- This is mostly still good, relevant advice that software engineers in particular really should take heed of.
- Butler Lampson pretty much invented what would become the modern computer at Xerox PARC with the Alto. I first read about Butler Lampson in _Programmers At Work_
- I was there back in the old days, and the example in the interview of "There are a number of applications where multitasking on a single user system could come in very handy. Here’s an example." were very artificial marketing driven.
In the 80s I would do things like file copy and printing to a serial port-attached printer in the background and I/O was bulletproof I don't recall ever having a problem on Level 1. It was slow and the floppy controller halted the computer severely but it never lost data or crashed, very nice.
On Level 2 I used Multi-Vue to run various combinations of editor, compiler, and executable in windows.
The main problem I had with OS-9 Level II and the dev system and Multivue is the complete software pack from Radio Shack was about $250... to run on a computer with a list price of $200... These were also the days when your CRT monitor and your hard drive (if you had one) typically cost 2x what your computer cost.
Another interesting quote from the interview was regarding a million cocos sold and only 100K disk drives sold by RS ... Note the base coco was $200 and for all practical purposes only available from RS, whereas the RS disk addon package was $300, a hundred dollars more than the base computer, and in comparison Rainbow/Hot Coco magazines were full of ads for cheaper floppy packages, like $225 to $250 price range.
Its interesting looking at old PDFs of Rainbow from the late 80s, I never noticed it at the time but 1/3 of the ads were for IBM/PC/XT compatible hardware, which seems weird for a "coco" magazine.
- To my enormous surprise, forty-plus years later triple period now means something like recursive wildcard subdirectory in the Go language
# lists your standard library packages and workspace packages
go list ...
# Builds just your workspace as opposed to "go build ..." which is much more exciting, don't do that
go build ./...
I am rather jealous of the M68K as on a 6809 in the 80s running OS-9 Level 1 we were somehow ALWAYS out of both floppy disk space and memory.
- Yes. AmigaBasic made me chuckle too.
Did a lot of astronomy calculations on Atari 800s and Apple II systems even it was closed form equations it was much easier than doing them on a calculator.
- I use a THUM myself with a 400MHz Sawtooth G4 in the server room: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/0/servertemps.txt
- I enjoyed the 8-bit blah blah blah followed rapidly by an Amiga BASIC screenshot…
- Tldr.
• Audio Enhancements: Refinements to the High-Level Emulation (HLE) audio system have been implemented, aiming for more accurate sound reproduction across multiple games.
• Synchronization Adjustments: Modifications to the synchronization between the CPU and GPU have been made to reduce non-critical error popups in certain titles, leading to smoother gameplay.
• Game-Specific Fixes:
• LIT (School of Darkness): Addressed unique issues by emulating previously unhandled hardware behaviors.
• Eternal Darkness: Resolved persistent problems that had affected playability in recent months.
- I used OS-9 68000 back in the 90s on a telecom project. The feature I liked best was using "cd ..." to take you to the parent's parent directory.
- Nine of these boards were cheap but it did save a lot PCs from e-waste. Sadly now with SOC based systems the style is to lock it all down and just replace the whole thing.
- Something I need to implement I think.
- There is a standard for paginating feeds through a <link rel="next" />, but I’m not sure if your client supports it https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5005#section-3
This would be my suggestion, if it’s possible to extend the twostopbits feed with it.
- Nice, I use the RSS feed almost exclusively to keep up with this site
- Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript
—Jeff Atwood
Every time something like this comes up I am always amazed at what people do with JavaScript
- It’s been an absolute joy to peruse and contribute to TSB.
Onward, retroheads!
- Similar story at Ars Techhnica
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/11/the-upside-down-capa.../
- Nice. Is there an API or RSS feed to get older articles ? I have noticed a get about the last 150 or so posts are available.
- Came for the effects, and stayed for the presentation on what they learned over the course of four years of building it.
- This OCC competition is a really inspiring event .. I will have to try to enter it next time. Seems like a great way to promote the use of old computers to do new things…
- Amazing work. Very surprised we don’t see more of this. So many old machines and add in boards are dead without the “magic disk” .
- Welcome. A lot of us came here from the orange site. The lack of animus is a breath of fresh air.
Plus Lammy, splorp, Screwtapello, classichasclass, nickt, dfarquhar, ddingus, qingcharles, celso all post their cool stuff here first.
- Lunatic Fringe was a lot of fun — IIRC, at a time when there weren’t very many standalone arcade games for the Mac.
- Just found this and honestly, it better than my old home, HN! Keep up the great work!
- A little more historical context. Rhapsody had two or three big problems:
- There was no transition plan for Mac apps other than Blue Box emulation. Adobe, Quark, Microsoft were the essential Mac developers and all of them completely refused to port to AppKit, full stop.
- Adobe refused to license Display PostScript under terms that would make it possible to ship as a consumer OS (supposedly they didn’t want to support DPS anymore, and refused to budge on a high per-seat price, as a way of tanking it the entire thing).
- Rhapsody was slower than classic MacOS on a wide variety of tasks, and unusable for others. The UI was a weird mashup of NeXT and Mac idioms
Note that it took until 2003 or 2004 for Mac OS X to become usable for non-technical end users. OpenStep had a lot of rough edges for non-Unix people; Rhapsody was the (false) start of a _long_ journey. (Ironically, given better engineering management, Apple could have shipped Copland well before then.)
- If you enjoy Usagi Electric's videos, I do recommend their quite active Discord channel over at https://discord.gg/p7UsfHD
- Thanks for this. I know little about this period. I was busy in the 90s as it looked like Apple was headed for oblivion. Little did I know at working on SUN gear was actually the wrong choice.
- This always bothers me to see. Glad to see people cluing into it.
- Historical context: the “Premier” and “Unified” releases planned here in 1997 got canceled, and all x86 work (Rhapsody for Intel and Yellow Box For Windows) got canceled after Rhapsody Developer Release 2. Rhapsody for PowerPC did see brief public availability as Mac OS X Server 1.{0..2} and shipped both in retail box (like mine!) and bundled with Server configurations of G3 and G4 towers. The “rootless” (only applications visible) Blue Box mentioned here eventually happened when Blue Box became the Classic Environment.
Even though it's actually usable for very little, Rhapsody remains my favorite “weird dead-end Apple thing” just for the novelty of having essentially NEXTSTEP 5.x (Display Postscript and all) with a Mac Platinum UI. Copland would probably hold that title for me if any of its builds actually worked, but Rhapsody has real stability, real application support, and a real POSIX environment via its NeXT heritage: http://rhapsodyos.org/ https://betawiki.net/wiki/Category:Mac_OS_X_Server_1.x_build...
Mac OS X Server v1.2v3 a.k.a. Rhapsody 5.6 is my favorite thing to run on my Blue & White G3 — the OG New World machine `PowerMac1,1`! https://cooltrainer.org/rhapsody-in-blue-and-white/
- This is great. In retro computing, presentation is everything...
- More
Expectations have changed a bit since then — we are now, IMHO, too eager to force training on users. Sometimes in the name of “opinionated design.”