I don't think the article is AI. I use AI to write a lot of research documents, with footnotes, and it never feels as casual as this writing, even if you prompt it that way. And I'm using all the SOTA tools.

Could be wrong, though. AI is getting nearly impossible to detect in most tasks.

I don’t think Gil Anelio leads Apple anywhere except bankruptcy in any alternate timeline.

In my alternative world :

- all the kids want a zune this Christmas which is gaining traction on market leader creative

- general magic is bought by a baby bill post MS breakup to give us iPhone-ish in 2013

- wearables is science fiction

- VR still sux

- Facebook doesn’t happen ( I can dream)

- blackberry is still a thing

Well, Apple would have gone out of business one way or another, and we'd still be at the mercy of carrier-locked "featurephones". No iPod, either.

And this isn't about BeOS, really; the lack of technical merit was a problem, but Mac OS X didn't ship in usable form for six years, and, you know, in that time they certainly could have ported QuickDraw GX and print drivers, and ported over Unicode support from the Taligent sources. But there's no timeline in which Gil Amelio manages to fully rescue Apple. He and the people he brought in didn't understand the problems.

Is that a better world? Quite possibly, because social media wouldn't have been able to destroy the world quite so effectively. (And I prefer MiniDisc to the original iPod; still have a couple of MiniDisc players and some blank discs.) But probably not better for computing.

The 400 version was on the site before, but those with an ailing 1200xl might find this useful as repair kits can be daunting or hard to source.

some more and different pictures for this lego build:

https://www.toxel.com/tech/2025/08/30/lego-imac-g3/

There was a link to an imgur gallery with down in the comments that has some addition photos of the event:

https://imgur.com/a/wukfY6B

This was interesting and really well written.

Not going to lie. I really didn't understand the algorithm this was coding and optimizing. depending on the bit depth you basically do a 1-d bressenham mapping x pixels into y pixels and the same for the y direction either duplicating scaled lines or dropping lines in the source image.

That's a great example! 10 sec per frame down to 5 FPS. Unusable to usable!

I love the 1mhz Apple 2 because just about anything becomes usable this way.

And one running at 16Mhz is crazy! That same image routine can go a few times faster, limited in the end by the 1Mhz bus on the way to the graphics screen.

There are times when I wish the Apple ended up with a video card standard. That would have ended up PC like and may well have brought the higher speeds to more software more generally.

Makes an interesting point that we actually need a "Return" key again nowadays for chat clients where we are always having to type [alt]/[shift]/[ctrl]+enter to get a new line without submitting the message. Or sometimes those submit the message and we have to do it without. There's no standard.

All that weight to support such a shitty UX.

PDF was so painful until Mac OS X came along with (a) the Preview app to make it actually nice to read the documents, albeit not supporting every feature; and (b) universal support for printing to PDF files.

Thanks for posting the link. Look back at typesetting in the old times. A lost art. Set the tone for what would come later. In some ways it looks like markdown.

I posted the link twice in a row in the URL field and I can no longer edit it. The correct link is:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-08-30/0/POSTI...

Apologies.

That price tho…

I wonder the legality of this, I know that some dos versions where released by Microsoft, but not DOS 3.10. In any case that would be nice to get this archived for historical/research reasons.

I hope the 404 on this is temporary …

Cool story about compiling and running on ibm mainframe Linux. Why it was posted to LinkedIn baffled me but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Even referenced Carmacks Law so +1

This is so good. OG Mac’s are in short supply and the ravages of age will make what is left hard to keep alive. What made the Mac so great has been lost to complexity

What to Lego and retro computers have in common ? You can’t have just one

Thanks! I somehow missed this being released. Looks like a good read.

The mainframe division did all kinds of meddling to avoid canibalizing mainframe and AS400 sales. The coffee pot story about a coffee pot inside a "microsoft confidential" box during the OS/2 days was IBM not being able to get out of its way...

agree - looking at the old byte archive(s) we got up on the site. the older apple ads had a sketched liked quality to some of the cutaway drawings. Its why I thought it was period / familiar.

The Atari art style is equally unmistakeable. I have a coffee table book devoted to their art...

art of atari book - i have the hardback and iTunes digital : https://a.co/d/3X4mHWX

so popular (or so affected by the orange moron's tariffs) that Adafruit is having difficulty keeping this thing in stock

I really learned from this that "6" seems to be the default character. (Interestingly, there is no 6, where you'd expect it, like in the number row or on the numeric keypad, indicating that "6" is not a number.)

Also, is it just me, or is that an illustration style you'd rather connect with the Apple II? Which may be well why the keyboard is placed like it is and may explain the over-all cutesy appearance.

There may be some to this.

But I'm not entirely convinced that IBM just didn't know how to do this. E.g., there's the Aquarius concept (1977), which had progressed to working production prototypes, which would have come attractively packaged and with an app store based on bubble memory cards. (Apparently, this was canceled over concerns regarding the reliability of those bubble memory cards.) As a marketing concept, this would have been about 25–30 years ahead of its time – and it would have separated this neatly from any other IBM business. However, any such elaborate concept would probably have struggled in an organisation like this, where any move may endanger what has already been secured.

Maybe, the remarkable lack of context of the IBM 5150 was its internal selling point?

(Imaginary internal sales pitch: "See, this machine has no specs. We won't even say what it's for. We'll just tell them, the Little Tramp likes it, so you like it, too. No, it won't eat into mainframes.")

*) More about the IBM Aquarius (including photos) can be found in Paul Atkinson's book "Delete. A Design History of Computer Vapourware", Bloomsbury, 2013.

OOOF. completely missed. yeah. thats AI - completely missed the comment about so many ways to enter a "6".

Somedays, I can be a couple of bytes short of a file.

I imagine it's some combination of IBM having no experience marketing to home users and wanting to be able to have a low "starting price".

I think the keyboard labeling makes it pretty clear that it's AI.

Thanks for this, it’s great. Much more accessible than my own archive, which is in a box, in the loft, in my mums house 4500 miles away in the UK!

Suitably impressed. If you get your network sorted your archive should be a top level post here on 2sb.

After all it’s all about the internet points.