Two Stop Bits | glhaynes's comments

glhaynes 223 days ago | parent | on: What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?
What was special about its interrupt handling?
- bmonkey325 223 days ago
  The PDP-11 was one of the first systems to use vectorized interrupts and interrupt chaining. This meant that when an interrupt occurred, the CPU could jump directly to a specific handler for that device, execute its code, and even pass control to other handlers if needed. Once completed, execution would resume exactly where it left off.
  For example, a sensor connected via a bus card could trigger an interrupt when new data was available, allowing code to store the value in memory or write it to disk automatically, without the main program needing to check for updates. This eliminated the need for wasteful polling, making the system more efficient and responsive by handling events asynchronously in the background.
glhaynes 312 days ago | parent | on: The MIPS ThinkPad, kind of - IBM WorkPad z50
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.
glhaynes 431 days ago | parent | on: This crystal fragment turns everything you see int...
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.
glhaynes 516 days ago | parent | on: Playdate revisited: Two years with the little yell...
I'm having so much fun with my Playdate. If you like old retro games on amazing hardware, it's a gold mine.
glhaynes 558 days ago | parent | on: An Apple district manager's Macintosh Portable in ...
>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.
- bmonkey325 557 days ago
  This was in the era of windows/286 and windows/386 where you’d get an app like Pagemaker that was shipped with basically a windows runtime that wrapped and booted one application.
glhaynes 625 days ago | parent | on: How Windows Generates 8.3 File Names from Long Fil...
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".
glhaynes 629 days ago | parent | on: Happy Holidays Everyone!
Merry Christmas to you and happy holidays to all! I've had fun here and am glad this site exists.
glhaynes 644 days ago | parent | on: Welcome to the recovered visual6502.org Wiki!
Just curious: why does the main visual6502.org page work but not the wiki?
glhaynes 665 days ago | parent | on: The Win32s compatibility list
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.
glhaynes 676 days ago | parent | on: The making of RoadBlasters
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!
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