[HN Gopher] Byte Magazine: Declarative Languages (1985)
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Byte Magazine: Declarative Languages (1985)
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 71 points
Date : 2022-09-13 18:45 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| ivoras wrote:
| Those ads are much more interesting (nostalgia-wise) than the
| articles!
|
| Like, they have schematics! And talk about expanding the 640k
| barrier!
| forinti wrote:
| These old magazines remind me of my 286. I wish I had kept that
| AT case.
| BMorearty wrote:
| What a surprise to go to Byte Magazine from 1985 and see
| Picasso's "Interior with a Girl Drawing" on the cover. I hand-
| painted a copy of it using oil on canvas in a painting class in
| the mid-90s. [1] I still have it on the wall of my backyard
| cottage.
|
| [1]: https://ibb.co/9qQpGrb
| jll29 wrote:
| Some of these articles were written by Robert Kowalski (homepage:
| http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/), who was part of the initial
| Prolog gang/community, which was split between Marseille (FR) and
| Edinburgh (GB).
|
| This year, PROLOG turned 50 years!
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| https://logicprogramming.org/2022/02/50-years-of-prolog/
| rikroots wrote:
| I went to the magazine expecting to read a 1985 article about
| declarative languages and instead (also) found a review of the
| first Amiga computer. This sentence in the editorial column made
| my day: "Dazzling graphics and audio and an open expansion bus
| make the Amiga the intellectual and technical heir to the Apple
| II." ... if only history had played out differently!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The GFX and sound for the Amiga were great but the 68k CPU was
| overrated. When you factored in how the memory bus worked, 68k
| machines didn't perform that much better than the Apple II.
|
| Even Motorola gave up on the 68k line and every computer
| manufacturer that depended on it such as Apple, Commodore,
| Atari, Sun Microsystems and many others either scrambled to
| switch to a new CPU or went out of business.
|
| The computer press of the 1980s tells a compelling story about
| the rise of the 68k but I've never seen a good account of the
| fall other than the account of why the BBC Micro didn't use it.
| jhbadger wrote:
| In the early 1990s the "common wisdom" was that CISC
| architectures were obsolete and that RISC architectures would
| take over any day. Motorola was part of the alliance that
| developed the PowerPC architecture (even if it is often
| described as just coming from IBM). The lack of focus on the
| 68k was a self-fulfilling prophecy as current versions just
| couldn't keep up with Intel or the PowerPC, and newer
| versions weren't being created.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Intel came out with this ill-fated chip
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860
|
| but they didn't throw the x86 under the bus for it's name.
| If they had, Intel would be a has-been chipmaker the same
| way Motorola is.
|
| In 1964 IBM realized it was a revolutionary idea to keep
| the same architecture from one generation of computers to
| the next. Intel was the second company to take this vision
| seriously and realize it and that's why Intel not only made
| the first microprocessor but it is still a dominant
| producer today. (Alternately the Apple II has no heirs
| because there wasn't a progression to a compatible Apple 3,
| Apple 4, etc.)
| smackeyacky wrote:
| The Apple II did have heirs, lots of them, right up to
| the late 1980s which meant it was a viable platform for
| well over a decade. From the ill fated Apple III to the
| various smaller/faster/better IIc/GS/e and whatnot. It's
| interesting to watch "The Computer Chronicles" from the
| 1980s on Youtube and be reminded of how diverse the
| personal computer industry was back then.
|
| Apple had a dual strategy for far longer than is
| generally remembered, the Macintosh was a hit but it
| wasn't a home run for a long time.
| jll29 wrote:
| 1984: MOS 6510 - first encounter with machine code
|
| 1986: Motorola mc68000 - 32 bit is beautiful
|
| 1991: Intel 80486DX2 - ugh, how ugly, those segment
| registers!
|
| 1993: HP PA9000 - the arrival of the RISC panther brings
| enlightenment at the speed of light
|
| But seriously, that issue of Byte magazine reminded me that
| such mags no longer exist. Now it's just ads and tests.
| mpweiher wrote:
| > 68k machines didn't perform that much better than the Apple
| II
|
| ?
|
| The 68K was significantly faster. Faster clock, wider bus,
| many more and much wider registers and wider/faster ALUs.
|
| Dhrystone is around 20x faster on a Mac than on an Apple //e:
|
| https://netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.html
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Faster at 32 bit math but you don't always do 32 bit math,
| particularly people didn't do a lot of 32 bit math back
| then. In fact 32 bit math is where the 6502 goes to die
| because it has nowhere near enough registers.
|
| In terms of real experienced performance in the
| applications people ran at the time the 68k was a
| disappointment.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I don't recall anyone who actually put it into a system
| regretting the choice. Unlike the 6502, the 68k also had
| a viable path forward, which only really ended when all
| the workstation vendors + Apple decided to jump to RISC.
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| I coded on Apple IIs, Atari STs, and early Macs, and I
| remember the 68k machines being quite a bit snappier than the
| Apple II. Keep in mind, the ST and Mac had a lot more to do
| in order to make a higher-resolution screen and GUI perform
| at all.
|
| Also, the big reason the 68k eventually fell out of favor was
| because it (1) wasn't ready on time for the IBM PC, and (2)
| couldn't keep pace with Intel on the low-end.
| protomyth wrote:
| Well, it was more the heir to the Atari 800 where the Atari ST
| was actually the heir to the Commodore 64. The Atari 800 was
| far and away better at graphics and sound than the Apple II.
|
| I remember buying this one, and seeing an Amiga a week later in
| the mall. The Prolog article blew my young mind. How in the
| heck is it figuring this out, BASIC doesn't do this?!?
| realce wrote:
| Only 75k for a C compiler!
| LVB wrote:
| What a massive amount of information (including useful catalog-
| style ads) packed into a _monthly_ magazine I could pick up at
| Waldenbooks. I might not have had the internet growing up, but I
| did have 400 pages of this every month, not to mention heavy
| volumes of QuickBasic manuals and Norton books, so I definitely
| wasn 't starved for information as a budding computer nerd!
| unwind wrote:
| Oooh that issue also has a preview of the Commodore Amiga, with
| epic block diagrams and tech specs. Having grown up learning the
| ins and outs of the Amiga 500, that is really nostalgic.
|
| Also seeing "Computing at Chaos Manor", Jerry Pournelle's column,
| in the ToC gave me the warm fuzzies. He always came across as, uh
| I don't know, likable? Like somebody's magically technical super-
| nice granddad/uncle or whatever. When I read Byte I had no idea
| at first about his books, all I knew about him was what I gleaned
| from the columns. So weird. I guess in a way he was an influencer
| waaay before the term even existed? :)
| abecedarius wrote:
| 'Super nice' is just not the vibe I got from his writing,
| personally. I liked him anyway. For more nostalgia there's his
| collection of non-computer columns, _A Step Farther Out_ ; IIRC
| the main topics were space and energy. Wasn't shy about
| despising anti-nuclear environmentalists, for a counterexample
| to "super nice".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What I remember is that something happened to Larry Niven (did
| he have a health problem like Heinlein did?) and then whenever
| there was a Niven book it was always a Niven-Pournelle book
| which wasn't as good as a Niven book. Pournelle was also known
| for his right-wing politics.
| [deleted]
| morelisp wrote:
| > Pournelle was also known for his right-wing politics.
|
| And Niven isn't?
|
| _Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial
| losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino
| community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order
| to harvest their organs for transplants. "The problem [of
| hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal
| aliens who aren't going to pay for anything anyway," Niven
| said._
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