I had one of these! (Probably still do, somewhere.) Got it when they were on clearance.

It was kind of a glimpse of the future in some ways. A small, light, fanless machine with a usable keyboard. And it ran for so many hours that you didn't have to think about batteries, you just used it. We're (largely) used to that today, but that's not what laptops were like back then. For doing simple tasks (writing a journal in Pocket Word, etc), it blew away my big ThinkPad.

In 2024, “8-bit” in the lexicon is a signifier of “old graphics”. When most people say “8-bit”, they don’t mean anything technical (like “2^8 = 256 colors”), they mean “looks like an old Nintendo or whatever.” Put a slightly higher-res version next to it and they’ll say that’s 16-bit. Same way old timey cars are all Model Ts to me.

I'm having so much fun with my Playdate. If you like old retro games on amazing hardware, it's a gold mine.

>Sneaky Apple marketing considering (afaict) Windows was already outselling OS/2 even before the 1990 launch of Windows 3.0.

Yeah, but OS/2 was the heir apparent and what serious people used (well, they were all planning to, one day). Comparing themselves to OS/2 (and thus IBM, the object of all of Apple’s ire) would have been perceived as giving themselves an air of legitimacy in 1990.

Sure, a bunch of people are running that toy “not even an OS” Windows. Half of ‘em are probably on clones!

That attitude changed really rapidly.

IMO this is a good example of why Microsoft deserved a lot of their success with Windows 95.

I was a big OS/2 fan at the time, but this is the sort of thing IBM was institutionally incapable of coming up with. Sure, OS/2 supported long file names… if you were on an HPFS file system that (practically) only OS/2 could read. But I'd guess the significant majority of non-corporate OS/2 users dual-booted with DOS. And, IIRC, files with long names were totally invisible to the otherwise superb DOS emulation. And I feel like I even remember some OS/2 programs having trouble with long names because their authors were more likely than not on FAT file systems. So it always seemed more like a "theoretical feature".

Merry Christmas to you and happy holidays to all! I've had fun here and am glad this site exists.

Just curious: why does the main visual6502.org page work but not the wiki?

How successful was Win32s? Put another way: if Win32s hadn’t been a thing, how would that have impacted the (extremely successful) 3.1->95->NT transition that Microsoft pulled off?

I was a kid at the time and interested in operating systems, but it always seemed like Win32s was kind of confusing, starting with the name that totally seems like a pluralization.

If you have a Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, check out the port to it. Pretty similar hardware so it’s very close to the arcade. Would have been an instabuy for me back in the day if I’d have even known it existed!

Every few months I go down a rabbit hole and lose a whole evening to The Cutting Room Floor: https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor