- bmonkey325 273 days agoUnit costs were simply too high. Sparc and mips and PPC couldn’t sell in volume s enough to justify the relentless improvement Intel could. Coupled with Unix style costs. SGI charged me $2500 for its SDK. Sky high prices for motif vs windows
- KODust 273 days agoThat's the problem right there -- SGI should have given anyone who asked the SDK and a free coffee mug. Apple had a similar attitude (MPW was something like $2500 at one point), and it almost killed them -- CodeWarrior really saved their bacon during the PowerPC transition.
- I wonder just how much of this article was written by AI. It has the stylistic flourishes ("it wasn’t just a processor—it also housed the audio processing unit") and the pseudo-accuracy, like
> Unlike other consoles at the time, the NES pushed a different modular design approach
This is a really weird thesis statement. The NES is different from other consoles that preceded it due to the copy protection and particulars about the implementation, but architecturally it wasn't that distinct in the way this article implies; even the Atari 2600 could be expanded through use of additional chips.
- I read some of the source code when it was released. Having the process ID as part of the window data structure makes me sad for what could have been on the Mac.
The RAM limitations of the original Mac coupled with some naive engineering decisions (and then terrible engineering management) crippled macOS for the following two decades.
- On the PDP-X to DG Nova thing, FWIW, Edson deCastro is pretty clear on what he thinks the timeline was in his CHM oral history; really seems pretty innocent.
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
- I really hope no one is upset at this point by that sort of thing.
For any Commodore, Apple, Atari, these computers sold in the zillions; there are plenty of decaying originals. They rot over time; if you want to keep using them, you have to replace the power supply; recap the motherboard; the case will generally have yellowed and if you want it to not look nasty you have to do something about it -- retrobrite, paint, total replacement. It's always going to trend to a ship of theseus situation unless you want to encase it in an unlit vacuum forever as an object to occasionally think about but not interact with. And if you want to use it and you have to make changes anyway, why not make it more pleasant to live with?
- I was happy to make it somewhat modular, so at least the original keyboard (and Tandy bodge board) has survived intact. The machine was never original in my possession – the previous owner has done a lot of modifications to it - so I feel like I am carrying on with his wishes rather than tinkering with Tandy's.
I do want to still replace the membrane/backplate inside the keyboard with low-profile switches as I did to my PC-6001mkII (https://www.leadedsolder.com/2024/11/26/pc6001mkII-keyboard-...), but that involves a lot of picky measuring for mounting holes, outlines, key switches, etc and you can tell from the article that accurate measuring is not one of my strongest suits :)
- As you can guess. I am more pragmatic.
I probably just need to stop hanging around snobby retro enthusiasts who brag how they have a VAX 11/780 in their basement with OG parts salvaged from other Vaxen? Vaxii ?
- Totally. I sort of understand it with big(ger) iron -- there are fewer made, by any measure, and you want to do things like get a VAXBI adapter because your goal is to get a an 8MB disk the size of a washing machine or whatever connected to it. But if you could power it from USB-C instead of a custom three phase power line with the original power supply -- you probably can't -- I might still argue that would be more sensible to do so.
- Granted, there's no value in the US, but it seems to be European entities driving all the friction -- is it possible the retro Amiga market is actually valuable (it's still not gonna make you rich, but…)) in the EU?
- I don't think so but... maybe? I guess there's no real data, so no way to know except guesswork estimates.
The entire retro market around all Amiga related things is larger, including people releasing modern games, but owning the rights to monetize the original Amiga IP is much smaller than the overall interest in Amiga. And even new Amiga games are almost all shareware, freeware or Patreon-supported, not a real commercial software model. I think the Amiga IP at this point is just down to:
* Getting royalties on licensing ROMs for distribution to retro enthusiasts (like Cloanto's Amiga Forever) or PowerPC derivatives born long after Commodore's demise (which are just a new and different thing from OG Amiga).
* Licensing the Amiga logo and name for T-shirts, mouse pads or if someone makes an Amiga recreation.
Any patents would be long expired at this point. So, I'm guessing maybe a few thousand dollars a month? Even that may be optimistic. The ROMs have been widely available from unofficial sources forever. I suppose you could try to leverage owning the Amiga name into adjacent businesses marketing new products to the retro-interested base but that still requires making new products, spending money to market them and profitably selling them. None of which is included in owning the old Amiga IP rights. I just can't see how it's really worth much.
- As a fellow child of the 80's I totally get what you mean, but you still can't really do that. You can get close with a simulation inside a closed roadway, I guess. People would probably pay for that experience, actually. Hmm.
- Yes, lower right pane contains the source code for the version of the game on the left. Very, very cool. It’s essentially an interactive debugger; I assume Zarf compiled Zork I from the source using ZILF and somehow got a symbol table out of it, to support the interactive features, but I don’t know.
- Also, Apple could have developed a fully in-house AppleSoft replacement by 1985; It’s unfortunate Sculley was not in a position — or did not realize software could be developed — to call Microsoft’s bluff.
- Little more to it than that. Bill Gates and Microsoft held the cards and killed it - Because Apple still depended on AppleSoft BASIC in the Apple ][ and their license expired during this time. Apple would have to stop shipping AppleSoft BASIC in Apple ][ without the license.
- Little more to it than that. Bill gates and Bill Gates held the cards and killed it.
- Still wonder how different the world might have been if there had been an excellent Mac-native BASIC available early on.
Microsoft’s BASIC was garbage on the Mac for a long, long time; it didn’t support the toolbox properly until very late, and when it did it was still kind of unpleasant to use.
- More
- People who wanted a Unix workstation could build one cheaply on commodity hardware with Linux
- SGI, HP, Sun, and others didn’t adapt to Linux’s disruption quickly enough. So much fucking about with Itanium.
- NT became good enough such that if you didn’t care whether it was Unix, you could actually use Windows.
- Mac OS X — the only Unix that’s ever managed to be user friendly in the true meaning of the term — ate the rest of the market. (You _could_ build a version of Unix that has a nice GUI and isn’t the Mac, but people are so wedded to X11’s 30 years of misfeatures.)