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  • KODust 10 hours ago | parent | on: The First Time I Was Almost Fired From Apple
    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.
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  • KODust 3 days ago | parent | on: 10 Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn’t Make It
    > 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.

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  • KODust 3 days ago | parent | on: A "web OS" based on the Apple Lisa GUI
    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.
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    • Rochus 2 days ago
      > 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.

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  • KODust 3 days ago | parent | on: The “Romkey” Apple I is up for auction
    "Romkey" sounds like a hardware feature. Turns out it's a person!
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  • KODust 4 days ago | parent | on: Dr. Dobb's Journal Interviews Jef Raskin
    I wish every programmer would adopt this philosophy:

    “Jef Raskin is well known for his heretical belief that people are more important than computers and that computer systems should be designed to alleviate human frailties, rather than have the human succumb to the needs of the machine.”

    You don’t need to buy Jef Raskin’s specific prescriptions to make things better for people. You do need to have the right attitude.

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    • starac 3 days ago
      I certainly share his dislike of the mouse as a pointing device.
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    • bmonkey325 4 days ago
      Putting the personal back in computing. I couldn't agree more. We've managed to turn the PC into a mainframe like existance again.

      Everything is fabulous but nothing is fun.

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  • KODust 24 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 32 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 32 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 36 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 37 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 38 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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