The Indy 500 was actually part of the official Formula 1 calendar from 1950 to 1960, though the two series diverged after that.
Some Indy features (refueling, changing tires even if they didn't have a puncture, safety cars) got adopted by F1 through the 1980s, specially as F1 started to lose audience to the American series in the early 1990s.
Though a problem, as you point out, it still happened. The 6800 based SWTPC was followed by 6809 machines what need to have all their software reassembled.
On the other side of the cpu wars, all those 8080 machines moving on the Z80s got to keep all their binary software, which happened again for IBM PCs and clones as those evolved.
My own memory of the events (which might be very wrong) was that a new vice-president of IBM semiconductors decided to drop bulk CMOS and focus exclusively on SOI (Silicon On Insulator). That suddenly left Transmeta without chips to sell. They had to scramble to find a new supplier and design their next generation processor for it (since the Crusoe wasn't portable to any other fabs). They were able to launch their Efficeon on TSMC 130nm (with a later version on Fujitsu 90nm) but the gap in supply was far worse for a startup than it would have been for a big company.
Backwards. The incompetent Transmeta board picked a VP from NVIDIA to be the CEO and his first action was to kill the IBM contract and move to TSMC, and forced TSMC to use a new unqualified process. This left us without chips to sell for over a year and notebook venders were furious and never returned.
This is what killed Transmeta, not all the technical details.
The VM in Slang had been previously published as part of the "blue book" (now that is what I call open source!) some 14 years before, and as the paper you linked to mentioned, Mario Wolczko at the University of Manchester had typed it in so it was available in machine readable form.
They did drop the object memory part completely and designed a new one from scratch.
Previously people had manually translated the VM from Slang to Pascal or C (I did so myself in 1986) but for this project they wrote a tool for that (in Smalltalk, of course).
Here is another copy of the "Back to the Future" paper:
Exactly, but the text has the same instruction sequence twice and the parent correctly indicated that the first copy should have used "lui" to illustrate the problem you mentioned and the second copy does use "auipc" to illustrate the fix you mentioned.
The early microcomputer market had three kinds of companies:
- those with organic growth, where the sales of products financed the development of new products: MITS, IMSAI, Sphere, Ohio Scientific, SWTPC, Cromemco, Processor Technology, etc
- those that were part of a larger company: Radio Shack, Commodore, Texas Instruments and Atari-Warner
- those that were financed by venture capital: Apple
In retrospect, the companies in the first group were doomed to not become an Apple. Later on we got many more venture capital based computer companies, with Compaq among the most famous.
In the case of Sphere it had many more problems than just how it was financed. They got an early reputation for not delivering at all or shipping non working products.
What was special about Sphere was that from a technical point of view it was a generation ahead of the competition: with a built-in screen it was more like a Commodore Pet or a Radio Shack TRS-80 from 1977 than like the boxes with LEDs and toggle switches from its peers in 1975.
You are correct about the US in relation to trademarks. The situation there is rather complex, with it being possible for people to just add TM to their texts and ask other people to do the same and it is considered legally binding. They can take the extra step of registering and then they add (R) to their texts and that gets them an even stronger legal case.
Because of the case law nature of the US legal system and the informality of TM, if other people start using the term in other ways (for example using "xerox" as a verb meaning "copy") and you don't show an effort to curb that then you can lose your trademark.
In other countries things are different. Brazil, for example, uses a Latin legal system which is more formal. So the only thing that matters is whether you have registered the trademark with INPI (National Institute for Intellectual Property) or not. Which is why Gradiente owned the iPhone trademark in Brazil even though they were not using it anymore (it was from a product from around 2000) and if you asked anybody on the streets in Brazil they would associate the name with Apple.
They hesitated a bit on continuing to release it as open source when they moved from Stanford to Sun (I should actually say Sun's lawyers hesitated) but then went ahead and released Self 2.0 sources (Self 1.0 and 1.1 had been open source). This continued with Self 3.0 and Self 4.0 and then the project was cancelled the first time as Sun decided to focus exclusively on Java. David Ungar was able to continue making small changes but neither the sources nor the binaries were released to the public.
Around 2000 Sun decided to restart the Self project with a embedded Self-in-Self called Klein and released Dave's improvements (including the PowerPC Mac port) while an outside group had done a port to x86 Linux.
I think it was 2006 when Sun cancelled the project again and Dave moved to IBM research.
So all the sources have been available since 1990, but with the delay I mentioned in the case of Self 4.1
Interesting, I seem to recall it just not being available in the mid-90s when I looked? Or was it under a restrictive not-really-open source license of some kind?
Or maybe I'm just recalling what you're talking about with post-cancellation changes.
The problem with Self in the 1990s wasn't the lack of sources (I just checked the 1994 Self 4.0 sources and the license looks like the typical BSD one) but the fact that the binaries only ran on Sparc workstations and not the computers people actually had. I might as well post the whole text of the license:
# Sun-$Revision: 21.2 $
Copyright 1995 Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Stanford University.
All Rights Reserved. RESTRICTED RIGHTS LEGEND: Use,
duplication, or disclosure by the government is subject
to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph (c) (1) (ii)
of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software
Clause at DFARS 252.227-7013 (Oct. 1988) and FAR
52.227-19(c) (June 1987).
Sun Microsystems, Inc. 2550 Garcia Avenue Mountain View, CA 94043 USA
LICENSE:
You may use the software internally, modify it, make
copies and distribute the software to third parties,
including redistribution for profit, provided each copy
of the software you make contains the copyright notice
set forth above, the disclaimer below, and the authorship
attribution below.
DISCLAIMER:
Sun Microsystems, Inc. makes no representations about the
suitability of this software for any purpose. It is
provided to you "AS IS", without express or implied
warranties of any kind. Sun Microsystems, Inc. disclaims
all implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a
particular purpose and non-infringement of third party
rights. Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s liability for claims
relating to the software shall be limited to the amount,
if any of the fees paid by you for the software. In no
event will Sun Microsystems, Inc. be liable for any
special, indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive
damages in connection with or arising out of this license
(including loss of profits, use, data, or other economic
advantage), however it arises, whether for breach of
warranty or in tort, even if Sun Microsystems, Inc. has
been advised of the possibility of such damage.
AUTHORSHIP:
This software has been derived from the Self system, which
resulted from the combined efforts of:
Bay-Wei Chang, Craig Chambers, David Ungar, Elgin Lee,
John Maloney, Lars Bak, Mario Wolczko, Ole Agesen,
Ole Lehrmann Madsen, Randall B. Smith, and Urs Hoelzle.
Some Indy features (refueling, changing tires even if they didn't have a puncture, safety cars) got adopted by F1 through the 1980s, specially as F1 started to lose audience to the American series in the early 1990s.