Top all-time · #8425
Tom Pittman
Personal blog · ittybittycomputers.comhardwareprogramminghistory
Tom Pittman writes Itty Bitty Computers, a personal blog at ittybittycomputers.com about hardware, programming and history. Since 2010, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Blueprint for a 21st Century Operating System”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tom Pittman's site for retro computing history: Tiny BASIC, the CompileIt HyperTalk compiler, his OS design notes, and his views on Mac OS and Unix.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Blueprint for a 21st Century Operating System2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-08-08
What Hacker News says?
Some quotes: > If you must use Unix, Apple's AU/X was arguably the least painful way to do it (much easier to use than OS X), but even AU/X was so bad it didn't last long. > The Mac OS gave my productivity an order of magnitude boost; everything since then (even Mac OS versions after 6) only goes backwards. His design for an OS: http://www.ittybittycomputers.com/IttyBitty/OSblue.htm
Comment linking /IttyBitty/OSblue.htm
on “CompileIt: A Hypercard compiler written in Hypercard (2007)”Submitted TBEK: Tiny Basic Experimenters Kit (1977) as a story · 12 points
HN discussionInterestingly there was a third-party HyperTalk compiler that could produce INITs: http://www.ittybittycomputers.com/IttyBitty/CompileIt/
Comment linking /IttyBitty/CompileIt/
on “The Macintosh Way (1990) [pdf]”Submitted Deus Ex Machina or the True Computerist (1975) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe section about speed had some interesting claims: > The direct interpretation technology chosen for Tiny Basic sacrifices up to an order of magnitude execution speed, but the speed of modern computers reduces the impact. Moreover, the memory bus bandwidth limits in modern computers can completely cancel the speed advantage of native code over interpretation. I decided to verify how much TinyBasic really achieves.…
Comment linking /IttyBitty/TinyBasic/TinyBasic.c
on “The Return of Tiny Basic (2006)”Submitted The Stock Market Is A Zero-Sum Game as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTom Pittman, the author of this article, is still extant at [1], or at least, he wrote a blog post [2] in May 2018. However it is not clear to me why this old article should be reposted. Is Tiny Basic [3] of any current interest? [1] http://ittybittycomputers.com/Bio.html [2] http://ittybittycomputers.com/WebLogs/WebLog18a.htm [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC
Comment linking /WebLogs/WebLog18a.htm
on “The Return of Tiny Basic (2006)”Submitted A Short Course in Programming(1980)by Tom Pittman as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Blueprint for a 21st Century Operating System as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
