Technical difference. Shipping and operating in the wild. The vax / pdp11 rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper .

I wonder what the technical differences are to the pdp2011 project: https://pdp2011.sytse.net/wordpress/

Thanks for the pointers. Yes, I know the MouseText characters are present in Unicode, but it doesn't describe how they were intended to be used, it just provides them for compatibility.

For example, the screenshot in the 1985 Apple II HIG shows something like the character at 5E (in the table on Wikipedia) being used for the close box at the upper-left... but is that intended? The character at 5E doesn't have a left-hand edge, and I'm guessing that it's supposed to be used next to the character at 5A to provide that left-hand edge, but that's just my guess. I'd like to find some more reliable source.

You have been here correct? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MouseText

I can't prove it but I suspect that the Bánffy, Ricardo cited in reference 3 and 4 is the rbanffy seen here and on the orange site. maybe these are bread crumbs to help your quest. apologies if you knew these details already.

Quick link to the actual language page on SPG's website https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/modula3/

The Apple IIc and "enhanced" IIe included custom bitmaps in their character ROMs called "MouseText". Many of the bitmaps look like they might be useful as parts of scrollbars or titlebars or whatever, but I've never been able to find any solid guidance on how they were expected to be used.

The 1985 "Apple II Human Interface Guidelines" mention "MouseText" and "MouseGraphics" UI toolkits available from Apple, and on page 96 where it describes "windows" it even has a side-by-side comparison of a generic window drawn with "MouseText" and one drawn with "MouseGraphics", but I've never found any "MouseText" library in archives of Apple's developer tools or any further information of any kind.

The Lisa guidance is a revelation of what Apple knew to be true and required for applications and documents in a graphical world. Of course some things came and went but so so much was right if you read that origainl 1980 document.

I helped Dale set up these boards and other materials for the Amiga 040th at the Computer History Museum back in August. I mounted one of the original chip schematic sheets on some foam core board (very carefully) and hung it up. That sheet was neatly hand drawn and I didn't see any CAD in material he brought.

I haven't asked Dale specifically if there was any CAD used for Lorraine but from other things I've read about chip design around that time, CAD was just being introduced and pretty rare. These prototypes were first debugged and brought to a working state over Nov/Dec 83 and were shown in the private room at Amiga's CES booth in Jan 84. In 82/83 any computer even capable of complex chip design would have been an expensive minicomputer with an esoteric graphics terminal add-on and Amiga was a startup on a limited budget.

The updates also highlight other activities in ZX Spectrum Next community than just the Kickstarter. These are like "official" community newsletters. You'd like to check also the earlier updates.

To a first approximation, yeah, that's basically the process.

This is cool. In my mind this is what I though the Data General "Eagle" CPU would look like during the events described in the _The Soul of a New Machine_.

It’s crazy to think that this collection of boards and wirewrap would be transformed into a set of chips that became the beloved Amiga. I assume it goes from CAD to wire wrap and if it "works" the CAD is sent to fabrication on real silicon ?

I was a the booth and talked to one of the original designers. Was really cool to see such a nice part of history up close.

I think you need a beefier Amiga like an A3000 to do that. But I could be pleasantly surprised....

C64 in north america was ubiqitous and probably one of the first network effects. My friends Zach and Josh and traded games back and forth effectively doubling their game library. Quality was superiour to the 2600 and the NES wouldn't be out for a few more years. definitely a sweet spot.

The killer app for a high school kid was a word processor and printer. Really couldn't do that with a dedicated console. Teachers were inclinded to give better marks for typed content that obviously easier to read than the chicken scratch that passed for cursive. With spell check, that was the ultimate cheet code.

ChatGPT and Grok indicated to me that this is likely LLM assisted but not fully LLM generated. Example in this related link : https://slicker.me/emulator.htm - the heading about "caution find something better to do" is just against the LLM ethos. I've seen graduate level draft papers with "As an LLM..." stuck in them so I get your frustration.

I will leave it to our benevolant overlord to decide if the site should be in the kill file. I am more than happy to comply if that is the will of the site.

Every retrocomputing article from slicker.me is partially, or completely, generated with an LLM. There is even residual copy-paste the "author" forgot to remove from the bottom of the article: "Further context: For specs, market share, and sales estimates, see historical summaries and technical overviews of the C64’s hardware, software ecosystem, and market impact."

Please don't post these; they don't provide benefit.

I will want one just to run Amiga Unix. Does it have a network port?

> - The primary effect (as far as I can tell) was in convincing all the executives at Apple of the value of the GUI.

That's my takeaway as well. Larry Tesler says as much somewhere.

I'm not sure about the talent thing. The overall vision for the Mac as a shipping product came from Steve Jobs, who was never really an engineer. The original Mac team members have been very clear on this point. The engineers, however talented and visionary, necessarily had smaller scope (which is why they were engineers and not executives).

> The Apple projects were underway prior to these visits.

Some interesting Polaroid screenshots are found in "Busy Being Born" by Andy Hertzfeld [1], showing windows and a pointer interface for the Lisa, probably predating the PARC visit.

Andy Hertzfeld:

> (…) a mouse/windows based user interface. This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where I most wish that Bill [Atkinson] had dated them. It's tempting to say that the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Bill thinks that the windows predated that, although he can't say for sure.

[1] https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html

PS/Edit: It may be of interest to note that it wasn't a secret, at all, what was going on at PARC. At this point, hundreds of visitors had been given the tour, and some (or most?) had been given an even more extensive one than the one Apple was eventually given. It would have been trivial for folks at Apple to have a cursory knowledge of the ongoing GUI developments, even when they hadn't seen it with their own eyes, yet. And they were by no means the only ones: when the Lisa was eventually introduced, it was just one of 3 commercial systems with a GUI introduced that year. (The PERQ 2 / ICL 8222 being one of the more prominent examples.)

Notably, the Apple teams weren't shown the Star, but individually GUI enabled Alto applications, which didn't feature a coherent interface.

Xerox did have a fair chance to monopolising the desktop with the Star (developed by Xerox SDD El Segundo) and was first to market. Also, Apple licensed a lot from Xerox (like the mouse, while they actually came up with their own designs.)

The idea of the "stolen GUI" probably comes from the "Look and Feel" court case, where the argument was irrelevant, as it was found that Apple had unknowingly granted an unlimited license for the desktop GUI to Microsoft. (If the technology had indeed been stolen, would Apple been in any position to grant a license, in the first place? In this sense, the argument is somewhat contrary to its intentions.)

I spent 20 years at Xerox, including research. Even in the 90s and beyond the company had no interest in anything that didn't involve putting dots on paper. Now it's stuck in a rapidly shrinking industry and buying competitors to capture market share. Oh, what could have been.

It's kind of funny. I've been working on a write of Xerox history following my article on SRI/ARC at ARF. And I've been working on this question.

- There were two visits.

- Xerox held a stake in Apple in exchange for the visit.

- People from SRI and from Xerox were already at Apple.

- To whatever extent Apple "stole" from Xerox, Xerox had already "stolen" from ARC.

- The Apple projects were underway prior to these visits.

- The primary effect (as far as I can tell) was in convincing all the executives at Apple of the value of the GUI.

The key take away from this bit is honestly that employers should work harder to keep talent. Companies need the talent more than the talent needs the company. Over and over, my research into tech history shows that great talent can flourish at any number of companies, and there are far more great business managers, accountants, and marketers than there are extremely good and visionary engineers.

I do not mean to downplay the impact of great executives. They are important. The talented and visionary engineers are just more rare.

Apple had improved the Xerox original design a lot. Here is a video where Xerox Star is compared to Apple Lisa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBiWtJJN5zk

I had a friend yank it out of his ANS (sounds crude, but...) and it looks like it might just be an edge connector.

If you're willing to go with socketed DIP EPROMs you burn on a TL866 or something like that instead of a fancy in-system-programming thing we could probably make our own.

Not yet. That's another part being worked on, and then we'd need to figure out some way to flash it like the 68K ROM programmers.

The Apple Network Server in question was made before Jobs returned to Apple and brought OS X with him, so it means classic Mac OS.

Do you know what connector that ROM card uses (any makers' marks?) This would be a fun project to throw some hours at.

Classic Mac OS. It will run up to Mac OS 9.

XPostFacto might be able to drag it over the finish line, but I suspect there will be a driver problem. No way to know until we can get a system up with these ROMs, of course.

Asking for a friend. Does macOS here mean classic Mac OS or osx/macos ?

A genuinely interesting set of BBs sites running in Atari 8bit equipment. What it was back in the 80s when you could reach out and connect to someone you were otherwise unlikely to meet.