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www.quora.com Performing security verification This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot.
If you have too much adblock, as I do, you can never visit quora.com. The security check will just loop infinitely.
Funny. Just tested that because I'm always told: too complicated, nothing will work!
And got no check at all.
Edit: Maybe it depends on where you come from, or what they think you come from. Or using VPN. Wrong browser with insufficient base for uBo. uBo configured wrong. (Not?) using an ad-blocking DNS-Server, so that shit doesn't even make it to your local uBo?
Tested from Hamburg, Germany via private tunnel from my home in Colorado, which also works.
Threat intel of the IP or network you're coming from matter as much as anything else. FirefoxLinux on a clean IP can access places ChromeWindows on a dirty high-risk IP cannot.
Maybe the times are changing. Went through with Adblock and vpn. No looping.
Man I didn't even realize that Quora was still around, let alone prominent people still answering questions on it. I deprioritized it in my Kagi searches months ago and even then I didn't notice that much of a change in the quality of my searches.
Yeah this is the first time in months if not years that I’m seeing the website.
Quora is such a gamble when it comes to accurate or relevant results. Either you get something incredibly insightful from someone with real experience or you get misinformation and stupid opinions. It's really only slightly helpful when I'm looking for subjective opinions or a personal perspective on some topic. It's very much a negative result when I'm looking for factual, verifiable information.
Some older people are on it, apparently, and some good experts among them too. Older folks often don't keep up with platform fashion. Some good older scientists even use academia.edu or researchgate...
Of course I'd prefer if he answered on a StackExchange site, tho I heard those are in decline too, but at least not enshittified like Quora.
I'm pretty sure Kay's not quite correct about the Eniac not being a stored program computer. In it's original form it obviously was not, as it had to physically reconfigured to solve different problems. However, after the war it was rebuilt to operate like any other stored program (von Neumann architecture) computer, as it was the first recipient of the design philosophy seen in the EDVAC report. It operated in that mode from '48 to '55, when it was decommissioned.
ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer is an excellent summary of the initial design and redesign of the Eniac.
Apparently Eckert (John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert designed the ENIAC) claimed that von Neumann basically stole their idea of the stored program and that they had already came up with the idea and he just took it and ran with it as if it was his
Eckert and Mauchly weren't reliable narrators of the history of their work, given how much they needed to claim in order to get the patents that were later invalidated. They claimed quite a few things that were later disproven in court or through historical study. At the least, Eniac was designed by the team at the Moore School.
von Neumann's "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" was both a summary of discussions by the Eniac team as well as von Neumann's own original work proving and expanding on various aspects of those discussions. It's called the von Neumann architecture because he was the author of the seminal paper, not because he laid any particular claim to the ideas. Eckert and Mauchly were mostly upset about the paper's existence, regardless of author, because it made it impossible for them to patent the stored program idea in general.
Story as old as time: corporate vs academia working towards very different goals and with different incentives, short term profit vs publication. In very rare cases, the scholar gets the rewards.
The existence of an incentive doesn't predestine the outcome.
Von Neumann was the one who inappropriately failed to credit them in "First draft...". Goldstine was the one who distributed it knowing they were legally unable to publish themselves. These are the unethical actions that clouded the record. Between these two sides, I'll be trusting Eckert and Mauchly's account.
Ehh.. I'm curious which things you're referring to. The patent trial was hogwash, so depending on the topic, 'disproven in court' could mean literally nothing. I hope you're not just an Atanasoff crank...?
Saying "like any other stored program computer" makes it sound like there were a bunch of them, but as I understand it there was really only ONE up and running at that time in 1948 - IBM's SSEC. The stored program EDVAC, whose architecture Von Neumann had formalized, was still not yet running, and Von Neumann personally advised on adapting ENIAC to this mode of operation.
As I understand it, even after adaptation to "stored program" mode, the program was still configured rather than loaded and stored, but now configuration was done using the function table dials (essentially a dedicated dial for each program step) rather than patch cords, and was a lot more convenient. Punched cards could be used for reading/writing data, but not for programs.
It seems there was no BIOS because I/O was so primitive. Per configuration a punched card would be read into the "constant transmitter" unit, then one of the read numbers could be copied into one of the 20 accumulators. Or you could do the same in reverse to output data from the accumulators.
Right. The patent refers to "semi-permanent cable connections" between card reader, registers, and printer. Basically, you could load and dump parts of memory, in decimal. The registers were all decimal, and so were IBM tabulators, so the interface is mostly a set of relays. No sign of format conversion or alphabetic capability.
As a matter of interest, "that time" being April, it was only two months later in June that the Manchester Baby ran its first stored program.
EDSAC as early as 1949 had an "initial orders" module. A boot-up ROM. There was a bank of rotary selector switches, to set the octal digits in each ROM word.
David Wheeler (of subroutine fame) figured out the most sensible thing to put in the tiny ROM was a paper tape loader and mini-assembler that loaded the rest of itself from paper tape. So at switch-on the machine would start reading the tape input and run. Programs could be written on the teletype with mnemonics and relative addresses in octal.
It seems a little strange that more advanced later machines like the original PDP-11 from 1970, couldn't "autostart" from ROM like that. You had to toggle in a bootloader.
I think that was because core memory was non-volatile. (EDSAC didn't use core; it had a refreshing DRAM-like delay line memory.) With core, you only had to toggle the bootloader into once and, provided your software didn't accidentally overwrite it, it was still there after a power cycle. So re-toggling in the boot loader was not really that common, despite how much lore surrounds it.
DEC supplied optional boot rom cards for UNIBUS, starting with the BM792, which arrived as a 32 x 16 matrix of diodes. You had to remove some of the diodes by hand to set the boot code.
Later cards used PROMs, and were pretty fancy. The M9312 had 512 words and included some basic CPU diagnostics. Different variants handled boot from disk, paper tape, console, etc, and you had to specify the options you wanted when you bought the card.
In Fred Hoyle’s science fiction novel, The Black Cloud, there is a computer in an early chapter that is clearly inspired by EDSAC. When they run a program on it, the process is just what you describe - they load a paper tape in through the tape reader, which Hoyle describes in detail.
I first read that book before I knew that in British English a vacuum tube is called a valve (from thermionic valve and which makes more sense than the American term, I think), so I was confused by the line about how warm the room was due to all of the valves!
We called them thermionic valves too, just the terminology shifted a bit over time. We also called capacitors "condensers". Both were references to steam powered control systems.
Hmm, I have read contradicting accounts.
They say the term did not originate from the steam condenser. Quite the opposite, it became deprecated because of the ambiguous meaning of steam condenser.
Processes like this are where "boot" comes from. The machine was pulling itself up by its bootstraps. The ROM was sometimes called the "bootstrap loader."
"Oh, I wonder which subroutine he came up with"
(Googles it)
"Ah"
"Which subroutine did he come up with?"
"Yes"
"The"
Very biased, but at Cambridge we were taught (by Maurice Wilkes among others) that the EDSAC was the first “useful” computer.
Because the PDPs had magnetic core memory, so the bootloader, once toggled in, stayed in memory. The OS took care not to overwrite it.
And in normal operation you wouldn't have to use it at all, you just switched on your PDP, and it was in the same state as when you switched it off.
Also, bootloaders were short (because peripherals had lots of intelligence); toggling one in was a matter of minutes.
Exactly. And when RAM cards were available to replace core (very late in the lifecycle of the minis), the RAM was battery backed to simulate that behaviour.
Yes that early pdp-11s had core memory, its contents survived power cycling. We'd hand toggle in the bootstrap into high ROM and start it, it would load whatever we were running from paper tape - unless you did something stupid that trashed that high memory you'd get to reuse the bootstrap over and over
Having said that the bootstrap was something like 8 16-bit instructions, a pain but not impossible
Alan Kay answering questions on Quora. What a cool gift to the world!
This is one of the thing we lose as more and more of the conversations turn to people privately asking LLMs things, who do their best to scrape out answers from the existing info or make up a best guess. People are losing the ability to ask experts with real, unique knowledge and then share that knowledge with humanity.
he answers questions here too
The most surprising thing about this to me is Alan Kay answering questions on Quora.
He's been doing that for years. I wish he'd come back to HN!
https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay
Me too. It's a shame he doesn't post here more often, because Quora's thoroughly enshitified user interface is so spectacularly hard to use and intentionally, aggressively, darkly patterned.
Quora has at least three different ways of folding content, and each one needs its own click: answers truncated at "(more)", comments collapsed behind "View comments", and nested replies collapsed again behind "View more replies", yet tellingly no "Expand all" button.
For logged-out readers there's also a login wall that blurs the rest of the page. The whole thing is fragile. Click the wrong thing, hit Back, or refresh, and it forgets everything you expanded and where you were scrolled, and dumps you back into a feed of unrelated "related" answers.
Worst of all, there's no way to link to a comment so that it restores your viewpoint and opens everything back up. The link lands on a page with everything folded again, and whoever you sent it to has to redo all the clicking to find what you meant. While HN has one kind of fold, [–], and every comment has a permanent item id that takes you straight to it, expanded and in context.
Maybe his last long visit here didn't leave him with a good impression of the "civilized behavior" of Hacker News. hota_mazi aggressively argued that Alan didn't coin the term "object-oriented," and then, when challenged, posted a bunch of unsubstantiated disrespectful misinformation.
Worse, hota_mazi did it while attacking Alan's friend Joe Armstrong in Joe's own memorial thread, days after Joe died, when Joe could no longer answer for himself. Alan exasperatedly asked him twice to do his homework.
Joe Armstrong died on April 20, 2019. The next day his essay "Why OO Sucks" was posted here, and the thread became a place to remember him.
https://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/ok/Joe-Hates-OO.htm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19715191
arendtio wrote:
oldpond wrote:
(Not everyone was so kind. Someone posted just "Why Joe Armstrong sucks"; it's [dead].)
The top comment, by rhblake, quoted Joe's own 2010 explanation of why he changed his mind about OO:
That's Joe, in his own words, crediting his supervisor and Alan. hota_mazi replied to it, two days after Joe's death, by accusing both men of opportunism [log in and set showdead=true to view flagged posts]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716281
hota_mazi on April 22, 2019 [flagged]:
skndr asked:
Before Alan had even joined the thread, hota_mazi dismissed Alan's own account of his own work:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716318
hota_mazi on April 22, 2019:
lliamander asked the obvious question:
So did DonaldPShimoda:
hota_mazi admitted he had none:
DonaldPShimoda, who works in programming language research, set him straight:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716632
hota_mazi demanded the sources while still rejecting the claim while hypocritically not doing any homework or providing any sources to his misinformation:
DonaldPShimoda:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716791
Then Alan arrived and said it plainly, in his own words:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717640
alankay on April 22, 2019:
And he replied directly to hota_mazi's first comment:
hota_mazi wasn't done with Joe. lliamander had challenged him:
So, in the thread where people were mourning Joe, hota_mazi explained that Joe had been a bandwagon-chaser who bent the definition of OOP to cash in on its success:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716419
hota_mazi on April 22, 2019 [flagged]:
That contradicts Joe's own explanation, quoted at the top of the same thread, and Joe was no longer alive to correct it. revvx did it for him:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716488
And Alan, two days after losing his friend, was left defending Joe's character:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717646
hota_mazi doubled down, arguing that since mainstream OOP ended up meaning something else, Alan's and Joe's view didn't count:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716595
revvx:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716625
To which Alan could only say, again:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717662
On top of that, people doubted it was really Alan at all. hannofcart asked:
Alan answered:
DonaldPShimoda still wasn't sure:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19721376
That's what Alan was answering with his weary verdict:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19721772
alankay on April 22, 2019:
(To DonaldPShimoda's credit, he apologized, and Alan graciously reminisced about crawling over Simula machine code listings unrolled down the hallways of the Merrill Engineering Building.)
A week later Alan was still correcting the record, when someone misquoted him:
I had Claude Opus disassemble the CDC 6600 dead start panel. The hard part was finding a better image of the switches so the vision could read the bits.¹
The content isn't very interesting, and Claude's comments aren't very detailed. Not bad for 2 minutes of work about a 62 year old computer though. Look out Ken Shirriff, AI is coming for you.²
1. https://dyninst.github.io/scalable_tools_workshop/petascale2...
2. Not really. I have no idea if this disassembly is corrrect.
3. Quora is prison for words.
BIOS wasn't a concept until 1975 with CP/M so it isn't possible for a computer older than that to have one.
Many people unfortunately completely conflate one or more of these terms to generically mean "ROM-resident code that enables a device to self-bootstrap": BIOS, UEFI, firmware, bootloader, boot ROM, boot flash, IPL, (boot) monitor, microcode
So early computers did have BIOS, but they loaded from wetware rather than firmware?
Kay nails it: the ENIAC 'BIOS' was literally a team of humans with patch cables. Makes you appreciate modern bootloaders.
Leave it to Alan Kay to articulate the spirit of a BIOS, even for ENIAC. Those fundamental abstractions persist.
Reading Kay's take reminds me those guys were the BIOS. Fascinating how computing evolved from pure hardware, not just software.
Kay probably explained how we were the BIOS then, flipping switches and loading programs by hand. Different era!