Some pages are empty, some pages have conent. its unfortunate there isnt a table of contents availble from hacking the url with status.

https://book.martypc.net/system-architecture/architecture-ov... if you hack to just https://book.martypc.net/ or https://book.martypc.net/system-architecture/ to get overall pages and status.

Cool project but if its just "a guy in a room" its going to take a long time to mature. Still good to see this kind of information being curated. further we get from the early PC era the more this stuff goes away.

vi vs Emacs debates are pointless. One is a lean, elegant editor. The other is Emacs.

It’s a bit murky. Technically not wrong. He does hold a design patent on the c64. The breadbin is what got used but what I have read was another case had been planned that never shipped. I can’t really tell from the drawings in the second link if that’s the OG c64 or this rumoured, phantom c64. Companies will get patents to protect themselves even if they never use them.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adammossoff_on-this-date-in-i...

And https://retropatents.com/products/commodore-64-patent-print

That's something I didn't know - was it because of AT&T ?

My first Unix was BSD/386 (as a product of the University of California) but my first job out of college was HP-UX on a K250. Later on they got an L-class. I still miss the PA-RISC.

There's a 9000/350 here running 8.x, a couple Galaxy 1100 systems running 10.10, a 425t with a PA-RISC upgrade that needs something to do, an RDI PrecisionBook 160 (B160L) running 11 and a C8000 also with 11. And a beat-up K260 I/O card on the wall as a memento. :)

Yes, it was quite different here in the U.S. Most consumer Amiga users in the U.S. didn't really know it was different over in Europe but I did - and I was jealous!

As a regular advertiser I got copies of the larger European Amiga magazines in the late 80s and early 90s which weren't available here in the U.S. outside of a small number of specialized places in major cities. A typical copy of Amiga Format Magazine wasn't just much thicker than U.S. Amiga publications, the look, feel and tone was also dramatically different. Being so consumer and games focused made it incredibly vibrant and energetic. You can feel the difference just comparing online PDFs of early 90s AmigaWorld and Amiga Format magazines. Sadly, I never got to see the UK/Euro scene first-hand back in the day. By the time I began regularly visiting Europe, Commodore was circling the drain and the Amiga scene was winding down.

In the U.S. the most active (and profitable) parts of the Amiga community were focused on the 2000, 3000 and 4000 models and tended to be more "creative professionals", prosumers, serious high-end enthusiasts and even academics using it as a lower-cost workstation alternative to Sun/Apollo/SGI. My Amiga users group had members from CalTech, NASA/JPL, and even a few "can't talk about how we use it" defense contractors like Lockheed.

While the U.S. consumers who used the Amiga purely as a home computer certainly played games enthusiastically, they were often equally interested in digital art, graphics, desktop publishing and/or computer programming. Thanks to products like the Video Toaster, Amigas were used for film and video production, computer graphics and 3D rendering by TV stations and movie studios. Stephen Spielberg's production company even had an Amiga rendering farm producing all the visual effects for a prime-time network TV show starring top celebrities. Today, quite a few of the 'gray beards' around Hollywood visual effects and TV production have Amiga roots because in the late 80s they were the disruptive 'young turks' pushing newfangled desktop production techniques.

Notably, the Apple teams weren't shown the Star, but individually GUI enabled Alto applications, which didn't feature a coherent interface.

Xerox did have a fair chance to monopolising the desktop with the Star (developed by Xerox SDD El Segundo) and was first to market. Also, Apple licensed a lot from Xerox (like the mouse, while they actually came up with their own designs.)

The idea of the "stolen GUI" probably comes from the "Look and Feel" court case, where the argument was irrelevant, as it was found that Apple had unknowingly granted an unlimited license for the desktop GUI to Microsoft. (If the technology had indeed been stolen, would Apple been in any position to grant a license, in the first place? In this sense, the argument is somewhat contrary to its intentions.)