cowlark.com
A while back I picked up an old Canon Typestar IV portable typewriter in a junk shop: this is one of a class of electronic typewriter known as the ‘thermal wedgie’: battery powered, printing via a thermal print head to either heat sensitive paper or with a special ribbon, they’re light, small and...
cowlark.com
As it’s the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, I thought this would be a great opportunity to live code a demonstration of using my new compiler to write a simple lunar lander game… but first, I’m going to port the compiler to generate code for an actual lunar lander. Yes, my target...
cowlark.com
Livecoding time again today, and I’m writing a compiler. This is a prototype for an alternate take on code generation for my Cowgol programming language. This is an Ada-inspired programming language for very small systems, such as 8-bit machines, intended to be self-hosted on such systems...
cowlark.com
The other day, being unable to find a suitable open-source text editor for cpmish, I sat down and wrote a simple vi-like editor. It took nine hours. I have it all on video.
cowlark.com
So I’ve had, for a while, a non-functional Toshiba T1000 laptop computer — a classic 1987 laptop with a 4.77MHz 8088 processor and a whole 512kB of memory. And, er, no mass storage whatsoever. I got it from the late, lamented Weirdstuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale, California, before it closed. I have...