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1972 is calling:

http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hba...

It was even worse than that on the PDP-10s.... The operating system used both SIXBIT characters and 7-bit ASCII characters using variable-length bit-field instructions (36 bit words => 5 chars and 1 bit left over).

HAKMEM item 93 is solved. Back in 1972 when HAKMEM was written, the AI Lab folks estimated a year or so of computer time then, I'm guessing, given how long has passed, that this was a bit optimistic.

Are you talking about the Dot Matrix From Reboot? or the one from SpaceBalls?

I saw Tron as a kid and I still like it today (though not as much, but still do)... A new Tron comic is set to come out this spring... And as another poster mentioned, I really loved Reboot...

Want a replica of a classic computer? You want a TOAD-1!

I very much liked the episodes of Reboot that I saw --- dumbing down for a children's program aside, what I saw of it had some very good writers.

I think my favourite segment was the satire of Gilbert & Sullivan's I am the very model of a modern major general . The revised lyrics are brilliant.

By this time next year, we'll be watching Gauntlet: The Movie.

Ha, they've already done that, and it was perfect. Wizards, Warriors and a Word from our Sponsor. Even the official movie wouldn't get better than that. =)

Apparently the grandparent post is stuck with (finite) representations of numbers inside a computer which helps to not have the intervals overlap. This reminds me that (on-topic!) thinking out of the box is what brought us many great theoretical discoveries.

Otherwise, if you stay in the box, you could wind up with this (lifted from HAKMEM:

ITEM 154 (Gosper):
...snip (see for yourself)...
By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more precisely, algebra:
let X = the sum of many powers of two = ...111111
now add X to itself; X + X = ...111110
thus, 2X = X - 1 so X = -1
therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) which is twos-complement.

http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hacks.htm l#item154

But make sure you do it in assembler, I guess?

Apparently, McDonald's believe they have the sole right to use the two letter prefix 'Mc', judging by the threat of legal action against Mary Blair and her McMunchies sandwich shop back in 1996. She sells cold meats and cold sandwiches and has a Scottish Thistle and St.Andrews flag on her sign.

The McDonald clan is fighting back, though. Lord McDonald, head of the McDonald clan, has appointed a clan member, one Ronald W McDonald, to be Sergeant-Major at Arms of the Guardians of Clan Donald: the linear descendant of the chief's bodyguard. The Guardians of Clan Donald aim to uphold and protect the dignity and honour of the ancient and honourable name of Clan Donald by all legal mean

Can you give an example of a byte being something other than 8 bits?

Yes. How big do you want your bytes to be (in the range 1 <= number_of_bits <= 36)?

On 99 44/100% or more of current computers, a byte is 8 bits, but that hasn't always been the case.

I just watched the trailer (thank god for slashdot articles "from the future") and noticed that not a single one of the characters blinked in the entire preview. Whether it's blinking, or speed of limb movement, or A/V sync, minute body motions are going to continue to separate live action from CGI for a few more years to come. Photorealism exists only in still frames for the time being.

Hmm... "Photorealistic TV series"... now what shows do I remember that fits that bill...

REBOOT
REBOOT "Daemon Rising" poster
BEAST WARS
BEAST MACHINES
ACTION MAN
(All of the above by MAINFRAME ENTERTAINMENT)
MAX STEEL
ROUGHNECKS: STARSHIP TROOPERS
HEAVY GEAR
CUBIX
JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS

These are just off the top of my short term memory. Feel free to lengthen my list as I feel I am missing at least 3 shows.

Of course these listed shows were not "Photo Perfect Realism" (MAINFRAME prefers not to render shadows on its main characters to give a "cartoony" feel to them, but if they decided to and were paid enough they could render a perfect human character on a weekly show). The dilemma of that time was with processor speed doubling regularly the investment of more render stations at the current speed means 11 months later they COULD have bought half of those render stations and gotten the same output level. Heck, by REBOOT Season 4 the faster Pentiums had decreased their render times so that they could render 64 times the output that they created at the begin of REBOOT Season 1.

The simple truth is that making a Computer Rendered show that can be mistaken for something filmed in the real world with actors in costumes requires money, talent, fast computers, and great software. At the moment it is cheaper to render a cartoony show and skip the realism for budget and time constraint issues.

Here's a sample:

ITEM 63 (Schroeppel, etc.):
The joys of 239 are as follows:

* pi = 16 arctan (1/5) - 4 arctan(1/239),
* which is related to the fact that 2 * 13^4 - 1 = 239^2,
* which is why 239/169 is an approximant (the 7th) of sqrt(2).
* arctan(1/239) = arctan(1/70) - arctan(1/99) = arctan(1/408) + arctan(1/577)
* 239 needs 4 squares (the maximum) to express it.
* 239 needs 9 cubes (the maximum, shared only with 23) to express it.
* 239 needs 19 fourth powers (the maximum) to express it.
* (Although 239 doesn't need the maximum number of fifth powers.)
* 1/239 = .00418410041841..., which is related to the fact that
* 1,111,111 = 239 * 4,649.
* The 239th Mersenne number, 2^239 - 1, is known composite, but no factors are known.
* 239 = 11101111 base 2.
* 239 = 22212 base 3.
* 239 = 3233 base 4.
* There are 239 primes < 1500.
* K239 is Mozart's only work for 2 orchestras.
* Guess what memo this is.
* And 239 is prime, of course.

Its mostly true. I remember spending a day trying to
write a tape on a DEC-10 (36-bit word) and read it on the
IBM 360 (32-bit word) and get the 6 characters/word
to convert to 4/word. It eventually worked, thanks to
creative use of the dd command.

Here is a link on 36-bit computing.

PS - I have gray hair, but no beard.

Before the Jargon File there was HAKMEM

http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.ht ml

Please use HTML links, like this one: HAKMEM. Just write: <a href="http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hak mem.html">HAKMEM</a>
Thank you.

According to who?

SGI. The sentence use the practical reverse-bananana compression idiom, the original which was first revealed in the holy book of HAKMEM

Please add the string "I am not a" in front of your Geek Member Card.

Check this out.

"Lord Macdonald of Macdonald, premier clan chief of Clan Donald, has appointed Ronald W McDonald to be Sergeant-Major at Arms of the Guardians of Clan Donald: the linear descendant of the chief's bodyguard. ...

One specific aim is to offer moral support to Mary Blair, proprietor of McMunchies, a small sandwich bar in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, who is being threatened with legal action by McDonald's Restaurants, the fast food chain, for daring to use the prefix "Mc" in the name of her shop.

When interviewed in BBC2's "The Money Programme" a top trademark lawyer made it clear that McDonald's have not a legal leg to stand on. Instead they rely on their unlimited financial resources to bully small businesses who cannot afford to fight back."

Really.. read the entire press release, it just gets better and better. This is coming from a long extended thing that happened around 1996, when McDonalds decided they were going to start trying to crack down on anyone doing anything vaguely resembling their trademarks. I'm not sure if they ever got McMunchie's to change their name, but whatever happened they did manage to piss off, in the process, Scotland. The best bit about the whole thing was that, according to an absolutely fantastic 60 Minutes report on this and the McLibel case, Lord MacDonald of MacDonald was so enraged by the whole thing that he decided to open a restaurant in the traditional family estate of the MacDonald clan, and name it "MacDonald's". The restaurant serves things like duck, and whatever else is the U.K. equivilent of "gourmet" food. Thus far McDonald's Inc. of America has yet to challenge him over the name.

As my more-or-less universal online handle is an abbreviation of my last name, McClure (it's a degradation of MacLeod), i have to say this case holds a small bit of interest for me.. it is a discomforting thought to know that a corporation may possibly want to claim ownership to the first two letters of my slashdot logon :)

Idiot! You must be trolling! Everyone knows that the "mainframe" is the world where Bob, Dot and Enzo do battle with the evil Megabyte!

"Warning: incoming game."

The computer animated television show ReBoot had purple "game cubes" that landed into the Mainframe. The show's animation looked similar to the GCN demos. Is this where Nintendo got its idea?

They actually used PDP-10s - the same kind of computer they used at Harvard to develop BASIC for MITS using their own cross-assembler and emulator.

Paul Allen was at one time giving out accounts on a PDP-10 clone.

Start with a 36 bit word and 18 bit addresses. Add sixteen "accumulator/index registers" and locate them at (octal) addresses 0..17 in main memory. Actually 16 GP registers is a decent complement, though being able to reference them as absolute memory locations is of dubious value.

Could be worse. 32 bit words are great for packing that limited 6 bit character set, once so popular in the DEC world: all the letters and numbers plus (IIRC) '$' and '.'. Two words give you 12 characters, more than enough for unique identifiers in any serious programming effort. "ASCII" then was generally a 7-bit "Half-Ascii" encoding to match up with most DEC unit record equipment at the time; 5 chars per word with a bit to spare. Imagine all the applications that were tempted to muck with that spare bit! Eight bit bytes were possible but not preferred because they wasted 4 bits in each word, but that led to the obvious solution: 9 bit character codes -- seven bits plus ESC and META, thus inevitably leading to EMACS.

Only thing that made this character endoding workable was the PDP10 had special so-called "byte" operations, where you could manipulate "byte" fields consisting of arbitrary bit ranges within a word. Further you could index bytes in packed arrays of such stuff.

On the plus side, the PDP10 was one of the first CISC minicomputers; it had a fairly complete instruction set, including a full complement of arithmetic and test operations, plus stack maniuplations and indirect addressing modes. This is probably why many early users loved it so -- it was the first mini where assembly language programming was NOT a royal pain in the ass.

On the other hand, the accepted wisdom these days is that nice, uniform RISC machines are a better match for compiler writers. Nevertheless, countless programmers devoted innumerable man years to compilers that tried to exploit every detail of the PDP10 instruction set.

In particular, The '10 had instructions to push and pop PC+status to/from a stack. However, there was no dedicated stack register. Rather the language designer presumably would designate one from the GP registers.

Further, the PDP10 retained traditional, non-reentrant "return jump" instructions, where the first word of your subroutine was overwritten with a jump to the point following the call. To return from sub you jump (perhaps indirectly) through address 0 in your subroutine. Although it makes re-entancy impossible (an infinite loop))this was a common mechanism in the old days. DEC10 Fortran compilers used this mode. Other languages used a variety of other calling conventions, though reentrancy and auto variables generally were a novel feature.

Of course, back in those days, 99% of computer cycles and programmer energy went to noble "systems" work. Programmers generally avoided working on ucky user applications.

Probably more than anything, the PDP-10 deserves credit for hosting a lot of the original development for the computer languages BLISS and BCPL, precursors to C [praise be to Ritchie].

For further reading, check out this PDP10 instruction reference in one try. Or read more about PDP10 History generally.

--JayBee [still waiting for a password]

The point about them not being picked up in the States (particularly for season 3) was partly the cause of the improved storyline and plotting for season 3. The staff of the show had long felt that they were being unduly cramped by BS&P - Broadcast Standards & Practices - and felt they had a chance to cover more ground without that restriction.

Some specific examples come to mind - the "BS&P Approved liferaft", and Dot's monobreast (search on 'monobreast' inside the article).

A more important and less noticably point is that the Canadian episodes were 'censored down' for U.S. viewing. There was consistent pressure to control language and imagery, but there were also apparently post-production cuts. If you watched it in the U.S., missing bits may contribute to plot inconsistencies.

Although "YRO" may not be the original reason this item made it to /., it's a good thing to note here; if you are getting the originals on DVD, then there is one less snipping layer between you and the creators of the work...

The point about them not being picked up in the States (particularly for season 3) was partly the cause of the improved storyline and plotting for season 3. The staff of the show had long felt that they were being unduly cramped by BS&P - Broadcast Standards & Practices - and felt they had a chance to cover more ground without that restriction.

Some specific examples come to mind - the "BS&P Approved liferaft", and Dot's monobreast (search on 'monobreast' inside the article).

A more important and less noticably point is that the Canadian episodes were 'censored down' for U.S. viewing. There was consistent pressure to control language and imagery, but there were also apparently post-production cuts. If you watched it in the U.S., missing bits may contribute to plot inconsistencies.

Although "YRO" may not be the original reason this item made it to /., it's a good thing to note here; if you are getting the originals on DVD, then there is one less snipping layer between you and the creators of the work...

I guess I posted too late for anybody to read this post earlier this week. And the news was old when I wrote that post.

I will second the posts made earlier that, for episodic television, season 3 was nothing less than mindblowing when it was shown in Canada in 1997. Reboot season 3 was produced between the first two seasons of Beast Wars (or maybe overlapped somewhat with production of Beast Wars season 2) and it fares very well when comparing animation quality between the contemporary shows.

For those who don't appreciate Reboot based on exposure to the first two seasons, you have to keep in mind that the writing was severely hacked by the censors at ABC (Broadcasts Standards and Practices - BS&P). There are numerous references to this hidden in the series. In one of the early episodes Bob uses Glitch with the command "BS&P" to break a stained glass window before flying through it; BS&P didn't allow Mainframe to show Bob crashing through the window because they were afraid child viewers might try to do the same. There's two references in Talent Night alone: the censor who complains about every act for the show, and the Small Town Binomes (Village People) who sing "BS&P" to the tune of YMCA. For more hidden references see Joe Smith's Unoffcial Reboot page

Talks regarding Season 3 finally broke down between Mainframe and ABC as Season 2 was getting completed. This is why the last few episodes of Season 2 start a darker approach to the plot, a trend continued in Season 3. In the episode with the "Army of Darkness"-style game, the tombstone that Frisket bursts refers to the deceased association with ABC as "An Unholy Alliance".

There are certainly weak episodes in season 3. Then there are some real gems like "Firewall". Like many Reboot episodes, it makes numerous references to popular culture. In the case of Firewall, the episode makes references to James Bond movies, Wacky Racers, the OJ Simpson slo-mo chase, Jurassic Park.

My only disappointment is that A.D. Vision could only get Season 3. My guess is that Polygram wouldn't release the publication rights for the first two seasons, even though they pretty well sat on them and did nothing. Hopefully those rights eventually revert back to Mainframe. I would really like to see a Reboot "Perfect Collection" including key episodes from the first two series that provide good background and character development such as "The Crimson Binome", "Talent Night", "Painted Windows", "Identity Crisis", and of course the whole of season 2's cliffhanger 4-episode arc that sets up season 3.

For people unfamiliar to the show, Joe Smith's Reboot page is probably the best internet resource on the show. I think i have my Megabyte action figure around somewhere... :^)
-legolas

i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...

A while back, a friend and I went through the effort of recording all of the episodes to the CGI Animation Show REBOOT off of the Cartoon Network. We digitized them, and now I have all 39 episodes in MPEG format. Happy Happy day...

In the process of doing this, I posted a request to the 'Un-Official Reboot' website asking if anyone had the original show opening(s) on video tape, because Cartoon Network wasn't running them. I got SEVERAL requests for people who wanted a copy of the shows when I was done... Many offered to pay me upwards of $250 for the 39 episodes. This made me a little nervous, since I was flirting with the 'copyright' territory, so I figured I be above board, and just ask them.

So I send a message to info@mainframe.ca, and asked them if they had a problem with me making a copy of the shows for someone. Within 2 days, they sent a reply back stating that, as long as I wasn't making money off of my copies, they said I could do it. So, I charged the guy $20 plus shipping (figure a buck-a-disc is OK), and everyone was happy.

</anecdote>

Bottom line: More companies should be this cool. I think that, as long as you're not PROFITING off of their stuff, or hindering their profits, you should be able to use it (and I mean no add banners, no nuthin'!).

Isn't that what being a fan is all about?

RP06 specs