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0 pointsanthk11mo ago0 comments

And Lisps too, fitting a sector from a disk:

And probably a small forth too, with a dictionary defining every math word, something not so different to Lisp.

LLM's? 4GB of RAM? Your grampa's 486 with 16MB of RAM can do calculus too.

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Derive 2 for Dos. Green Screen 286 I think or 386 computers in a small side room. Later Windows version was better. Then there was the DOS version of Minitab 5 I think that came as floppy disks in the back of a spiral bound book which I used to generate data sets for students to process for homework so everyone got a slightly different sample.

You can do a lot of numerical maths just with a noddy spreadsheet of course.

anthkOP11mo ago

Macsyma, PDP10 + ITS under Maclisp.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Sys...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma

Fun fact: old Macsyma's math code still runs at is on modern Linux'/BSD's with Maxima. Even plots work the same, albeit in a different output format.

A 386 it's far more powerful than this.

mrybczyn11mo ago

At the 1940s Manhattan project, back when computer meant a job: "person who computes mathematical statements", major advancements were made in the integration of hyperbolic PDEs, by substituting electro-mechanical and then vacuum-tube machines to do the job. You know, those hard-wired vacuum tube monsters like ENIAC.

You could argue that the First useful thing electronic computers did was integration...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2021.1...

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