- The intro paragraph suggests AI writing too, so maybe the weirdo pic is a warning to stay away.
- All of these companies wanted to make a profit off developer tools, which is why they charged that much -- there were so few developers compared to end-users. But viable platforms need applications! The only way to get them is to get developers on board, so you want to publish the tools as cheaply as you possibly can.
I think SGI's hardware was exclusive enough to limit their audience anyway, but everyone else, including Apple, really screwed themselves with this.
This is something Steve Jobs fixed at Apple in 1997 by eliminating per-division tracking of profit/loss. When the VPs are freed from profit motive for their direct divisional output, they become responsible for the profit of the entire company. It's worked pretty well.
- ha, don’t miss this comment
- FWIW, my PiHole is not blocking it
- I was flabbergasted at the time that AOL was valued more than Time Warner. By that point any savvy analysis should have pointed out AOL was very far down the road of being just another ISP rather than a destination in itself, while the Time Warner media assets were much more valuable and relevant then than they are today (and there’s still some value there today).
Total failure of due diligence — on the scale of the Studebaker-Packard merger, or bigger — and every consultant on Time Warner’s side who didn’t advise against it should have been put on a list, never to be trusted again.
- Wow. No less than four books on the original Macintosh Basic, the one Apple developed and Microsoft forced them to kill before release. Still wonder how different the world would have been if Apple had gotten that out the door. Microsoft’s Basic for the Mac was garbage.
- for anyone else who might wonder, the tech specs are at the bottom of the store pages:
https://www.commodore.net/product-page/commodore-64-ultimate...
CPU emulation is FPGA-based, seems like it can accept original SID chips if you have them (?) or use an FPGA version, and the keyboard uses Gateron mechanical switches. Seems pretty good for the price, if tariffs don’t fuck you over. I wonder if they’re overestimating the number they’ll sell, though.
- It's an Ultimate 64 https://ultimate64.com/Ultimate-64-Elite-MK2
- I'm skeptical about this venture for several reasons, but this is a good first product launch. The bundle seems like a great deal, at least for people who know what they're really buying.
I'm also curious about how many of these kinds of machines the market can absorb. It's more of a replacement/backup unit for serious C64 enthusiasts than a casual "nostalgia" gaming platform, which is to their credit IMHO, but maybe a harder sell. RG's THEC64 Maxi reportedly sold in the tens of thousands but it was roughly half the price.
- I estimate that there are only about 32,000 working C64 left in the wild. Anything, even FPGA, to keep the ability for the machine to be alive is awesome. The SID, VIC II are becoming more and more rare by the day. The supply has all but dried up in Canada where I live. Tarrif anxiety is having a chilling effect of sourcing parts from USA
- The high-level manager who chewed him out is almost certainly https://www.youtube.com/@CKHaun -- who was indeed a very distinct character. My interactions with C.K. were never that fraught.
- > Quark, a desktop publishing behemoth of the ’90s that is still very active today
I dunno man. I guess it still exists, but Quark self-immolated at least in part by failing to port to Mac OS X early on. The rumor was they had outsourced their engineering team to India around the time Mac OS X was announced, which was very clearly not the right time for a new set of developers to take over an existing sourcebase.
- Yes, incredibly impressive work. Although, to truly provide the Lisa experience, they'd have to insert a lot of nanosleep() calls everywhere. I remember being struck by how painfully slow it was compared to the Mac 128k.
- > they'd have to insert a lot of nanosleep() calls everywhere
The Lisaem Emulator indeed does this. Lisa is a pretty complex system with an asynchronous bus which requires cycle-accurate simulation to make the original software work. I spend some time to experiment with simpler (and faster) emulators like QEMU, but this would only work with significant changes to all drivers (the Lisa source code was published by the CHM). So for me personally, the re-implementation of the Lisa GUI as demonstrated is a very wellcome solution to appreciate the innovations Lisa brought us without all the hassles of a cycle accurate emulator.
- More
It is both a blessing and a curse that most LLMs and generative AI were not adequately trained on vintage computing materials.