- I was flabbergasted at the time that AOL was valued more than Time Warner. By that point any savvy analysis should have pointed out AOL was very far down the road of being just another ISP rather than a destination in itself, while the Time Warner media assets were much more valuable and relevant then than they are today (and there’s still some value there today).
Total failure of due diligence — on the scale of the Studebaker-Packard merger, or bigger — and every consultant on Time Warner’s side who didn’t advise against it should have been put on a list, never to be trusted again.
- Wow. No less than four books on the original Macintosh Basic, the one Apple developed and Microsoft forced them to kill before release. Still wonder how different the world would have been if Apple had gotten that out the door. Microsoft’s Basic for the Mac was garbage.
- for anyone else who might wonder, the tech specs are at the bottom of the store pages:
https://www.commodore.net/product-page/commodore-64-ultimate...
CPU emulation is FPGA-based, seems like it can accept original SID chips if you have them (?) or use an FPGA version, and the keyboard uses Gateron mechanical switches. Seems pretty good for the price, if tariffs don’t fuck you over. I wonder if they’re overestimating the number they’ll sell, though.
- 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.
- > 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.
- 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.
- > 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.
- "Romkey" sounds like a hardware feature. Turns out it's a person!
- 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.
- 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
- I dunno. I think commercial value for Commodore is what you make of it.
- More
I'm also curious about how many of these kinds of machines the market can absorb. It's more of a replacement/backup unit for serious C64 enthusiasts than a casual "nostalgia" gaming platform, which is to their credit IMHO, but maybe a harder sell. RG's THEC64 Maxi reportedly sold in the tens of thousands but it was roughly half the price.