Monday, April 18, 2005
	1:02:38 PM   Seattle DOS was a better rewrite of CP/M for 16 bits than CP/M-86 Tim Paterson did a better job of rewriting CP/M for 16 bits than Digital Research did, and it's related to the DOS vs CPM/86 porting issue Adam Barr discusses in Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters (starting at the bottom of page 187 in this online sample). At the time I was doing development work on CP/M Z80 systems, and we were looking for a way to move to a 16 bit OS (8086, NSC8000, 68000). I still have an original Seattle DOS manual (unfortunately, somewhere in storage) from when we did our research. Whether or not the Seattle DOS code was based on CP/M (which was in practice the open source OS of its time), Tim wisely made the basic API the same as CP/M and provided an extended API for 16 bit functions. CP/M-86, on the other hand, replaced the API with a single "new, improved" 16 bit version. This meant that I could port my programs and utilities to Seattle DOS simply by changing a few macro definitions, maintaining single source for both operating systems. I would have had to change all my source code to port to CP/M-86 (don't forget, this was all assembler). When IBM introduced the PC, with the choice of DOS or CP/M-86, it was clear that "DOS" took the Seattle DOS approach. I remember disassembling DOS 1.0 up to 2.1 - if only I could find those files ... Even if CP/M-86 hadn't been priced way too high, DOS still would have been the sensible choice since it was much easier (hence cheaper) to preserve our applications. Origins of MS-DOS [Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters March 2, 2005] Tim Paterson, who wrote the operating system QDOS on which the original PC-DOS and MS-DOS was based, is suing the author of a book which claims that QDOS was a ripoff of CP/M. Microsoft legally acquired QDOS; the issue is whether Paterson had earlier "ripped off" CP/M when writing QDOS. It's not clear what exactly "rip-off" means; there's no doubt that QDOS looked like CP/M, because most command-line-based OSes back then looked the same (and still do; Monad on the surface looks a lot like CP/M, QDOS, PC-/MS-DOS, and any Unix shell).   8:33:43 AM   Convergence in Academic Jargon Generation and Parsing The circle of technology is almost complete. Academic jargon generators have met academic jargon parsers, and we can finally get rid of the academics who are now redundant. Despite the "Vodka is good, but the meat is rotten"[pdf] myth, computers have been better than people at generating garbage for years. It has been shown [ref: 87,133,279] that the primary [ref: 32,942] functionalityization [ref: 88,166] of academic [ref: 482-507,666] jargonization [ref: 1] is to stretch out a single zero-to-one-line idea into a series of journal articles, concluding with the need for further funding. "The principal occupation of the academic community is to invent dialects sufficiently hermetic so as to prevent knowledge from passing between territories. By maintaining a constant flow of written material among the specialists of each group, academics are able to assert the acceptable technique of communication intended to prevent communications." -- [Wright House] Computer Program Makes Essay Grading Easier A professor of sociology spent six years developing the program and has been testing it on his pupils for the past two. Students load papers directly into the system via the Web and get nearly instant feedback. The program scans text for keywords, phrases and language patterns. It analyzes sentence and paragraph structure and can ascertain the flow of arguments and ideas. It gives each work a numeric score based on the weight instructors place on various elements of the assignment. Students have challenged the scores, but if they don't use the right lingo in their papers, they're out of luck. "In sociology, we want them to learn the terms," Brent said. With up to 140 students enrolled in his writing-intensive, introductory sociology course, Brent estimates he's saved more than 200 hours of work per semester. -- [CNET 4/7/2005 via Slashdot: 4/8/2005] > GPLed code generates automated Comp Sci papers -- output accepted for conferences!. A GPL'ed automated computer science paper generator programmed by MIT students produces results so good that the output has been accepted at conferences. Between the pompous CS-speak ("few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and public/private key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable") and the amazing diagrams, this thing is nearly the funniest thing EVAR. [Boing Boing 4/13/2005]

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