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  • KODust 13 days ago | parent | on: The Macintosh Mouse - The Invisible Mouse
    One of these documents has Jef Raskin claiming credit for the mouse and related UI behaviors.

    This, from Andy Hertzfeld, is an important addendum: https://www.folklore.org/I_Invented_Burrell.html

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  • KODust 21 days ago | parent | on: There's not much point in buying Commodore
    I dunno. I think commercial value for Commodore is what you make of it.
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    • bmonkey325 21 days ago
      I bet revive machines wishes it had the design patents and Atari logo for its retro Atari effort
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  • KODust 25 days ago | parent | on: Endangered classic Mac plastic color returns as 3D...
    Possibly the color when printed is slightly different from the color on the spools? Because the color on the spools looks like the previous cream/yellow/beige color used for the original Mac. Either that or they made the mistake of sampling a slightly yellowed Mac.

    The gray Apple used when they decided to modernize was indeed a light gray color.

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  • KODust 26 days ago | parent | on: Oral History of Bas Ording
    Interesting. We, the OS engineers, first heard of him inside Apple when Mac OS X was in development. The rumor at the time was that he’d been cold-emailing Steve Jobs designs and Steve liked them and told the HI group to hire him.
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  • KODust 27 days ago | parent | on: Atari ST, Everyone's Second Favourite 16-bit Home ...
    Tangent: Fred Brooks held that the only consistent way to determine the number of bits classifying the machine was to use the user-visible parts, i.e. registers, not the implementation. Therefore, 68000-based computers are 32-bit CPUs.
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  • KODust 28 days ago | parent | on: Learning from the Amiga API/ABI
    I find it useful to discount heavily for hyperbole when reading stuff written by Amiga people, including the otherwise essential Bagnall books. I think the shock of being able to do multimedia-ish stuff in the mid 1980’s somehow causes reality to distort when considering the stunning mediocrity (or worse) of much of the AmigaOS software stack.

    (I can write some choice words on the Mac’s software stack too. None of the 80’s 32-bit platforms were without significant and avoidable problems.)

    edit: misplaced punctuation

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  • KODust 37 days ago | parent | on: The PlayStation Portable felt like the future
    I dunno, I thought the PSP was just ill-conceived and pointless at the time. Sony was at the peak of their NIH syndrome, and just not caring what the market actually might want.
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    • zxm 37 days ago
      the umd drive was for me what killed it. a brand new storage medium available no where else. and they want us to buy media in this format? when vcd was becoming increasingly popular at the time never mind dvd.

      sony makes beautiful hardware, some of the best. but they destroy it with bad practices like cd players that can't read cd-rs. digital music players that weren't mp3. they became about protecting their copyright and not doing what their customers wanted.

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      • ddingus 32 days ago
        I feel the same way.

        For a while, I had a SONY CD Changer in my car. You ever see the scratched up CDs often sold at flea markets for a buck each or less?

        Many computers and players won't read them.

        But that SONY does. And not only does it read them, the thing takes a bit longer to buffer due to all the scratches and massive error correction it has to do while buffering...

        But once it does all that, it will play the disc flawlessly! Bumpy roads, too cold, too hot, disc too scratched?

        All pretty much no problem.

        I would gladly buy another. Was that good, but it won't read ANY recordable format.

        Bummer.

        It went with the car when I sold it. I put some of the very worst discs I had ever seen in it for demo purposes too.

        Dude that bought the car loved it like I did. I did not mention CD-R largely because the player was going with the car no matter what.

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  • KODust 44 days ago | parent | on: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were ...
    I object to the premise.

    > Configuration options and user empowerment was increasingly considered confusing or dangerous

    This, in particular, is nonsense, but it’s a long-festering strain of nonsense. A particular subset of PC users truly believe that Apple decided, with the original Mac, to take away “user empowerment” and “dumb things down” because users might hurt themselves. That was never the motivation.

    No, the point was to empower users in ways that actually mattered. Steve Jobs’ “bicycle for the mind” rhetoric was trying to communicate this. You can disagree with the selection of what, exactly, matters, but the underlying motivation was _never_ to “protect users from themselves.” That’s a canard.

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    • IcePic 43 days ago
      Well, look at the critique when Gnome3 came out to replace Gnome2. What pissed people off was exactly that it: 1. Set a certain amount of choices on how the gui should work and 2. Removed a lot of settings, especially those that would have allowed people to reset the things in point 1 to what they liked from Gnome 1&2.

      It's one thing for a GUI maker to move the task bar from side to top/bottom for instance, but another to also not allow you to have it back where you "need" it to be. Even when you do want to move defaults (like tmux changing hotkey from screens ctrl-a to ctrl-b) it still is a good idea to allow people to set it back, even if only for a transitional period. Muscle memory takes a while to change for some, and GUIs are not except from that, so if you always had the trashcan to the right, moving it to the left will piss someone off, but not as much as preventing that someone from moving it back again, if that is their preference, perhaps even a preference that your previous versions of the GUIs made for them.

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    • viler 44 days ago
      But that passage doesn't refer to the original Mac. It describes notions that started becoming commonplace around 2000, and the end of that paragraph specifically differentiates them from the Mac Classic era.

      About the argument in general, the false premise would be that the set of things which "actually matter" applies universally. It's not a question of what exactly matters, but _to whom_. There are different types of users, and the pretense of always knowing what's good for all of them better than those users themselves is certainly not unique to one person's approach... even if Jobs' personality could make it appear as if he had it worse than most others in the industry.

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    • bmonkey325 42 days ago
      I’ve lived the dongle life for 40 years because Steve jobs didn’t want people tinkering with the insides of the Mac. My ProFile and HD20 is testament to that.
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  • KODust 64 days ago | parent | on: The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective
    The BeFS book mentioned referenced in the article is still a terrific read.
  • KODust 68 days ago | parent | on: A Science Project: "Make the 486 Great Again!" - M...
    I think it would be swell if we could avoid fascist-adjacent slogans for retrocomputing projects.
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