- I post the article title as it is presented by the author. I do take poetic license when the title exceeds the 80 characters allowed by 2sb and create a site friendly title.
- Someone on HN reminded me of how they went about making the XT/370 and AT/370: they wanted a 32-bit "mainframe on a chip", so they got the Motorola guy who wrote the 68K microcode to create a customized pair of 68K CPUs which implemented the System/370 instruction set. Then they similarly modified an Intel 8087 for the FPU, plopped all 3 on a card, and put that into a standard XT or AT.
(https://www.cpushack.com/2013/03/22/cpu-of-the-day-ibm-micro...)
- Be sure to watch the panel discussion linked in the article. We don't hear from good boomers like those ones anymore.
- I had to hunt around for it, here’s the direct link:
https://discuss.systems/@ricci/115504720054699983
It’s a photo of a tape with a handwritten label. Very cool if it’s real, readable and validated. Sounds like they are going to drive it to the CHM so we’ll find out soon.
- > Both the Amiga and Atari ST were niche platforms in an increasingly PC/Mac-centric world. The big computer magazines barely mentioned either one.
In America. In Europe, it was really Amiga vs Atari at home. PCs were used in offices, and Macs nowhere.
- Just a factual correction on the title: it's an invoice for a "1994 IBM PC-compatible", not a "1994 IBM PC". Not to be overly pedantic but this is a pretty key distinction to people interested in vintage computers. If it was actually an IBM PC made in 1994 it would likely be a later PS/2 model, some of which could occasionally be historically interesting. IBM did some unusual or even weird things (PS/2, micro-channel, AIX, etc) as they slowly came to realize what everyone else already knew - they'd lost the desktop PC business.
But this appears to be a run of the mill 486 clone assembled from globally generic parts by a typical PC integrator located in Belgium. Although I appreciate that this particular machine may hold treasured childhood memories for the owner (and it's nice they've kept it in working condition), it looks to be a bog standard beige box PC clone - the single most generically common type of computer ever made. It's even largely ISA compatible with the most common type of computer still available everywhere today.
Am I being harsh? Maybe, but I'd argue it's not unjustified. The 90s were the decade when the rich and fascinating diversity of uniquely different, completely incompatible computer platforms were swept away by a tidal wave of virtually identical beige box PC clones. From a historical perspective, PC clones were the planet-killing asteroid which destroyed a vibrant tapestry of divergent life, probably including home-grown computer platforms that were uniquely Belgian, each with its own ecosystem of software and opinionated vision for what a computer could be - and replaced them all with a monotonous beige sameness. So... yeah, having just attended the Amiga 040th anniversary events was a fresh reminder how much was lost in The Great Beige Wave - how computers got overall less interesting even as they grew much more powerful and common.
- IBM was a weird place in the 80s. Its depth and breadth had so many quirks in it. If you had the money - IBM would or could build you just about anthing.
All kinds of internal tools and utilities that never shipped. Friends who were lucky enough to intern there in the summer came home with all kinds of goodies. They had a laplink-like utility that was lightning fast that could hook two machines together over RS232. easy and fast. beat copying files to floppies and doing sneakernet when upgrading.
- IMHO, Given how the site works for scoring, commenting the article is slop just pushes this to the top of the main page faster.
If you want to bury this kind content - make a worthwhile comment in another topic and this page will tumbleweed away with its one point.
- * HTML formatted table. Check.
* Gratuitous use of em-dashes. Check.
* Traditional essay structure. Check.
* Typical "in the style of..." title illustration. Check.
* Only expands on a single idea easily expressed in a prompt sentence. Check.
Yup.
The worst part is it makes a trite point which totally misses the much more interesting and nuanced reality. In the late 80s I ran one of the largest Amiga users groups in the U.S. with hundreds of members. I went to almost all the Ami Expo shows around the country, I knew lots of developers and most of the editors and writers at the top magazines. I partied with Amiga engineers like Dale Luck and Dave Haynie at Comdex and CES shows. In short, I was as hardcore Amiga as anyone.
Yet, the reality was I also knew some users in the ST community along with a few senior people at Atari. I got along fine with Atari people. Just because my computer was technically better than theirs, doesn't mean they were bad people :-). Amigas were more expensive and besides cost, the ST could be a decent choice for MIDI-centric musicians and people mostly focused on productivity or desktop publishing.
Another factor was that Amigas and Ataris weren't all that widely available. Most big computer stores carried neither. It was usually smaller mom and pop stores which carried either the Amiga or the ST (but rarely both in the same store). Back then, most people wanted to get hands-on a computer before buying and often needed some after-sale support as well as a place to see and buy their platform's software. So for a lot of Amiga/ Atari ST users, which one you ended up with often came down to which platform the "indie store" in your area happened to carry.
Both the Amiga and Atari ST were niche platforms in an increasingly PC/Mac-centric world. The big computer magazines barely mentioned either one. So at larger multi-platform trade shows the users, developers, dealers and journalists of both platforms would inevitably end up hanging out at the same places after hours (there were only so many good bars). Sure, we'd joke around and trade jabs but it was all good-natured. Frankly, Amiga and Atari users were more similar to each other than either of us was to owners of other types of computers, so there was solidarity around the fact that at least none of us were pretentiously monochrome Mac people or boring PC suits. :-) And it hasn't changed, last weekend I was at an Amiga show and there were (gasp) people there with both Amigas and some pretty nice Atari ST rigs. Even I own a 520ST and a 1040ST I picked up at a some thrift store for a few bucks 20 years ago.
- This looks like ai slop through and through.
- Despite the inherent limitations, these monsters graphics have a very very nice style. Kudos to the artists, that’s lovely !
- I love this site. It's saved my bacon when working with old floppies. Every time I visit I learn something new - I suppose something old, but new to me. What a great effort by a real enthusiast and if you're here Thomas, many thanks for the wonderful resource.
I did prefer the old style of the site though, it feels a bit more nostalgic to me.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200224063235/https://retrocmp..../
- It has a nice nod to LFTs "nine sprites" demo on the C64.
- Sorry, missed this comment.
Yes, it does boot.
- You are very welcome. As a former Atari ST owner, I couldn't allow this fine article to go unnoticed...
- I believe it’s referring to these: https://archive.org/details/Developers_Handbook_for_the_Appl...
https://github.com/bruno185/Apple-II-Mouse-Graphics-Toolkit-...
- From the post:
> The industry wants to eliminate friction, but without friction there can be no spark.
> "Spark" is what I felt struggling against a hyper-strict budget during my publishing days. I found it when examining the depth of Deluxe Paint in the animation controls. It is what I felt when I overcame the Y2K bug in Superbase. I felt it again just now as I realized the lathe solution while waiting for the boolean to finish. Each little struggle forced me to shift my frame of mind, which revealed new opportunities.
> If my very first thought is brought to life instantly, with no artistic struggle (one hour of prompting is not a struggle), then why ever "waste time" thinking of second options? Or alternate directions? Even, heaven forbid, throwing ideas away? These common creative pathways are discouraged in a modern computing landscape.
- Thanks for sharing the link. It's still work in progress, nothing useful can be done with it just yet. Side effects of this effort are unlocking the installer (any application can now be installed from any floppy disk, no need for emulators that support low-level disk emulation), and a monitor patch that makes the OS boot in Bochs and Qemu - simplifying the debugging.
If you want to help out, please reach out to me. :)
- Did you know there’s a variant of NetHack for Newton OS?
- Dang, I'm too slow to post my own work! lol Thanks for sharing it, @starac.
- Technical difference. Shipping and operating in the wild. The vax / pdp11 rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper .
- I wonder what the technical differences are to the pdp2011 project: https://pdp2011.sytse.net/wordpress/
- Thanks for the pointers. Yes, I know the MouseText characters are present in Unicode, but it doesn't describe how they were intended to be used, it just provides them for compatibility.
For example, the screenshot in the 1985 Apple II HIG shows something like the character at 5E (in the table on Wikipedia) being used for the close box at the upper-left... but is that intended? The character at 5E doesn't have a left-hand edge, and I'm guessing that it's supposed to be used next to the character at 5A to provide that left-hand edge, but that's just my guess. I'd like to find some more reliable source.
- You have been here correct? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MouseText
I can't prove it but I suspect that the Bánffy, Ricardo cited in reference 3 and 4 is the rbanffy seen here and on the orange site. maybe these are bread crumbs to help your quest. apologies if you knew these details already.
- Quick link to the actual language page on SPG's website https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/modula3/
- The Apple IIc and "enhanced" IIe included custom bitmaps in their character ROMs called "MouseText". Many of the bitmaps look like they might be useful as parts of scrollbars or titlebars or whatever, but I've never been able to find any solid guidance on how they were expected to be used.
The 1985 "Apple II Human Interface Guidelines" mention "MouseText" and "MouseGraphics" UI toolkits available from Apple, and on page 96 where it describes "windows" it even has a side-by-side comparison of a generic window drawn with "MouseText" and one drawn with "MouseGraphics", but I've never found any "MouseText" library in archives of Apple's developer tools or any further information of any kind.
- The Lisa guidance is a revelation of what Apple knew to be true and required for applications and documents in a graphical world. Of course some things came and went but so so much was right if you read that origainl 1980 document.
- I helped Dale set up these boards and other materials for the Amiga 040th at the Computer History Museum back in August. I mounted one of the original chip schematic sheets on some foam core board (very carefully) and hung it up. That sheet was neatly hand drawn and I didn't see any CAD in material he brought.
I haven't asked Dale specifically if there was any CAD used for Lorraine but from other things I've read about chip design around that time, CAD was just being introduced and pretty rare. These prototypes were first debugged and brought to a working state over Nov/Dec 83 and were shown in the private room at Amiga's CES booth in Jan 84. In 82/83 any computer even capable of complex chip design would have been an expensive minicomputer with an esoteric graphics terminal add-on and Amiga was a startup on a limited budget.
- The updates also highlight other activities in ZX Spectrum Next community than just the Kickstarter. These are like "official" community newsletters. You'd like to check also the earlier updates.
- More
Separately, I agree that the title guideline is generally good and, on a site like Hacker News, absolutely necessary due to the large audience creating some incentive for 'editorializing' post headlines. However, on a smaller, much more focused and (hopefully) more benign community like TSB, I'd personally be okay with a slightly more relaxed policy permitting minimal headline adjustments if it significantly increases clarity or accuracy and is needed. But I certainly understand that might increase the chore of curation, making it a non-starter.
As always, I greatly appreciate all you do!