Two Stop Bits | tommasz's comments

tommasz 504 days ago | parent | on: The biggest CRT display ever made: Sony's PVM-4300
They don't mention how much it weighed. The 27" Sony we had was slightly over the limit of what I could lift by myself (though I did manage to when no one else was available).
- n3ffo 503 days ago
  450 pounds, or about 200 kg
  - bmonkey325 502 days ago
    I had. 50” hitachi diamondscan from this era that was about the same weight. My niece killed the screen with duck hunt
    - qingcharles 502 days ago
      What's a Diamondscan?
      I had the 40" Sony CRT. It took 3 of us to lift that thing. I bought it just for lightgun games.
      - bmonkey325 502 days ago
        4:3 rear projector 50” tv of the same era. 3 colour tubes to composite and project each colour plane. Just a big, bulky, dumb tv. I only noted it because it had the same mass as the tube tv you had.it took 3 persons to cart it up the 2 flights of steps into my apartment.
tommasz 539 days ago | parent | on: Small VT100 scale model with working keyboard
This is something that needs to be reposted sometime in the future when more of it is complete.
tommasz 540 days ago | parent | on: The people who won't give up floppy disks
I miss the musical sound of the floppy drives in my Mac Plus, a very analog experience.
tommasz 549 days ago | parent | on: Radius Full Page Display
The tech pub group at my work had Xerox publishing systems and I thought the vertical monitors made so much sense for most tasks. When the Radius came out I desperately wanted one but with the money I spent on my 512K "Fat Mac" and upgrade to Mac Plus it was out of the question.
- bmonkey325 548 days ago
  I remember when desktop publishing was a business. You could go to someones house and work with them on a news letter or brochure and get something printed on a laserwriter or then taken to a print house if you had money to get it done in colour.
  What a wild time.
tommasz 559 days ago | parent | on: 1975: IBM VM/370 and CMS Demo
I wrote my first programs in Basic and then Pascal on a 370 running VM/CMS. It would only be much later than I learned it actually virtualized the entire machine and could run multiple OSs simultaneously. The VAXes that replaced it were in a way a step back, but you couldn't beat the price (in comparison) and it meant that engineering had its own machine instead of sharing with the rest of the company.
tommasz 576 days ago | parent | on: PumpkinOS
I loved my Palm V, Zire, and Treo. They always just worked.
tommasz 642 days ago | parent | on: The last programming project from Bill Gates
I guy I worked with years ago used one of these as part of a delivery job he had in college. He wrote a Basic program to do all the paperwork and it made him the most efficient driver the company had. It was a remarkably useful computer.
tommasz 663 days ago | parent | on: Is Fortran "a dead language"?
Fortran is a bit like COBOL in that there's an enormous amount of code out there that's not going anywhere. For a lot of scientists and engineers, it's the only programming language they've ever used. In its niche, there's nothing that comes close. As long as they keep updating it to take advantage of improvements in computing power it'll keep going forever.
tommasz 703 days ago | parent | on: The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared ...
I worked at Xerox and got a chance to actually see an Alto up close, although it was not in operating condition. When I started in the mid-90s GlobalView, the successor to the OS that ran on the Star (which was a successor of the Alto), had been ported to run on Sun workstations and was still in use inside the company. They also ported it to run on top of Windows but performance was horrible and people only used it if they had to.
tommasz 731 days ago | parent | on: ‘Be’ is nice, end of story.
Haiku is fun to play with in a VM, everyone should try it.