Javascript Hero: Change Computer History Forever

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3375

by cleverjake • 15 years ago

56 24 15 years ago

ascii.textfiles.com

paulirish• 15 years ago

Sounds like a job for emscripten: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki

textfiles2• 15 years ago

Jason here, who wrote that weblog entry. Quick comments.

- Yes, it is difficult in some ways. Easy in others. - Emscripten is very likely to be involved. - It will run slow for some things. That's fine. Things get faster. - Yes, this is really important.

I'm at jscott@archive.org if people want to work on it.

daeken2• 15 years ago

I've been working on a port of my IronBabel framework (universal emulator platform) to JS for a couple months whenever I can spare a few minutes. Designing it properly has been a challenge, but the goal is that any computer can be emulated using it. The focus is on simplicity and handling common tasks, e.g. generic memory mapping, JIT code caching, etc.

From here, what I'd love to do is this: develop emulators for common platforms in the clearest way possible (no optimizations -- that can be separate) and simultaneously document the hell out of older platforms. In the end, you'd theoretically have a repository comprised of a set of documentation and a set of "reference emulators".

It wouldn't be fast, but it'd preserve these platforms effectively forever.

AlexCP• 15 years ago

Green text on black background, my eyes hurt.

jblomo• 15 years ago

http://www.readability.com/

The bookmarklet will make it (and other sites) easy to read.

http://www.readability.com/articles/s15uh64p

Pent• 15 years ago

no kidding, this is even worse when you are on a tablet that doesn't support bookmarklets

acheron• 15 years ago

Never used a monitor where that was the only option?

My lawn: get off of it.

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

Let's be fair: The old green-screen monitors had much larger font sizes. Maybe that was less harsh. Also, I had younger eyes. ;)

Does anyone have an actual Apple II green-screen display (40 or 80 columns, 24 rows) emulated in Javascript to share with us? I found an Apple II emulator but it only plays games.

petercooper• 15 years ago

Tangentially related: Google recently posted a case study of porting MAME to Native Client (currently a Chrome thing): http://code.google.com/chrome/nativeclient/docs/portingMAME....

textfiles2• 15 years ago

Very appreciated.

drhayes9• 15 years ago

This. A thousand times this.

I was talking to a friend of mine about the "Digital Dark Ages." He didn't believe me that we were unable to view data that we had sitting around on computers anymore; one of my prime examples was computer games from the 80s that relied on bugs in the hardware to run. I'm glad that emulators exist to be provide that service.

But, man, being able to say, "Yeah, here's the URL to the gist of Choplifter," would be something completely different. The level of accessibility provided by the World's Largest Runtime (tm) would be unreal.

cpeterso• 15 years ago

If ASCII is the universal, forward-compatible data format, is JavaScript to become the universal runtime environment?

Every layer of software builds upon the lower software (and hardware) layers (and bugs). It's like a Jenga tower of dependencies. It would be nice if some middle layers could be excised/refactored to simplify our technology stack.

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

If we took out the Javascript layer we'd be down to C, right? We've had emulators written in portable C for nigh on twenty years. Where's the challenge in that? ;)

The advantage of JS as a runtime environment is that it's got the most extensive cross-platform app ecosystem in the world, with a lot of eyeballs on it. Every new difference that arises between the behavior of a JS engine and that of its peers is greeted by a hundred thousand screams from the mouths of a hundred thousand web developers.

Plus, I believe the pain required to get your app to run in all the popular JS engines is mild when you compare it to the ins and outs of cross-platform C libraries.

nknight3• 15 years ago

If the premise is ASCII, JavaScript cannot be the result.

ASCII is intensely simple and, for its intended purpose, very close to perfect. JavaScript is... not.

JavaScript is, at best, the most common language used for today's GUI applications. It and its "toolkit" (the DOM and HTML) need a lot of work, particularly wart removal, if they're going to have the timelessness of ASCII or its successor (UTF-8).

mukyu• 15 years ago

http://blog.archive.org/2011/09/03/hard-drive-archaeology-an... is a great example of this.

Natsu• 15 years ago

There's actually a fair amount of old hardware out there even still, but you're right that it won't last forever. Heck, there's an 8088 hiding under my bed, complete with math coprocessor, full RAM, CGA adapter (and monitor) and even a dot-matrix printer.

One of these days, I should find out if it still works or not.

danbmil99• 15 years ago

My eyes! All I see is green text, everywhere.

sp332• 15 years ago

If you want to experience what this will be like, there is a browser plugin called ActiveGS that lets you load Apple ][ and IIGS images directly into your browser and "boot" from them. http://activegs.freetoolsassociation.com/ (examples http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html )

Javascript Hero: Change Computer History Forever

Related Stories