1977, Hmm 48 years ago. Last week, during the week of July 21 2025, I discovered that two things, I wanted to talk about, happened in 1977, and it made a lot of sense to me. One was it’s the year “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was released, which gave a big impact to me. The Japanese title MichitonoSouguu, Encounter with the unknown, was perfect. It was moving to see how people communicate with others, whose language they don’t know or who they are, using music. The other is that Voyager 1 and 2, which are still flying nonchalantly today, took off in 1977 from the earth. Their functions are gradually shutting down, and now they can only communicate basic information. And they cover a distance that takes one light-day to cover. I heard news for the past two months that communication was cut off but has since been restored, and that attitude control seems to have worked/recovered properly, even though no commands were given from Earth. I heard that it seems that a command was executed from an unused backup function.
1977年、ちょうど48年前か。二つの取り上げたいことがこの年だった事を発見して、なるほどなぁ、と思ったのが先週。一つは、未知との遭遇の公開年、これってインパクト大きかった。日本語題がしっくり。言葉もどんな相手かも分からない相手とどうやって意思の疎通をするか、音楽に乗せて、というのが感動的。もう一つは、今も淡々と飛んでいるVoyager 1と2号は、77年に飛び立った。ドンドンと機能を止めて、今は基本的な情報だけの通信。しかも1light-dayかかる距離をつなぐ。この2か月ほどは通信が途絶えたが復旧したとか、姿勢制御がちゃんとできたようだ地球からは指示してないのに、とか。使ってないバックアップ機能のコマンドが実行されたようだ、と
What was I doing in 1977? The story of the monitor program in the Voyager article from NASA JPL reminded me of that time. There was a story of myself about the software I was working on it. In 1976, my supervisor bought me an Intellec8 mod80 from Intel, a machine like the boss of Altair, and I made a homemade board on it, attached a separate memory module with 64kw, 1word=36bit,… and that’s what I was doing. I wrote the machine language program with about 5,000 steps in total, burned it into PROM, and ran it in one go. Later, my juniors made a simulator on the mainframe, and I tested it with that. I ran Lisp. My thesis advisor told me to make evidence that it was working, so I ran a mathematical formulae processing system called Reduce. It could do symbolic differentiation and organize expressions. Thanks to that, I was able to understand all the operations after turning on the power of computer in 1977.
1977年の私、何をしていたか、NASA JPLのVoyager記事にあるモニタプログラムの話からずるずると同じ頃のことを思い出して行った。その頃のソフトの話があって、なんだ自分もやっていたとか。76年に、Intellec8 mod80というIntel謹製のAltairの親分みたいなマシンを指導教官に買ってもらって、それに自作ボードを作り、64kw で、1word=36bit の別メモリモジュールをくっつけて…という事をやっていた。全体で5千ステップくらいの機械語プログラムの作成は直書き、promに焼いて、一発で動かす。あとからシミュレータをメインフレームに後輩達に作ってもらってそれでテストはした。Lispを動かした。動いてる証拠も作れっていうからReduceという数式処理システムを動かした。記号微分や式の整理ができる。77年にはお陰で、電源投入後の動作を全て把握。
My research work for PhD started with the Intellec8 command system, which I remember was about 1KB in size. It was well made. It was also extensible, and it was amazing. It just stuck in my head. After I got my PhD and had a break, personal computers started to become popular. The first was the CPM-86. This was almost the same core as the Intellec8 monitor program. The difference was that CPM could use floppy disks. One day, I dumped the CPM and disassembled it by hand. The structure was similar, so it was easy. It had some interesting features. It had an entrance that created a command string and passed it to execute it. I thought that was obvious, so I used it myself, and also published it in BIT magazine upon request. There was also an article in IEEE Computer about the structure of stack machines, and I had broken it down and taken notes, but Mr Banno asked me to write about that as well, so I wrote about it. I forgot which one it was, but I was contacted by him saying that it was the top reader reputation. I also helped out several computer systems development companies. I thought that the contents of an OS or language processing system were not so strange, but something I was familiar with. This all started around 1977.
出発は、Intellec8コマンドシステムで、1KB位のサイズだったと思う。これがよくできてた。拡張性もあるし、すごかった。頭の中にビッタリと入った。博士も取れて、一息ついた頃パソコンが流行り出した。最初はCPM-86。これは、ほとんどintellec8のモニタと同じ核。違いはフロッピーが使える。ある日、じゃぁと、CPMをダンプして、手作業で逆アセンブルしていった。構造は同じようなものだから簡単。いくつかおもしろい機能が入っていた。コマンド文字列を作って、それを渡して実行させる入り口が作ってある。そりゃそうだろうな、と自分でも利用して、かつリクエストがあったのでbit誌に載せた。また、スタックマシンの構造についてのIEEE Computerの記事があって、それを噛み砕いてメモしていたが、それも書いてよ、と坂野さんがいうので書いたりしてた。どっちだか忘れたが、読者の反応としてトップだよ、とか連絡をもらった。いくつかの処理系制作社の手伝いもした。OSや言語処理系の中身ってそんな変なものじゃない、馴染んだものだと思った。この発端は1977年頃のこと．