- if someone sold a new palmos device that ran on aa or aaa batteries i would buy one in a heartbeat. for all it's limitations it did certain tasks very well. memopad, calendar and contacts. writing in graffiti 1 was fine for entering small amounts of data and local sync to a desktop with the cradle worked perfectly to sync data between multiple desktops.
- seems there's a project to create a drop in open source replacement.
- reminds me of the computer story/fable/legend/myth
- Real Programmers don't use Pascal :-) http://www.wilk4.com/humor/humore6.htm
- I have local copy of that in my fun directory :)
- I was 14 or 15 when I first read it. Learning C on PC to get ready for windows, Mac, ST and Amiga coding - first read I thought was serious and I was never going to be a real programmer.
If you ask my colleagues they might say I’m still not ;-)
- Hehe, I am feeling sometimes like real programmer when I do disassembly of some old programs or games to hack stuff :)
Reading opcodes, binary patching.. Hard stuff, when you fight for few bytes to do jmp to add extra little functionality or fix a bug.
- Yeah. My first disassembly to bypass license check in a game by checking for “license found true” to “license found false” was a bewitching drug it was also like Prometheus stealing fire. Yes I know. But to a 12 year old with a $2/week allowance with games costing $35. A few indulgences was gonna be ok.
- Hah great story :) Had fun reading it it.. If only webpage would not be shitty...
- i harbour plans to set up a cpm system for home use. for an offline never connected to the web system. any rasp pi will at some point be connected no matter how barebones i make it. for updates, for convenience. with cpm there'll be far less incentive to do so.
a decent text editor, a spreadsheet, a basic compiler, maybe a small database. nothing fancy. distraction free, no worries about security, just 1 cpu and a limited amount of ram and storage working for me and me alone.
- Seems like there is a ton of good dev software available too.
Some time back, I read about a CP/M portable --Amstrad I think, where the creator had setup compilers for just about any language available pre 2005 or so.
Would be a neat machine
- amstrad had many weird and wonderful portable devices but none ran cpm out of the box iirc.
but it did ring a bell when you said cpm and amstrad. there was this: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/hh3rrp.../
- in the 80s we used an interfaker to connect parallel ports to a serial port to capture data from cpm and non dos computers that otherwise could not transfer data to a pc.
https://live.staticflickr.com/4155/34580317352_3b87d19630_b....
- Thats neat, never come across anything like that before.
- i've only ever seen them twice. one my boss had and 1 on site at a engineers office.
one of those obscure pieces of hardware around before the internet and apart from a few photos on auction sites doesn't exist online.
https://www.tzsupplies.com/modular-technology-mt25-iv-interf.../
and a 1 page pdf of the manual. https://docs.rs-online.com/e9af/0900766b8001aeab.pdf
- i was so close to buying a hp95lx back in the day. i needed a mobile computer, i couldn't afford a laptop. the dos compatibility was a huge plus.
in the end i knew a lot of the software i ran wouldn't run in the confined space of a hp95lx and the keyboard was... lacking.
in the end i went with a psion 3a. better keyboard. while there was zero compatibility it steered me towards using open formats to get information on and off systems. something i still do today.
i never saw a hp95lx or it's successors in use in ireland but i did see a lot of psions.
- annoying but it's a problem with all museums. they have far too many items to display make available. most have huge archives of stuff that will never see the light of day.
it would be interesting to see if there's a follow up and what the organisation did to try and avoid dumping them.
- Responsible organizations have other options, such as stopping accepting new submissions when storage space runs out, or looking for a new good home for the excess material they can no longer store. Or, at the very least, notify the original submitter they can no longer store the material.
- A simple phone call like "hey, sorry, we have no time/space/energy to do anything with your stuff, pick it up or it will be destroyed by $DEADLINE" would certainly have solved the problem
- i remember buying the version for palmos and when i had a palm iiic getting the colour version. was a great game on the platform. whiled away many an hour playing it. one of my favourite games on the platform.
i also had it on the original playstation. bought it second hand for 20 quid. didn't think it would be a fun play using a controller but it worked well enough.
- amstrad made great 8 bit computers that were just a little too late to the party. bbc, c64 and zx spectrum dominated at that point. when amstrad bought sinclair and began making spectrums the keyboards got a lot better.
they also had their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW line which were z80 based 8bit business computers. a last gasp of cpm that sold for a fraction of the cost of ibm compatibles. they turned up all the time when i was starting out in the 80s.
- i love the zx spectrum but the keyboard was an acquired taste at best. only thing preventing me from buying a zx spectrum laptop is that the keyboard is too spectrum like. :-)
- More
wifi and bt to link to your network or phone to access data would be excellent. a shame there'd be no avantgo for mobile offline web which i absolutely loved on palmos. sync before you leave the house and i'd have news downloaded for the day to keep the boredom away.
with just those 2 protocol it could link to devices and services for many years without been dependent on special hardware to talk to the phone networks.