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1500 questions
58
votes
8 answers
Could you reverse engineer silicon just by looking at it?
I was interested in a recent interview of Masayuki Uemura, one of the engineers who designed the Nintendo Famicom in the early 80s. During initial design phase of the Famicom, one of the first things he says he did was reverse engineer the video…
da66en
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58
votes
16 answers
Did many programs really store years as two characters (Y2K bug)?
The claim that programs stored dates as two ASCII or similar characters because computers were limited in resources seems wrong to me because it takes more memory than one 8-bit integer would. Also in certain cases it's also slower.
Storing the year…
Mr. Chem Question
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57
votes
4 answers
Why is Ctrl-V the Paste shortcut?
We now casually use the Ctrl-C to Copy.
We also use Ctrl-X to Cut. I understand this choice. We cannot reuse Ctrl-C and the 'X' represents a cross. Crossing something out on a sheet of paper was similar to cutting it out.
Now... Why would we use…
Alexis Wilke
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57
votes
6 answers
Did Microsoft really reserve secret APIs in Windows?
In the nineties when the antitrust case was building against Microsoft, various accusations of abuse of monopoly power were leveled against the company, some of which were proven true.
One of the more persistent accusations was that Windows…
rwallace
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57
votes
9 answers
What is the oldest digital processor still performing non-educational duties in its original environment?
I discover that Mariner 9 is supposed to crash on Mars this month (2022/03). Discussing the specification of the CPU, I see that a CPU from the early 70s is still running.
So I was wondering (sort of a trivia question) what is the oldest running CPU…
malat
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57
votes
8 answers
How were Western computer chips reverse-engineered in USSR?
The British ZX Spectrum computer had many clones in the Eastern Bloc. It seems many of them were built using Russian-made chips from the Angstrem factory in Zelenograd in/near Moscow. The Russian Wikipedia mentions the КР1858ВМ3 which is a Z80…
Omar and Lorraine
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57
votes
7 answers
How did old MS-DOS games utilize various graphic cards?
Nowadays each graphic card has some driver in operating system that translates some (typically) standard API such as OpenGL, so that programmers use some standardized API code to tell graphics cards how and what they want to render. (Actually that's…
Petr
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57
votes
1 answer
Why do we use caret (^) as the symbol for ctrl/control?
From my understanding, the caret character (^) has been used to indicate Ctrl-key combinations since the early UNIX days, if not earlier. Why was this character used to indicate this? Was it simply that the symbol wasn't being used for anything else…
fluffy
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56
votes
4 answers
Why did line printers have 132 columns?
From what I read, most line printers have 132 columns. Also, the VT-220 and presumably other terminals may be switched between 80 columns (that's a usual width) and 132 columns.
As I recall, 80 columns was because of those Fortran punch cards.
But…
Omar and Lorraine
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56
votes
2 answers
Why were the /\ (min) and the \/ (max) operators abandoned in the C language?
In the UNIX V7 version of the C language (but not yet in the V6 version), there were the /\ (min) and the \/ (max) operators. In the source of the scanner part of the compiler,
case BSLASH:
if (subseq('/', 0, 1))
return(MAX);
goto…
Leo B.
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56
votes
1 answer
How was collision detection done on the Asteroids arcade game?
In honor of today's landing of and sample collection by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on the asteroid Bennu:
How did the arcade game Asteroids detect collisions between the screen objects (player's ship, asteroids, enemy saucers, shots) ? Was it a…
DrSheldon
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55
votes
8 answers
Why didn't the 8086 use linear addressing?
The 8086 used a segmented memory architecture where the linear address was computed from a 16-bit segment number and a 16-bit offset. This greatly complicated things from a programming perspective. The Motorola MC68000, designed at about the same…
Alex Hajnal
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55
votes
9 answers
How long will floppy disks maintain data integrity?
This was on CNN today:
The U.S. is still using floppy disks to run its nuclear program
Which led me to read through this article:
Think the floppy disk is dead? Think again! Here’s why it still stands between us and a Nuclear Apocalypse
In…
Aaron
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55
votes
13 answers
What languages are better fit for generating efficient code for 8-bit CPU's than C?
I found Why do C to Z80 compilers produce poor code? very interesting as it pointed out that C (which was leveraged to be an abstraction of a CPU for porting Unix) was not a very easy language to create efficient machine code from for the Z80.…
Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
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55
votes
2 answers
How was the blinking terminal cursor invented?
I was just staring at my blinking terminal cursor:
And was wondering where it comes from.
Does anybody have some piece of history about the blinking cursor? I couldn't find much online.
E.g.:
when/where was it invented?
who invented it?
is there a…
Gohu
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