In 2008, I wrote about it.
In 2018, someone ran my code and sent me screenshots!
This person got their hands on a gloriously-vintage TI MicroExplorer -- that's a Lisp Chip on a NuBus card, using a Mac IIfx as little more than a device driver for the screen and keyboard.
And a mere 20 hours later,
Exhibit B:
Exhibit B:
The best part is the "**MORE**" in the second screenshot. "I spent twenty hours converting that to decimal and I'm ready to stuff it down your eyeballs, one page at a time, goddamnit!"
Many are the mornings that I came in to see an overnight run blocked at **MORE**. The terminal wasn't in a separate process with a text buffer between the two. That prompt halted everything until you hit space.
"Your output buffer fills; your process is petrified -- more --"
<enter>
"your process makes its saving throw and resumes"
Worst Rogue-like Ever.
In Soviet Russia, the Prosecutor will give you 'More'! ;-)
And today with SBCL,
(time (length (write-to-string (ash 1 (* 31 (1- (ash 1 17)))))))takes 6.002 seconds. :)The real wtf here is having 12MB of physical memory in 1990.
My memory of things that long ago is fading, but 12MB sounds plausible: the Sun 3/50 I had a year or so earlier had 4 which was not enough, the 4/65s had, I think, 16, and bigger 4s had maybe 24 or 32.
Your essay hating on the Java ecosystem 20 years ago is hilariously still on point.
It's a hate flower that blooms all year. I'm glad I get to 100% ignore it now. I think the only reason my machine even has a Java runtime installed is because Illustrator inexplicably still requires it.
Who would have thought that in 2018 the only people running Java would be kids playing Minecraft and enterprise software?
Kids really shouldn't be playing with enterprise software.
30 seconds of MOST-POSITIVE-BIGNUM scrolling by.
The whole thing takes about 10 minutes.