That sounds like uncontrolled dosages of Desoxyn.

Oh hey, how about Madagascar?

A non-recursive recursive descent parser isn’t any easier to reason about.

I had been thinking about doing something akin to the X16 but more modern, but realised that the main challenge with launching a product like this lies not in doing the design, but in coordinating all the people that are involved in producing the hardware, software and documentation (and hype, don’t forget hype). And you’ve gotta hand it to David Murray (the 8-bit guy): he’s knows how to do this, and has demonstrated this before with Planet X3.

It’s weird in the sense that software development has moved in other directions. A tagged-architecture stack machine like the Burroughs Large System is weird as well, even though it’s been highly successful and very influential on later designs (eg. Forth, SmallTalk).

If we’d still be using bank switching and overlays I’d say learning to code assembly on a 6502 is a great introduction to modern computers, but we’re not so it’s not.

Exactly. Something in the spirit of an Amiga 500 (I never had one, so this is not nostalgia speaking) is much more suitable to beginning programmers. Something with a flat address space, an easily memorisable instruction set and rich collection of hardware (blitter, DMA controller, sound generator) to play with. And something that has modern interfaces (HDMI & USB) so the not-so-well-equipped hacker-in-training can also jump in right away.

The Commander X16 isn’t it.

There’s plenty of choices. If you want that retro vibe go for a 68k, if you want something neat but obscure (and are willing to use an FPGA) choose the pdp-11, if you want to go with the flow then use risc-v.

But please pick something that’s not actively fighting modern (that is, not 1970’s) programming techniques.

People would learn bad habits.

For example, due to parameter passing often being done via the zero page, recursion is unnecessarily hard on the 6502, whereas one could argue that recursion is one of the major skills to master for any programmer.

The 6502 was weird back in the day as well, just weird in an ubiquitous way. It’s registers are too small, it’s stack is too small, it’s address space is too small. Argument passing often had to be done using the zero page, and since none of its registers can hold a respectable portion of its address space it requires hacks to implement such obscurities as C-style pointers. No current ABI can trace its origin to the 6502 (not even ARM).

Sure, back in the day the alternatives at the price point were worse, but that doesn’t make the 6502 good.

If you want a good CPU design with a 16-bit address space, take a look at the PDP-11.

Though I really like the concept of building a new device which incorporates the inherent ease of programmability of the computers of yore, I think the 6502 is just too weird and limited for doing so. For example, in order to cram a halfway decent amount of memory into the thing they had to resort to bank switching. At the least they should’ve gone with a 65816 (apparently they tried but they initially had some problems with the '816 address bus multiplexing).

“Clearly these numbers have a ritual purpose”

Thank you, that is indeed helpful.

I’ve found a local supplier that can mix Sikkens ON.00.78 for me, which looks to be close to that colour. I’ve been lightbrighting the plastic for a few days to see how that works out and consider my options.

I’ll keep you posted.

I know. Sadly, there had been a (by now degraded) sticker on top of the monitor which left a clearly visible discolouration that I believe requires a fairly aggressive retrobright to get rid of, which I’m afraid might damage the plastics.

I understood that to be the “Putty” colour of the Apple ][, not the “Platinum” colour Apple was supposedly using at this stage.

Floppies. So many floppies.

I’m a xennial. Though we were always a bit behind the curve (my first computer was a Philips XT clone, back in the early nineties), so I guess I’ve always been retrocomputing.

But yeah, it’s kind of shocking to see people being all nostalgic about stuff I consider newish.

(And I’m still cursing myself for throwing out my CPD-G420)

Yes: it prevents things like death threats mods have been known to receive on the centralised Lemmy precursor.

In my opinion this runs counter to the idea of federation

The rest of the internet runs counter to the idea of federation, yet Lemmy must work with it.

You mean like lmmy.to?

Eunice Newton Foote