2) Asian Rodents
3) Weather Systems.All three specified as upper case by Jeremy Vine.
Answer: 3) Weather Systems. But the contestant correctly sussed HTML as a computer language because it was all capitals, ... and then he chose answer 3).
I wonder if he is going to vote on June 8th ?.
Probably from GDS.
HTML can be described as a computer language. But not as a programming language.
I don't understand your message so does that make me a non egg head? To be honest many of the questions on quizzes are somewhat sailing close to the truth. I remember Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Modulo 2 etc. I also remember Forth and I personally think the latter was invented to send people into loony land. Brian
It was APL that was designed to send you made followed by SQL.
Just a different paradigm.
The operating system I'm using right now has a loader written in Forth.
I guess the original posting was designed to suggest either (a) quiz contestants are so stupid nowadays, or (b) that memories are so short.
Actually I don't see why the average quiz contestant should have heard of any of these. Algol stopped being used about 30 years ago, and while Cobol still runs much of the banking and finance industry, and Fortran is still heavily used for weather forecasting, the design of power stations, aircraft, etc. and in astrophysics research, the languages used are pretty much hidden from popular view.
I once wrote thousands of lines of Forth as it was the only language we could get running on a PDP-8 minicomputer with very limited memory, which we were using to test an x-ray telescope before it was launched into space. Since I'm fairly fluent in reverse Polish (thanks to using an HP calculator) I didn't think Forth was so strange. The lack of a GOTO statement sometimes required some awkward work-arounds, but to those who say that a language can't work without one: well Forth is a good counterexample.
No, it's just a paradigm that some prefer.
No, it has quite a lot of facilities. This is the final stage loader, not the boot block.
FreeBSD
On Sun hardware? The Sun bootloader is written in Forth.
No, on x86. It's been like that for many years. I suspect (but I'd have to check) that it dates back to the 1990s, on multiple architectures. Ah, yes. 1999, FreeBSD 3.1.
Really, the Forth interpreter is partly the loader, with Forth being used for extensive scripting.
Wouldn't be surprised if the idea came from Sun, though.
Ahh, Open Firmware, by the look of it.
"It was developed by Mitch Bradley at Sun Microsystems, and used in post-NuBus PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh computers (though it has been dropped with Apple's transition to Intel processors), Sun Microsystems SPARC based workstations and servers, IBM POWER systems, and PegasosPPC systems, among others. On those computers, Open Firmware fulfills the same tasks as BIOS does on PC computers.For example Fedora and Debian use the YaBoot BootLoader for Open Firmware.
The Open Firmware user interface includes a FORTH-based shell interface. FORTH is a powerful high level language that is remarkably compact. A complete Forth development environment including compiler, decompiler, assembler, disassembler, source level debugger, and assembly language debugger is present in the XO boot ROM (SPI FLASH). With the Open Firmware Forth system, you can directly access all of the hardware devices on the XO, use built-in functions like selftest diagnostics and games, and even write complete applications, without needing any external tools. The bulk of Open Firmware is written in Forth, so the source level debugger can be used to debug Open Firmware itself."
I still use an RPN calculator on the phone and tablet (as well as an HP calculator).
When I started in research (1970) there were still manual "Facit" calculators around, and the electromechanical ones were not uncommon. A lot of calculations were done on "analysis pads" because turnround was a day for mainframe jobs. In our well funded group of about ten scientists, we shared two canon calculators which were about the size of portable typwriters. Square roots, but no scientific functions. We had a budget of getting on for £1k (a year's salary for a new graduate) for a new one, with scientific functions. Then along came the HP-35. We had all read the literature, so the salesman who brought one in just said "Here it is then" and handed it over. It took us about two minutes to decide to order three. (About the same time we acquired a PDP8-F with a teletype as a data logger, it was a while before we added 8 inch floppies to it).
No reason at all.
I stopped writing Fortran in 1978 and moved to BCPL, and then C. These days it's typically javascript and PHP. The latter I use for any OS scripting, since it comes with OS X and shell script languages are little better than line noise.
How much was the HP35?
I bought (and still have) a cylindrical slide rule that I bought in
1974. Around 1975, I bought a simple electronic calculator for around £10. Before that, I used a Monroe mechanical calculator, which I still have.
I wish I could remember, I think it was about £250. $395 in the States, apparently.
I see from Wikipedia that it came out in 1972, not sure if it arrived in the UK the same year. It had an interesting bug, see for example
Sinclair started selling cheap scientific calculators by about 1975.
My first calculator c.1975 was a Commodore GL987R, which had memory functio ns and a percentage key and was rechargeable. About £17 according to a n advert in New Scientist. Then I got a Commodore SR7919D with maths and me mory functions a couple of years later and the price had dropped to around £12. It was particularly cheap and nasty. Then it was various Casios, still got an FX85WA kicking around my desk drawer.
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