For prior related work, check out patent US-6377261-B1 "Compiling glyphs into instructions for imaging for execution on a general purpose computer" filed 1996. The basic idea is each character turns into a sequence of "Load Immediate" / "Shift" / "OR to Memory" instructions; so there's no more fetching from a stored bitmap of the font, as the pixels are implicit in the Immediate data in the generated machine code. Then you can get fancy when one row of pixels is the same as the previous row in the character, so you don't even need to do the Load Immediate. Etc. This scheme was used in FrameMaker for Macintosh back in the day, as implemented by Gus Fernandez (who went hog wild on additional optimizations).
Thanks! I had a feeling there was something out there, but couldn't easily find it. I can see this is well optimized for speed, but the RAM usage looks scary from the perspective of a really memory constrained chip.
On the RP2350, a load from memory and a move-immediate both take 1 cycle, because there's a separate data bus to fast SRAM. If I did want more speed and didn't mind an expansion in font size, I could store each glyph in its own byte/word and avoid the ubfx instruction. But on this chip, for a reasonable speed/space tradeoff I'm going to optimize for space every time.
Indeed, it's not clear that my stuff would have any utility in today's higher-end CPUs, either. But it was fun and zippy in the Motorola 680x0 days (I miss writing to the frame buffer). Certainly this is just related to your stuff, but with different goals never mind wildly different time/space trade-off. (Hi, Raph!)
Something like this was called "sprite compilation" and used a lot in the DOS game coding scene back in the day. The idea was, given a bitmap image of a sprite, produce the code that would draw that sprite on the screen in assembly and incorporate it into your game. Not very flexible, but fast and useful in the days when games had a lot of 2D bits and bobs moving around, especially for those who could not yet afford a 486 and were stuck on an old Tandy 1000 or something...
Image 6 (with figures 8 through 12) is fun; you can eliminate the Shift if you're willing to have multiple different JITed functions for each character, each one generated knowing what its shift count is, leading to yet more optimization opportunities.
The Altair didn’t come with a keyboard or screen. Just a front panel with lights and switches (like a PDP-11, to be fair). So, the fact that it wasn’t an integrated system in one box all from the same manufacturer distinguishes it as a Mini/Micro Computer rather than a Personal Computer.
Yup. That's why you hear of the Apple II as one of the first personal computers, and not of the Apple I, which was a more advanced kit than most, but still required owners to supply their own case, power supply and keyboard.
MOE: How long has that been in the soup, froghead?
CURLY: About uh--- [Looks at the three watches on his wrists.]
MOE: Hey! What’s the idea of the three watches?
CURLY: That’s the way I tell the time.
MOE: How do you tell the time?
CURLY: This one runs ten minutes slow every two hours. This runs twenty minutes fast every four hours. The one in the middle is broken and stopped at two o’clock.
MOE: Well, how do you tell the time?
CURLY: I take the ten minutes on this one and subtract it by the twenty minutes on that one. Then I divide it by the two in the middle.
MOE: Well, what time is it now?
[Curly grabs a clock from the inside of his jacket pocket.]
CURLY: Uh, ten minutes to four.
MOE: Hmm so it is!
[Moe grabs the clock from Curly and hits Curly on the head with it. The clock breaks.]
Interesting to note that the original invention of Proof Of Work was motivated by anti-spam in particular ("Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail" Dwork & Naor, Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO' 92).
It’s a ticket for use of the interstate, basically. Used to be a bit of paper you’d stick in your windscreen, now it’s electronic in a lot of places. Rather than a toll, which may be additionally applicable, it’s a standing fee valid for a set period.
They’re usually inexpensive. Most countries have clear and repeated signs telling you you need one, etc.
Slovenia - last I was there - don’t have a single sign on the way into the country. They don’t tell you at the toll post on the border.
What they do have is cops with binoculars sitting in the median flagging down every foreign plated car, and then issuing a fixed €200 fine (they’re ready with a card machine), and telling you you have to buy a vignette at the next gas station, which is where they’re sold.
Anyway. Wildly irregular across Europe. Useful site!
If I remember from my time in Europe the key difference between the vignette and something like an EZ-Tag is the vignette isn't necessarily tied to the registration of your vehicle like the ones in the States are. You can usually walk into the gas stations in europe and just buy them for periods of time like you say.
And yeah, they don't tell you. If you're driving europe cross country, best get your armchair lawyer book out and plan on strategically buying them as soon as you enter the country.
I'd guess in 2026 all vignettes can be bought online, for several different periods from one day to whole year, so you can and should buy them once your itinerary is set.
If you know that you need them - hence this site is useful. Unfortunately you’ll often look it up as a tourist, you’ll be hit by ten phishing sites and a government website that has a downloadable word document that explains vignettes for foreigners but is 14 years out of date and tells you to buy a ticket at an office that has been shut since 2008.
Plus… sometimes the solution is non-obvious. I live in Portugal. I want to drive my EV into Spanish cities. I need a special vignette for that. Spain don’t issue it to foreign vehicles. Portugal don’t have a scheme. But France do! And it’s reciprocal with Spain! So the solution for Portuguese EV drivers is to get a vignette from France that works in Spain.
Well, I'm #4, but it's all from TeX stuff (where I'm kind of a ringer), and not The Art Of Computer Programming. The beyond-amazing Udo Wermuth is also all TeX, I believe, and did it without having a home team advantage; everyone else high on the list looks to be strictly TAOCP.
that's not what I was asking, I was asking Mr. Fuchs his pronunciation of the color named after the fuchsia flower named after the biologist Dr. Fuchs.
Let's keep this pertinent to Hacker News: The nicely intoned computer voice of SID on UFO was way more advanced than the clunky monotone of the Star Trek TOS ship's computer.
The first episode of Star Trek: The Original Series where we hear the ship's computer speak is "Mudd's Women" filmed starting June 1966. UFO had SID talking from the very first pilot, filmed starting April 1969. So, less than three years apart, and not much time for the public's perceptions to change. On the other hand, HAL showed up on screen in the interim, so maybe that helped. And big shout out to Lost In Space's Robot B9, with more personality than all of them put together, and who showed up before for all of them, in 1965.
There is a torrent. Objectively it’s uneven but the I’m biased toward it because I watched it on release. Space Bastard Travis is a terrible villain but Servalan is very attention getting. The simple fact that none of the characters felt safe made it compelling on first viewing and Avon’s cynicism vs Blake’s idealism makes for satisfying viewing despite the obvious budget constraints on the screen. Definitely seek it out but don’t expect Firefly production values.
A favorite Knuth story to illustrate: He was re-writing the 8080 code for the processor that ran our new Alphatype CRS Phototypesetter, since the manufacturer's code wasn't suitable. Real-time, 7 levels of simultaneous interrupt stuff, since it controlled two stepper motors that moved the lens around the photographic paper, plus four custom font outline-tracing S100 cards that flashed vertical segments of characters at just the right moment on the CRT that the lens then focused onto the paper. No debugability other than a 4x4 keyboard and a 15(?) character display. I was responsible for the code on the other end of the RS232 port that connected it to the DEC mainframe, sending down character outlines on the fly to the very limited memory on the 8080, along with the properly-sorted character placement info ultimately from TeX.
Anyway, we'd been doing morning, noon, and night debugging sessions together for a number of days. On maybe the 3rd morning, I arrived at his office and was speaking with his secretary of many years, Phyllis Winkler, when Knuth came in. He handed her a stack of maybe a dozen or two pages, saying "Here's a paper I wrote; please type it in." When? When did he write it? It's still a mystery to me.
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