n_plus_1_acc 7 hours ago

Very interesting. I can See that you haven't assigned /w/, /j/ and /h/, is that intentional? Also, what happens when a word only has vowel phonemes, like 'eye'?

  • susam 4 hours ago

    The phoneme-number assignment is something I learnt from a book. That system was developed by several people over several hundred years. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system for more details about it.

    Indeed /w/, /j/, and /h/ are not assigned any numbers in this system. I believe the intention was to omit sounds that are phonetically too similar to vowel sounds.

    A word composed entirely of vowel sounds are not used in this system.

2mlWQbCK 21 hours ago

Screenshot shows program in GW-BASIC 3.23 from 1988. I tried it in GW-BASIC 1.0 (the version Microsoft released with a free license a few years ago) and it worked as expected. It also worked well in PC-BASIC.

https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC

https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/ (or just pip install pcbasic)

The debug-commands seemed to work fine with the debug included by default in DOSBox-X, but I was too lazy to input all of the digits. I never had any idea how to use debug, so I learned something new here in addition to some more things about mnemonics.

  • susam 20 hours ago

    The DEBUG.EXE example in my post demonstrates using the E command to enter bytes directly into video memory. While that's certainly one way to use DEBUG.EXE, I'd say it's not the most typical use case.

    Back in the day, I primarily used DEBUG.EXE to disassemble existing executables or assemble small programs from scratch. It almost felt like "scripting" in assembly language. If you're curious, I wrote a couple of blog posts in 2002–2003 documenting how I used to do this:

    * https://susam.net/programming-with-dos-debugger.html

    * https://susam.net/editing-binaries-in-dos.html

    I'd love to know if others have similar experiences!

watersb 19 hours ago

I used to have an association between screen colors and numbers from another Microsoft Basic, for the Tandy Color Computer.

Long since forgotten them. There weren't that many.

I love the mnemonic devices, though.

A friend of mine changed the way she teaches English sounds to non-native speakers; she and a partner developed the Color Vowel Chart.

https://www.colorvowel.com/interactive-chart

I don't know if that is relevant to this neat article, but I do enjoy the use of color to reinforce conceptual mappings.

alwa 20 hours ago

This delights me.

I’ve worked with Soundex, which uses a rather different set of digit/consonant associations, but the “major system” Susam uses was new to me. Apparently [0] it has centuries of pedigree—with the specific pattern Harry Lorayne used dating to the turn of the 19th century, laid out by a delightfully named Mr. Von Feinaigle.

[0] https://artofmemory.com/blog/history-of-the-major-system/

bitwize 19 hours ago

Sounds like a great way to get induced synaesthesia. What a neat little system. Playing with ideas in the purest sense.