As much as I'm for being gender-neutral, what they did here really annoys me. They've changed every instance of "he", "him" or "this" to "they", "them" or "their", which is fine. But leaving the old text in grey strike-through and the new text in italic makes it very jarring to read when you're just trying to get the actual information. I ended up resorting to custom CSS for making it read normally.

I used to use Turbo BASIC, but QuickBASIC was a major step up from that. QB4.5 made BASIC feel professional. Microsoft was very clever to replace GWBASIC with QBASIC. I wonder how many people graduated to QuickBASIC from it.

I tend to use a Windows XP laptop (off-network) for DOS development. Win9x might be more appropriate, but the laptop is too modern for it to work reliably - and XP is just generally more stable whenever I make a coding mistake :D It's not perfect, but it has some advantages over DOSBox. Two spring to mind: 1. DOSBox maps Ctrl-F9 to the killswitch by default, and I tend to forget to disable it (which can be done using the keymapper). Quite annoying when that is the "Run" key combination for Turbo C++ and similar IDEs. 2. Windows supports long filenames, which RHIDE (the DJGPP IDE) can make use of. I much prefer giving my source code filenames that aren't limited to 8.3 characters.

Wow, that is a comprehensive article. Very impressive!

I wonder how the performance would be in assembly. Replacing the floating point emulation done by BASIC with a fixed point implementation would probably do a lot. I'm always impressed at raytracing being done on systems that lack multiplication and division instructions.

It may have been tongue in cheek, but I actually find it endearing and cool that Shatner responded to this and responded in the way he did. Not to mention he's actually not wrong.

Merry Christmas. Thanks for creating Two Stop Bits!

One thing that still bugs me is that in the dark mode the header bar is black on dark grey. (Incidentally, the "dark" theme is not selected going to the profile page - so just clicking the "update" button without any changes will switch me back to the default theme).

I really like Pascal as a language and Turbo Pascal in particular was an amazing piece of work. It was uncommonly user friendly for such a powerful piece of software running on the limited hardware of the time. The context sensitive help was terrific. Also amazingly fast, especially with self contained units. Visual Studio on a modern multicore multiGHz PC makes me wait longer for a build than Turbo Pascal did on my 486 or in some cases even my earlier 386.

Thats insanely impressive and impressively insane.