Ongoing PunchCard releases

Hi Dave, I did some thinking today about what you were saying in the
meeting about PunchedCard and new Squeak releases.  PunchedCard has
not needed any changes for eons.  Its non-intrusive and so will
probably work for several more future Squeak releases.

So why we should we have to do a manual exercise of tagging it with
"Squeak4.5" in SqueakMap?  It's a good question.

I think the easiest and most natural approach for projects at rest is
to simply let them remain at rest.  We don't _need_ to tag PunchedCard
as "Squeak4.5" until the moment someone desires enough that
information to be documented in the catalog.  At which time we want it
to be very easy -- no need for new SM Release if no changes, just the
category assignment.

Until then, nothing stops anyone from downloading the current
PunchedCard "2.0" version in Squeak 4.5 even though its not tagged for
it.  If it is found not to work in 4.5 (or some future release), we at
least have the tag documenting the last version of Squeak it was known
to work in.  They could run it there and if they care enough they'll
update it for 4.5 and add a new catalog entry.

The SqueakMap client window should be replaced to look more like a
System browser..  Categories | Packages | Releases across the top,
with notes where the code pane is..

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 08:40:08PM -0500, Chris Muller wrote:
As the maintainer of (Bob Arning's excellent) PunchedCards, here is what
I want to be able to do when a new Squeak release is declared, such as
Squeak 4.5:

1) I will test the package and make sure that it works on the new Squeak
release.

2) After confirming that it works, I want to update some attribute of the
current release (which is "2.0" for PunchedCards) to declare that it
works on Squeak 4.5, and that it should appear on the list of safely
available packages in a Squeak 4.5 image.

What I specifically do not want to do is declare a new release of
PunchedCards for Squeak 4.5. The reason that I do not want to do this
is that there has been no change to PunchedCards, and if I were to
tell people that a "new release" was available, this would imply that
something has changed in PunchedCards to support Squeak 4.5 when in
fact nothing of the sort has happened.

>
> Until then, nothing stops anyone from downloading the current
> PunchedCard "2.0" version in Squeak 4.5 even though its not tagged for
> it.  If it is found not to work in 4.5 (or some future release), we at
> least have the tag documenting the last version of Squeak it was known
> to work in.  They could run it there and if they care enough they'll
> update it for 4.5 and add a new catalog entry.

This is exactly what I do not want. The user should not have to guess
about this. I actually *did* test the current release of PunchedCards on
the new release of Squeak, and I have confirmed that it works. I want to
communicate that fact to potential users of PunchedCards. I do not want
the user to have to guess about it after I already went to the trouble
of testing to confirm that it works.

In the unlikely event that something actually changes in the PunchedCards
package (such as adding the capabiity of filing out Squeak source to a
stack of virtual punched cards, but I digress), then I want to declare
a new release at the time. And I will want to test that new release, and
have some way to declare what versions of Squeak it works with. But until
that time, I do not want to declare a new release of PunchedCards.

Dave


>
> The SqueakMap client window should be replaced to look more like a
> System browser..  Categories | Packages | Releases across the top,
> with notes where the code pane is..

Yep.  Okay, great, so you're golden then.  It looks like you've
already done exactly that for the last few Squeak releases..

> What I specifically do not want to do is declare a new release of
> PunchedCards for Squeak 4.5. The reason that I do not want to do this
> is that there has been no change to PunchedCards, and if I were to
> tell people that a "new release" was available, this would imply that
> something has changed in PunchedCards to support Squeak 4.5 when in
> fact nothing of the sort has happened.

Yes, of course.  You don't want to have to declare a new release, you
shouldn't have to, and you don't have to.  That's the way it already
is!  The wiki page "How to designate existing SqueakMap packages for a
new version of Squeak" (http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6180) says this
in step 6.

Yes, of course!  :)  I'm not sure what you meant by that first
sentence of the above paragraph, but the rest of it is exactly how it
works today.  You cared enough about PunchedCards to test and tag it
for the new Squeak release (with no need to create a new SM Release).

 - Chris

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 10:21:25AM -0500, Chris Muller wrote:
I think what we have here is a case of good old fashioned user error. I'll
read the instructions more carefully next time we do a Squeak release!

Thanks,
Dave

LOL, cool, no problem the instructions should try to be more clear.

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 12:10 PM, David T. Lewis <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 11:17:23AM -0700, Chris Cunningham wrote:
> Punched Card!  Neat!

FYI, this is Bob Arnings work, not mine.

>
> So, I downloaded this (not realizing what it was before), and it really is
> kinda neat.  I tried putting some COBOL code into one of them to see how it
> would have looked oh so long ago:
> [image: Inline image 1]
> Pretty nice.  Except for the font - what font do you use, David, to make
> the text at the top of the card be readable?
> Also, if your background is close to the color of the cards - hard to see
> the punches.  But that's fairly accurate...

I have not paid much attention to the font. I think that if I were to work
on any improvements, I would put a high priority on implementing the hanging
chad feature ;-)

Dave



>

On 16-05-2014, at 11:17 AM, Chris Cunningham <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Punched Card!  Neat!

Not having ever followed the story of this morph I may be asking a dumb question - but did anyone ever animate executing them? There has to be an interesting educational demo in there somewhere.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Can easily be confused with facts.

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 11:39:15AM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
>
> On 16-05-2014, at 11:17 AM, Chris Cunningham <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> > Punched Card!  Neat!
>
> Not having ever followed the story of this morph I may be asking a dumb question - but did anyone ever animate executing them? There has to be an interesting educational demo in there somewhere.
>

Nope, I don't think anyone has done this. It might be a fun thing for someone to try.

Dave
 

Original context mercilessly scrubbed for brevity.

I've *always* wanted to play with punched cards. Never ran across a machine that read them, though. Then I saw this thread...

Okay so in the last week I had an itch to emulate something. I was thinking 6502, and spent a bit of time reading up on the architecture, but I haven't written any code yet, which leads me to...

Did anyone ever do the 1401 emulator?

--Casey

On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 12:49:45AM -0700, Casey Ransberger wrote:
> Original context mercilessly scrubbed for brevity.
>
> I've *always* wanted to play with punched cards. Never ran across a machine that read them, though. Then I saw this thread...
>
> Okay so in the last week I had an itch to emulate something. I was thinking 6502, and spent a bit of time reading up on the architecture, but I haven't written any code yet, which leads me to...
>
> Did anyone ever do the 1401 emulator?
>

I don't think that it has been done in Squeak, but if you google around for
1401 emulators you will find lots of interest in the topic. Here is some good
inspiration:

  http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/restoring-the-ibm-1401/

And speaking of inspiration, the idea of visualizing a running computer is
nicely illustrated in the UI for Bert's SqueakJS:

  http://bertfreudenberg.github.io/SqueakJS/

Dave
 

Am 18.05.2014 09:49, schrieb Casey Ransberger:
> Original context mercilessly scrubbed for brevity.
>
> I've *always* wanted to play with punched cards. Never ran across a machine that read them, though. Then I saw this thread...
>
> Okay so in the last week I had an itch to emulate something. I was thinking 6502, and spent a bit of time reading up on the architecture, but I haven't written any code yet, which leads me to...
>
> Did anyone ever do the 1401 emulator?
>
> --Casey
I have done a (somewhat incomplete) 8080 emulator to run space invaders in Squeak a loooong time ago. It wasn't a pure
interpreter but did some sort of trace compiling to Smalltalk methods so its speed was somewhat usable even on my slow
PowerPC Mac where I ran Squeak at the time. Nowadays it should be no issue to just run a simple emulator at original
processor speeds.
But of course, with punched cards a mainframe/minicomputer emulator might be more appropriate. Micros have rarely been
used in conjunction with punched cards AFAIK.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin

On 18-05-2014, at 6:03 AM, Hans-Martin Mosner <[hidden email]> wrote:

That’s pretty cool. I guess we should throw in the Alien idea too - Bochs & GdbARM simulators cover lot of ground and I’m pretty sure that other emulators could be hacked to work in the same manner. Anyone for a 6502 Cog?


tim
--
tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: PDH: Page to Disk for the Hell of it