Annoying Trivia

1) There surely must be a better way to figure out the Cirrus Logic GD5446 video card than by reading the QEMU sources. 2) It appears that I never explained where the project’s name came from. It could, if you like, refer to a Lisp Operating system. I must, however, confess that it is the […]

Posted in: Hardware, LoperOS by Stanislav No Comments

Programming as Play

Many of us have not forgotten the joy of playing with toys which let your mind run free: Lego blocks, Erector, etc. On the other hand, it appears that the larval programmers of today are skipping the stage of development involving the digital equivalents of such toys. Specifically I am talking about Logo, BASIC, and […]

Posted in: Hot Air, Philosophy by Stanislav 7 Comments

The Temptation

The temptation to implement a modernized Lisp architecture in a high-end FPGA never ceases to tug at me. It has recently re-asserted itself after my discovery that one can buy reasonably priced and fully assembled boards containing the latter, complete with SDRAM, DVI, SATA, etc. sockets. Verilog guides have silently crept into my browser tabs […]

Posted in: Distractions, FPGA, Hot Air, LoperOS by Stanislav 3 Comments

The Linked List and Modern Architectures

The linked list is a less-than-welcome guest on modern machine architectures, for reasons which are well-known. I am trying to determine if the difference between current cache and main memory speeds (as well as other concerns) have made CDR coding attractive again. It has traditionally been considered a no-no on any machine lacking hardware-assisted tagging. […]

Posted in: Lisp, LoperOS, Memory, SoftwareArchaeology by Stanislav 2 Comments

The Book

The Architecture of Symbolic Computers (Peter M. Kogge) is quite possibly the most useful resource I have come across in my quest thus far. If you are interested in Lisp Machine revival, non-von Neumann computation, or the dark arts of the low-level implementation of functional programming systems, you will not be disappointed. More generally, I […]

Posted in: Books, LoperOS, SoftwareArchaeology by Stanislav 7 Comments