of those relevant functions were picked up by libraries over the years due to the lack of, or cutbacks to, other government services.

Some people prefer, or can only use, services offered through libraries because they offer them with few, or no, questions asked. That is rarely the case with dedicated services, where funding often has more conditions tied to it.

So you'd agree it would be better to just provide those services though? Or do you think using the library as a public restroom and shelter is ideal?

It would depend upon how those services are offered.

To give you a couple of examples: a local park used to have a public washroom. The only people who would use it would use it for unintended purposes because it would provide both shelter from the elements and a place to perform undesirable acts out of sight. Needless to say, it wasn't used by the public very often. Libraries and community centres do have marginalized people using their washroom, but it tends to be for a washroom's intended purpose. It turns out that having washrooms within a public facility is a deterrent (heck, a lot of those people may even respect the library), and having people to handle the exceptions is an added benefit for the safety of everyone.

Libraries aren't really shelters, even though some people claim that homeless people use them as such. Homeless people may use their services, but that holds true for any other member of the public. Shelters may provide similar services, but there are often strings attached that deter people. You may even catch some homeless people catching a few winks, but you know who else is bad for that: university students. Yet what is considered okay for one group because they are "desirable" is considered trespass for another group because they are "undesirable".

Maybe I'm lucky in my neck of the woods. Maybe the marginalised people behave in our libraries, while they don't in other parts of the world. If that's the case, maybe it's the other parts of the world that need to get their acts together.

Perhaps we are entering an era where it should be.

Comparing today to 40 years ago: as far as I can tell, letter mail is virtually always used for the purpose of transacting business these days. Forty years ago, it was used for business and personal purposes. If I wanted to communicate with family on the other side of the country, it was more likely than not done by mail. Even 25 years ago, a long distance call took some thought because it was charged by the minute. These days, at least in Canada, all but the cheapest of mobile plans comes with nation wide long distance and we have the Internet. Both services are available for less than basic phone service back then.

Parcels are a different story. I can't guess how people's personal habits have changed, but the business front is very different as far as I can tell. Mail order was the exception in urban areas back then. It would have been different in rural areas, but in my explorations of the country I discovered that some towns were places where people lived while other towns were regional hubs for businesses. There would have been some mail order and a lot of doing without, but I suspect it has seen a shift where proportionally more parcels are commercial in nature. On top of that, the standards for delivery have changed. When I was a kid, it could take weeks to receive something via the postal service (from across the country). Now shipping times are more aligned with couriers.

I realize there are economic benefits to subsidized mail, but I'm not sure that subsidizing businesses should be a priority.

Then how is your Philips screwdriver going to send an alert to your phone when you insert it into a JIS screw? I mean just because you know the difference (Craftsman screwdriver engineers are shaking their heads) doesn't mean that the average Joe doing a household repair does! /s

I suspect a lot of the fascination is because the information can be used to improve our quality of life. I suspect the cynicism comes from those who have the most access to this information using it to improve their quality of life at our expense. (That, and actually making use of the information takes more effort than most people are willing to expend.)

I have always been leery of data collection, but I have my own parallel: there was a lot of optimism about the benefits of personal computers in the 1980's and 1990's. Of course, that was pushed by the industry itself. I have since realized that what was happening then was not all that different from what is happening today. The outcomes were different because the tools were different, but it basically reduced/reduces to a bunch of people trying to enrich themselves by promising one thing and delivering another.

> It's a sign of the times with how used tech companies are to 'softly' moderating societal trends by unilaterally tweaking the software that everyone uses.

I realize that there are many reasons to be critical of our digital overlords. This is not one of them.

This is in no way comparable to a physical keyboard stopping you from typing something, because what you are typing is entirely deterministic. Most computer software will underline only misspelled words or grammatical errors, not politically charged statements, because it is a literal interpretation of what the user typed.

Swipe typing and auto-complete are different because they are interpreting the user's input. There is no way to ensure the interpretation is correct. For the sake of both the users and the company, you ensure the interpretations are the ones that cause no harm.

I'll restate a lot of what I have said in this thread that I think is still very relevant to what you said.

1. I realize that swipe input is probabilistic as opposed to using a physical device. I just think it should not matter - if it's probabilistic, they should have specific hard rules that are obeyed in all cases. For example, if the software concludes that the input is likely to be this dictionary word with 95% certainty, it should output that word. The context surrounding the word can be used to fine-tune the certainty, but not to cross-check against blacklists of banned phrases.

2. The reason for #1 is that if the CYA approach is allowed, there are no arguments left to prevent Apple from looking at your entire paragraphs of text and then dynamically deciding to discourage certain predictions, to prevent their device from being used to create something they don't agree with.

3. Additionally, because typing on a digital keyboard is also predictive (the touch zones of keys are weighted depending on what it thinks you're likely to type next), this would also allow them to literally make typing certain 'unsafe' things more difficult.