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Mansa Musa was the ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa. Details recorded here should be sourced; unknown information is left blank.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Li-Chen Wang (born 1935) is an American computer engineer, best known for his Palo Alto Tiny BASIC for Intel 8080-based microcomputers. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club and made significant contributions to the software for early microcomputer systems from Tandy Corporation and Cromemco.[1] He made early use of the word copyleft, in Palo Alto Tiny BASIC's distribution notice "@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED" in June 1976.[2]
The Homebrew Computer Club was a hotbed of BASIC development, with members excited by Altair BASIC. Fellow members Steve Wozniak and Tom Pittman would develop their own BASICs (Integer BASIC and 6800 Tiny BASIC respectively). Wang analyzed the Altair BASIC code and contributed edits to Tiny BASIC Extended.[3] Wang published in the newsletter a loader for the 8080, commenting on Bill Gates' "An Open Letter to Hobbyists":[4]
Altair Basic has a bootstrap loader of twenty or twenty one bytes long. In principle, you can use this bootstrap to load in your own loader which will then load in your program. However, since Mr. Bill Gates claims that he did not get payed [sic] enough and is in the mood of calling people thieves. (See HBCC newsletter '12-1.) I decided to code one myself. What comes out is a bootstrap of sixteen bytes long. This is still too long, maybe our professional experts can make it shorter. For the time being you are welcome to copy mine and I will not call you a thief (this includes Mr. Gates).
Palo Alto Tiny BASIC was the fourth version of a Tiny BASIC interpreter that appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, but probably the most influential. It appeared in the May 1976 Vol 1, No. 5 issue,[5] and distinguished itself from other versions of Tiny BASIC through a novel means of abbreviating commands to save memory, and the inclusion of an array variable ("@"). The interpreter occupied 1.77 kilobytes of memory and assumed the use of a Teletype Machine (TTY) for user input/output. An erratum to the original article appeared in the June/July issue of Dr. Dobb's (Vol. 1, No 6). This article also included information on adding additional I/O devices, using code for the VDM video display by Processor Technology as an example.
Wang was one of the first to use the word copyleft, in June 1976. In Palo Alto Tiny BASIC's distribution notice, he had written "@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED".[2] Tiny BASIC was not distributed under any formal form of copyleft distribution terms but was presented in a context where source code was being shared and modified. In fact, Wang had earlier contributed edits to Tiny BASIC Extended before writing his own interpreter.[3] He encouraged others to adapt his source code and publish their adaptions, as with Roger Rauskolb's version published in Interface Age[6] and Leor Zolman's save file and load routines.[7]
Wang also wrote a STARTREK program in his Tiny BASIC that appeared in the July 1976 issue of the People's Computer Company Newsletter.[8][9]
The original prototype TRS-80 Model I that was demonstrated for Charles Tandy to sell the idea ran Li-Chen's BASIC.[10]
Wang's mark also shows up in and on the Exatron Stringy Floppy ROM for the TRS-80 Model I. Embedded Systems columnist Jack Crenshaw calls Wang's Manchester encoding code, achieving 14K read/write speeds, a "work of art."[11]
The first color graphics interface for microcomputers, developed by Cromemco and called the Dazzler, was introduced in 1976 with a demonstration program called "Kaleidoscope" written by Wang. According to BYTE Magazine the program, written in 8080 assembly code, was only 127 bytes long.[12] But this short program stopped traffic on 5th Avenue in New York City.
Stan Veit was the owner of The Computer Mart in New York City. He placed a color television in his store window displaying the colorful, ever-changing kaleidoscopic patterns generated by the Dazzler and Wang's software. According to Veit: “People driving by began to stop and look – they had never seen anything like it before. In a short time the Dazzler had caused a traffic jam on 5th Avenue!” The police had to contact the building landlord and make him disconnect the television.[13]
Wang also developed "3K Control Basic" for Cromemco.[14]
Wang also created WSFN ("Which Stands for Nothing"), a programming language for controlling robots and published by Dr. Dobb's Journal in September 1977.[15]
In 2001 Wang was re-elected for a second term as chair of the Infrared Data Association's Technical and Test committee. In 2004 Wang was employed as Chief Technical Officer at ACTiSYS in Fremont, California, focused on IR/mobile products.
TINY BASIC FOR INTEL 8080 VERSION 1.0 BY LI-CHEN WANG 10 JUNE, 1976 @COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVEDThe June date in the May issue is correct. The magazine was behind schedule – the June and July issues were combined to catch up.
TINY BASIC FOR INTEL 8080; VERSION 2.0; BY LI-CHEN WANG; MODIFIED AND TRANSLATED TO INTEL MNEMONICS; BY ROGER RAUSKOLB; 10 OCTOBER, 1976; @COPYLEFT; ALL WRONGS RESERVED")
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Li-Chen Wang (born 1935) is an American computer engineer, best known for his Palo Alto Tiny BASIC for Intel 8080-based microcomputers. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club and made significant contributions to the software for early microcomputer systems from Tandy Corporation and Cromemco. He made early use of the word copyleft, in Palo Alto Tiny BASIC's distribution notice "@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED" in June 1976.
Tiny BASIC is a family of dialects of the BASIC programming language that can fit into 4 or fewer KBs of memory. Tiny BASIC was designed by Dennis Allison and the People's Computer Company (PCC) in response to the open letter published by Bill Gates complaining about users pirating Altair BASIC, which sold for $150. Tiny BASIC was intended to be a completely free version of BASIC that would run on the same early microcomputers. Tiny BASIC was released as a specification, not an implementation, published in the September 1975 issue of the PCC newsletter. The article invited programmers to implement it on their machines and send the resulting assembly language implementation back for inclusion in a series of three planned newsletters. Li-Chen Wang, author of Palo Alto Tiny BASIC, coined the term copyleft to describe this concept. The community response was so overwhelming that the newsletter was relaunched as Dr. Dobb's Journal, the first regular periodical to focus on microcomputer software. The small size and free source code made these implementations invaluable in the early days of microcomputers in the mid-1970s, when RAM was expensive and typical memory size was only 4 to 8 KB. While the minimal version of Microsoft's Altair BASIC would also run in 4 KB machines, it left only 790 bytes free for BASIC programs. More free space was a significant advantage of Tiny BASIC. To meet these strict size limits, Tiny BASIC dialects generally lacked a variety of features commonly found in other dialects, for instance, most versions lacked string variables, lacked floating-point math, and allowed only single-letter variable names. Tiny BASIC implementations are still used today, for programming microcontrollers such as the Arduino.
Chen Li-an (Chinese: 陳履安; pinyin: Chén Lǚ'ān; born 22 June 1937), sometimes spelled Chen Lu-an, is a Taiwanese mathematician, economist, and former politician. He was the president of the Control Yuan from 1993 to 1995.
Wang Li (Chinese: 王力; August 11, 1922 – October 21, 1996), born Wang Guangbin (Chinese: 王光賓) was a Chinese Communist propagandist and prominent member of the Cultural Revolution Group, in charge of overseeing the Cultural Revolution movement of Mao Zedong. Wang joined the Communist movement in his youth and became a specialist in theory and propaganda work. He was one of the leading figures of party propaganda at the outset of the Cultural Revolution, and contributed to the synthesis of Mao's theory of "continuous revolution." Despite being one of the leading proponents of the mass movement, Wang became one of its victims. He was purged on orders from Mao in 1967, shortly after he delivered an incendiary speech in support of rebellion at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and was sent to prison. He was retroactively denounced as a secret agent and extremist, and assigned blame for the Cultural Revolution's early excesses. He was released in 1982, and, having lost favor with both the Maoist and reform wings of the Chinese Communist Party, was duly expelled from the party in 1983.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Mae Jemison, aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992.