There's a famous computer joke that goes along the lines of "we needed 4K of RAM to send people to the Moon, and now we need <e.g. 4GB to keep a grocery shopping list>".

I think it is a fine illustration of the Jevons paradox in computing, and one of the "computing Murphy laws", known as the Parkinson's Law of Data - "Data expands to fill the space available for storage". I also think it's quite intriguing to highlight observations of a similar phenomenon related to compilers, especially in the context of #permacomputing

Yesterday I read a book on a minimalist compiler written in the 00's, having a remarkable footprint of merely 424 KB of RAM.

And then I thought about Turbo Pascal for CP/M that ran with 64KB of RAM. And then various compilers that worked on micros with 16KB or less.

And then I read about things like the ALGO compiler, an ALGOL clone, for a first generation/vacuum tube computer Bendix G-15 (yes, the one Usagi Electric has): 2160 words of 29 bit RAM, no more than 370 op/s.

After the Code of Conduct and the Mediation process, the Core Governance document is now ready for wider feedback.

This document describes what JoinJabber does and what we aim to achieve. It also describes what our values are and a way to make proposals to the entire community.

Feel free to share and read/respond to the document.
codeberg.org/joinjabber/collec…

#xmpp #permacomputing #consent #jabber

collective/Governance/Governance.md at governance

collective - Resources and meta issue tracker

^Codeberg.org

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Second Update: Event Uncancelled!

Join us this Tuesday, April 23rd for the 3rd edition of the B̵e̵r̵l̵i̵n̵ ̵P̵e̵r̵m̵a̵c̵o̵m̵p̵u̵t̵i̵n̵g̵ ̵M̵e̵e̵t̵u̵p̵!

We are now having an open-ended discussion about how we can apply #permacomputing principles as part of free desktop development with @tbernard, @sonny, @cas, @rmader, @verdre

It starts at 19:00 (also known as 7PM)

The reason why #uxn and concepts like #permacomputing excite me is that I'm a sucker for archival practices.

Today I was reading about a new proposed standard called Records in Context. There is a fantastic text (in German) introducing and overviewing the reasoning behind RiC. Basically it is nothing less than a revolution in digital archival practices as it wants to forego the classical tree model in favor of a relational model for the organization and contextualization of knowledge.

It doesn't sound like much. But when one becomes aware about all the effort that archivists, librarians, restorators, and other people active in GLAM are putting into care, maintenance and organization of their respective archives, proposing new ways of going about your daily business can have huge impacts.

arbido.ch/de/ausgaben-artikel/…

(long post... deleted + redrafted behind CW, sorry!)

An #abacus seems very #permacomputing.

It is frequent to use spare columns to hold intermediate results during a long computation. So... a small abacus is an accumulator machine and a larger one that holds several results is more like a stack machine.

The cpu microcode, like multiply/divide algorithms, are memorized by a human. Lots of microcode can be found here: totton.idirect.com/abacus/

The programs (breaking down your task into math operations) can be come up with on the spot, written on paper, or they can also be memorized if you do them frequently enough.

The biggest thing missing here is RAM, which could also be used for stored programs. I've seen this done with paper, for machines like the CARDIAC: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboar….

Scaling up my abacus to a matrix of 100x10 Abacus-style digits would fit in a 50x25 inch desktop frame and yield 1,000 decimal digits or ~500 bytes of RAM.