Apple Pascal supported > 64k of RAM on suitable machines, so it probably already did?

Cool project. Is the discussed p-system still 16 bit, or does it support a larger address space?

Facts. Only attacks I ever saw were physical where the code would seek the drive head on Atari 810s repeatedly or strobe it or attempt force xt drives in and out of the landing zone to similar effect. obviously over time this is not good for the mechanism.

I don’t remember cpu therms being an issue until the mid late 90s - and then it was athlons. I could be wrong but I dont remember seeing CPU fans until the Pentium II cartridge but that is probably misremembering nostalgia.

80s was just robust against thermal - heck ataris had a giant aluminium shield over the mobo

I call BS on this claim:

> But if your program tried to write to ROM and did it often enough, you stressed both the CPU and ROM chip and could cause one or the other to overheat and fail.

I was very much into the C64 scene back in the early 90s and while I heard claims similar to that one (code that destroys chips or other components by overheating/stressing them) there was never any legitimate source of that. It was all just urban legends

Fun way to learn 6502 is to get the Stella emulator and write some demo code for the Atari 2600. Simple code and you can get the feedback on screen with immediacy.

Here’s a talk by Will Lindsay that might inspire https://youtu.be/D3ZlyJEQW0w?si=__vC9YxnRICjZyH2

I was amazed when I got to the end of Dune to find that there was an ending completed by his son. I'm still suspicious about the story of finding a loose 5.25" disk containing the plot. Regardless, I actually loved the writing of the final books and felt that his son's books were actually toned down a little in a such a way that made them more enjoyable to read.

The move to multi-core designs was particularly hard on game developers who were used to a single core they owned completely. Games aren't very suited to parallelism, which made the task even harder. Sega got burned by this again and again with the Mega CD, 32X and then Saturn.

Thanks! I happen to have have a G850V (non-S,) but the zebra cables on the LCD have gone spotty. I'm going to see if I can reflow it somehow, or simply put a block of foam behind to re-establish contact.

Truly impressive machines, but vulnerable to the classic Sharp durability issues. I'm still hopeful I can bring it back :)

A little sad to see the venerable Motorola 6809 dismissed with only "This was possibly the most sophisticated 8-bit architecture but had much more limited adoption than its competitors."

If we're using emulation anyway, does the installed base over 40 years ago really matter? Of course, I'm biased on this point because, by happenstance, I ended up with the 6809-based Radio Shack Color Computer. Basically, my parents weren't going to pay much for a home computer for my late-teen self in 1980 (because what would you even do with a such a thing?) Even the minimal 4K RAM version was $600 but via a tiny ad in the back of a magazine, I found a non-corporate franchise Radio Shack store out of state selling them for about $450 delivered (no sales tax!). I mailed the check off hoping I wouldn't get scammed.

The computer showed up and it turns out random luck paid off because the 6809 was a fantastic CPU to learn assembler on. It was the most powerful 8-bit CPU because it was really a hybrid 8-bit/16-bit CPU, much like it's later big brother the 68000 (a 16-bit/32-bit hybrid). It had a bunch of 16-bit registers, indexed and program counter relative addressing modes (enabling position independent, re-entrant, pre-emptive multi-tasking code), software and user stacks, layered interrupts and a beautifully orthogonal instruction set (definitely inspired by the PDP with some nods to the IBM 360). And, damn, was it powerful! With the Unix-like, multi-tasking OS-9 operating system you could service up to 8 simultaneous users on serial terminals in real-time on a literal "toy computer" with a 1.8MHZ 6809 and 64K RAM.

For the first several years I was learning assembler, I had no idea how lucky I was. Much later when I eventually looked at the Z80 and 6502, I was shocked how primitive they were. Apple even initially chose the 6809 for the Macintosh and early Mac prototypes were 6809-based before they migrated to the 68000. Even better, Radio Shack sold an assembler in a ROM cartridge so low RAM wasn't a problem. A television for display and an audio cassette recorder to save your programs completed your "software development environment" :-).

Okay, it's true not a lot of people know much about the 6809 today - but back in the day all the cool kids definitely knew it was a powerhouse compared to Commodore, Apple and Atari 8-bits CPUs. However, I think more people today might object to dismissing the 68000 family. The 68K is still legendary for being fun to program in assembler. Sure, it was CISC but it was CISC in perhaps its most mature, pure and idealized form. And while RISC eventually replaced CISC architectures because RISC was more scalable when Moore's Law eventually delivered ever more gates in the 90s, the very CISC 68K was designed to be human legible, expressive and even joyful to program in assembler by hand. Sure, RISC architectures can be hand programmed, but they were clearly conceived for compiler written code and higher level languages.

Learning assembler today is anachronistic anyway, so why not go for the gusto and relive an ISA that legendary OG giants of software seriously described as 'elegant' and 'beautiful'?

> he’d seen protection schemes that, if they detected you had tampered with them, would try to break your disk drive in retaliation. The most common way to do this was to send the drive a command to try to move the drive’s stepper motor beyond its physical range. The drive would oblige and try to do the impossible, so it was possible to command the drive to permanently damage its own drive mechanism.

I didn't have a C64 and my Radio Shack Coco had a less complex disk drive mechanism based around a standard Western Digital disk controller chip, but there were similar copy protections on some software titles.

While I'm sure someone did tell Dave this story, and that person may have believed it themselves, I suspect it's based on a mistaken extrapolation of a more innocent behavior. Way back in the day, we heard a similar report at my local user's group but a techie friend of mine looked into the offending software title and discovered a reality that was more benign. Basically, during manufacturing disk protections tend to put some non-standard formatting someplace on the original disk and then the software tries to read back the non-standard stuff to verify it's the original disk. These could be extra, missing or mis-numbered tracks or sectors. Some protections also put data on an extra track added beyond the last track. Coco disks had 35 "official" tracks in the specification but users quickly learned that these drives were manufactured as 40 track drives, of which some didn't pass QA tests seeking all the way to track 40 and were sold cheaper to Radio Shack. But I never saw a Radio Shack Coco drive that wouldn't seek to track 36, 37 and usually more. I eventually had four drives and all of them would reliably seek to track 41 or 42. In fact, hobbyists made mods for the disk operating system to add extra tracks to the official count. So, at least on the Coco, there were multiple disk protections that would seek the head "beyond the last track", not to damage the drive but because they knew the original disk had data there which all drives could read but no normal disk copy command would write.

The other thing to know is that all these floppy drives were inexpensive, mass-manufactured mechanical devices that had varying tolerances between individual units at the factory which only grew with wear over time, temperature, shipping and handling. Also the diskettes themselves weren't exactly made to exacting mil-spec standards. So, to read the disk the controller software would seek to the desired track and try to read the requested sector. It wasn't terribly unusual for a read to fail and time out due to the head moving a bit too slow or perhaps initially undershooting or overshooting the target track. So all controller software would move the head back (usually to track zero) and then try to step back to the desired track and do the read again. If it didn't work, it would repeat this several times hoping to get a good read before eventually failing with an error. When these rapid head resets and retries happened, the drive would make a loud and unusual "gronking" sound that was quite noticeable. And that was just with normal disks and no oddball disk formatting or trick-play head seeking.

When disk protections would fail to find the expected oddball tracks or sectors, they'd do the same reset/retry behavior with the same furious gronking. Except in the case of disk protections half the sectors on a track could be "special" (on the Coco there were 18 sectors on a track). At 3 or 5 retries each, that's a lot of loud head gronking for a long time as each sector is attempted and fails out in turn. Such was the case with the protected software title my friend disassembled. The erstwhile failed pirate at our user's group meeting (a middle schooler) was trying to start a copy of the game which had none of the "special" sectors present. While I doubt all that gronking was good for the disk mechanism, it wasn't intentionally malicious on the part of the software title. But you can see how the loud gronking sounds which only happened on a failed attempt to pirate a copy of a protected disk could cause people to make assumptions and leap to nefarious conclusions which would then be further embellished through the retelling.

Of course, I don't doubt that some hobbyist hacker or maybe solo software dev had nefarious thoughts and maybe even played around with how to do it and showed their friends a demo. But I never saw or heard any credible claims a commercial software title sold at scale ever shipped to consumers with the intent to destroy user hardware. Even in those days software was sold by publishers to distributors who then sold to retail stores, who sold to end users. A national wave of failed hardware reports associated with one title could mean blame and perhaps even legal liability for any and all of those parties. And disassembling the software sufficiently to prove it was doing this intentionally would have been much easier than making working pirated copies. To be so reckless, not only would the author have to be really dumb, so would the publisher and anyone who knew about it in advance.

The kicker is that, in those days, bulk duplication of diskettes (especially funkily formatted diskettes) wasn't all that reliable - meaning there was a pretty high probability that some non-zero percentage of your legit copies sometimes wouldn't read correctly for a paying customer due to varying manufacturing tolerances (or stray magnetic fields in shipping). And, of course, this failure to read could cause the copy protection to detect the legit disk as "pirated". Back in the 80s and 90s I worked for a successful software manufacturer and one of our products was a large, professional tool which eventually grew to occupy well over a dozen 3.5 inch floppy disks. When a disk wouldn't read for a customer it was a costly warranty issue to ship them a new disk set (and there was no consumer internet). As our software and disk count grew, we saw increasing disk failures. So we analyzed it and despite using the top disk duplicator in the U.S. and legit top-notch, direct-from-the-Sony-factory media - once our install was over a dozen diskettes, the statistical best case was almost every fourth customer would have at least one disk from their set fail to read. And this is without any funky formatting! Fortunately, CD-ROM became a thing shortly thereafter but the point is, the top disk duplicator in the country confirmed that "Yep, we do this better than anyone and your media is the best money can buy - and you're getting the expected field failure rate." So, selling hardware destroying time bombs would have been incredibly stupid, because statistically inevitable failures would certainly harm the hardware of more than one legitimate paying customer by mistake, and that would result in a very fast (but quite spectacular) fireball of infamy for any company dumb enough to try it.

Wow. Doing a print magazine for C64 is so oddly unexpected that I think I'll buy a copy even though I've never really been into C64 (my 8-bit was a 6809-based Radio Shack Coco before my first Amiga).

Now that's a lovely detailled deep-dive. The good kind of rabbit hole!

My suggestion: it's the "mode change" code/character found in various IBM punchcard encodings, punch 11-8-7, represented by an upper-case delta.

Rendering this slightly differently from the regular Greek letter, would make sense, I guess. This may also explain the varying representations in the manuals: some would represent this like in common EBCDIC charts, as a delta, while others would refer to it as represented in the actual on-screen character set.

(There is also the rather common problem with special characters in manuals, where the font used for the chart doesn't comprehend the particular glyph, giving rise to alternative, often more abstract representations, as these symbols were drawn in later.)

I was surprised to read this part: "For now, FreeDOS 1.4 can't run Windows for Workgroups in enhanced mode, but can run Windows 3.1 in standard mode."

I know very little about the project but I'd have guessed that ~100% DOS compatibility would've been achieved early on. There's just not very much to DOS! I'm sure there are reasons, of course, would be interested if anyone knows.

The Psion 3 series used 8086 processors, so they could have released a standalone version of SIBO for IBM-PCs with relative ease.

In fact, Psion did release a SIBO "emulator"* for DOS which seems to be basically a PC port. It's intended for developers, and hews to replicating the mobile devices rather than taking advantage of the PC hardware, but you can imagine polishing it a step further.

* https://home.hccnet.nl/joop.nijenhuis/psion/emul_0e.htm

Note to self that the theme selection doesn't stick because the choice function in app.srv has no way of knowing which of the choices was selected. Needs a total rethink.

I'll fix that.

FTA:

The original request was for a startup sound lasting about 3 seconds. However, Eno submitted dozens of sound elements for the Microsoft designers to explore, and they chose the one we know and love today—even though it's twice as long as initially requested. Perhaps the most scandalous part of the sound bite's creation is the admission in a 2009 BBC interview that Eno created the jingle on a Mac.

Repo for build instructions: https://github.com/kmilne40/PiFrame

Here is a sample image from the project site. I can't tell if this jives with your explanation. Also, I am not sure if dithering is the same as artifcating which is what I used to see on Apple II and Atari Hi-Res games sometimes to get extra "colours" out of monitors and tv sets.

https://hackaday.io/project/164212/gallery#0f87e94323e101952...

iPod was a halo effect. it gave people a reason to buy a mac. Just like Microsoft sold things to bundle together. Outlook is best when you buy it and use it with Exchange.

> I would only add that the iPod is what saved Apple

Yes, I agree. I just didn't want to get into a lot of detail in what was basically an aside to address that Apple's Mac platform did (sort of) survive. But as you observed, it was on very shaky ground and hardly a resounding success. Even today, the Mac business isn't as significant to Apple as iOS or services.

I would only add that the iPod is what saved Apple, not the Mac. NeXT’s software didn’t really have anything to do with it. Most Mac users stayed with Mac OS 9 until 2003-2004, because OS X wasn’t ready for prime time until then.

In terms of Apple’s long term survival, everything Apple did between 1997 and the iPod introduction was just treading water. Steve had stopped the bleeding, but the Mac was still not setting the world on fire in terms of market share or profitability. It was on shaky ground until the Intel transition, coupled with the iPod halo effect, allowed people to feel safe buying Macs again.

Excellent find! It's almost hard to remember how primitive Windows 1 was at launch. Frankly, GEM, Desqview and several other competitors already on the market were somewhat better.

To be fair to Ballmer, that looks like it may be one of his internal videos to hype up the field sales force. Ballmer was known for doing those and he cultivated an over-the-top persona in contrast to Gates' nerdy engineer at Microsoft internal and developer events. The schtick eventually devolved into self-parody which Ballmer was happy to go along with as long as the sales force kept making the numbers. And we should never forget the legendary cringe that is "Developers! Developers! Developers!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fcSviC7cRM.

With all the nostalgia for the ST and Amiga, I couldn’t pass up posting this. Ballmer comes off like a late night infomercial huckster.

I agree.

Facts. We can only hope that George appoints a successor like Robert Jordan did for his Wheel of Time series. I mean even Dune got finished eventually....

Nice to see OG 68k AmigaOS still getting a little love. I'm one of those who used Amigas daily from 1985 to 1995 and loved the platform. I still love it as a venerable retro platform because it was the most unique and interesting of the retro-era computer platforms.

Sadly, I've never been able to muster much interest in the subsequent post-Commodore Power PC or retargetable graphics-based Amiga derivatives. Relative to their post-1995 peer platforms none of those Amiga derivatives were compelling. They had all the downsides of being a low-adoption hobby platform with none of the unique upsides the OG Amiga offered vs its peers between 85 and 95 (better graphics, sound, color, multi-tasking). Post 1995-ish most peer platforms had approximately similar resolution, color depth, graphics speed and processing performance to anything derivative Amiga add-ons or upgrades were offering - and usually with more support and better prices. Worse, they didn't even offer much nostalgic appeal because new apps and OS were required - essentially making it little different than transitioning to an entirely new platform anyway.

As Commodore disappeared into bankruptcy, the era when unique platforms could carve out a market was ending and fundamentally nothing Commodore (or its successors) could do would have done more than delay the inevitable. Platforms like the Amiga had shown the way to the future but eventually the baseline tide was catching up. The age of CISC CPUs and 15khz displays was at an end. Commodore didn't survive long enough to take a solid swing at a RISC machine with >31khz graphics and none of its descendants had anywhere near the resources to even make a serious attempt at anything which might have been uniquely better than current peers. Frankly, even Commodore didn't have the resources to spin a truly competitive new hardware platform with a bespoke OS ready to exploit it.

Even Intel and Microsoft combined barely managed to eventually make the transition. Maintaining x86 ISA compatibility with microcode translation on top of RISC was an ugly and risky hack that almost didn't work (requiring heroic effort to salvage). After trying to do essentially the same with the 68060, Motorola gave up (perhaps wisely as they didn't even have Intel's process fabrication savvy to help hide the inevitable performance gap of emulating a CISC ISA on a RISC CPU). And on the OS side, it took Microsoft 8 years of iteration to eventually improve Windows to the point where it was really usable as a multi-tasking GUI OS.

There was simply no way a vertically integrated computer company like a Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, etc could compete against a platform made by separate companies each specializing on one aspect: the CPU & chipset, OS, graphics or sound and then assembled by a manufacturing integrator. Leading edge desktop computers had grown incredibly complex and the 90s was peak Moore's Law acceleration, enabling immense gains for those able to move fast enough. No single company could compete. Keeping up required an ecosystem of companies. And if Commodore (or successors) had shifted to outsourcing all the components, they'd just be yet another low margin integrator like an Acer, Dell, Gateway, etc. And to be fair to Commodore, no one else made the transition either. Even giants like IBM, DEC, HP, SGI, Sun, Next all either gave up on desktop PCs or became low margin integrators (usually as a loss leader for their higher end hardware). Apple barely survived (and wouldn't have without acquiring a new OS from Next, Steve Jobs returning, a last minute $400M lifeline loan from Microsoft and quite a bit of luck).

Yeah. You should add both. The BASIC appears to deserve it.

     Sidebar:

This is a bit off topic, at least for this thread, but I am doing some similar activities related to pocket computers.

Back in the day, what I really wanted was a Model 100 by Tandy. I have one now, and yeah. It would have done the work back then. Well.

My use case was manufacturing. Actually still is! I have an opportunity to make some parts similar to ones I did then. At the time, I used a combination of a Tandy PC-6, I believe? The folding one. And also a Casio scientific.

The Tandy had just enough to be useful, but no graphics. Only 20 character, one line display too. Ugh.

But that was enough to help lay out parts and crank out some g-code, which I would just type into a machine and run.

Well, little didnI know, but SHARP was flat out killing it in this space. They got really good at designing little, fast organizers that ran an bit CPU of their own design I think, and button cells!

Their displays were often super too. Clear, fast, respectable pixel counts.

The SHARP G850VS is basically a whole darn workstation. Battery requirements went up to AA cells, but worth it!

Display has 20x5 lines too. Pixel addressable.

But get this!

It has a huge system ROM containing:

BASIC with graphical, scientific, statistical and robust logic commands.

System Monitor

Z-80 Assembler

C Compiler! ! ! (Seriously?)

PIC Assembler

And one other pseudo machine assembler for education I do not fully understand other than the consensus it it being useless.

System Bus, like for cartridges or and / dock.

10 Pin GPIO block, similar to the Raspi machines.

IR comms capability.

That is nuts! And back then it was easy to miss this kind of thing. No Internet meant a lot of us just did not get info. Heck, I learned 6502 out of the magazines in the grocery store magazine racks!

I am on the hunt. And they are not too hard to find right now, so I really just gotta save my pennies and pull the trigger on a good one.

That kind-of capability would have enabled a little CAM system with back plotting to verify g-codes!

     End Sidebar

Seems to me you found enough here in your exploration to want the same thing. Flesh it all out and go! Bet you it ends up worth it. :)

Very enjoyable write up, BTW.

I'm 100% convinced those books will never get finished now. I wish I hadn't read the first five.