Alice's Adventures in a Differentiable Wonderland (arxiv.org)
42 points by henning 2d ago 4 comments
The story of Max, a real programmer (incoherency.co.uk)
90 points by surprisetalk 3d ago 58 comments
The Amiga 3000 Unix and Sun Microsystems: Deal or No Deal?
11 zdw 4 7/2/2025, 4:53:43 PM datagubbe.se ↗
As many American readers don't know: 3 years after Acorn's Archimedes, with an 8MHz ARM2.
https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A300.h...
It was £799.
In 1987 USD, $1450.
Given that the 68K-based Sun-4 launched at the same time as SPARCstation 1 in 1987, the former was clearly a sop to legacy customer sites not ready yet to migrate to RISC. There is no way that a few years later Sun adds another incompatible 68K architecture.
A more intriguing possibility is Sun buying Amiga in 1984 or 1985. The real Sun was very late to fast graphics, giving others such as SGI an opening. If someone at Sun had had the foresight of the potential of a bit of hardware-accelerated graphics ... The funny thing is that, if this happens, Commodore likely goes ahead with the 900 running Coherent! A Commodore Unix (clone) box in 1985, anyone?
I had fun with a series of what-if ideas last year:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/where_computing_went_...
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/where_computing_went_...
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/where_computing_went_...
Commodore bought Amiga. What if Sun bought Commodore?
Come up with some kind of early virtualisation to run AmigaOS stuff on SunOS/68k.
Actually make and ship the Amiga Hombre, but with SPARC instead of PA-RISC.
The other line of thought is where Commodore could have gone...
It didn't realise that the C64 was such a cash cow, and wasted effort on the C16 and Plus 4. It only did the C128 with a Z80 because otherwise the C128 wouldn't have worked with the CP/<M cartridge.
Can the whole C16 family, the C64C, C64SX, the C128.
Instead, incrementally improve the C64 rather than leaving a decade, coming up with the C65 and then cancelling it.
Incremental improvements that were on offer and affordable:
* better BASIC
* more RAM
* faster CPU
* 16-bit CPU
* Stereo sound
* More colours, higher resolutions
Lots of fun what-ifs to be had with the 1980s and early 1990s industry giants, before x86 caught up and swept everything else away.