Two Stop Bits | qingcharles's comments

qingcharles 344 days ago | parent | on: How a Commodore engineer trolled Jack Tramiel with...
The action figure looks more like Jack Tramiel than Boss Hogg :D
qingcharles 344 days ago | parent | on: Why Did Early CD-ROM Drives Rely on Awkward Plasti...
I still don't feel like this article gets to the bottom of this mystery.
One answer I saw might be that the tray mechanisms were too big to fit in a 5.25" bay. The early Mitsumis used a manual tray, but I always assumed this was for cost reasons.
My Philips burner from 1992 was tray loading.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/44095/Philips-CDD-52.../
qingcharles 346 days ago | parent | on: DOS Append
Using DOS since '88. Never figured out what the hell APPEND was for until 2024.
- bmonkey325 346 days ago
  It’s like PATH but for regular files. Like PATH you need to be sensitive to the order as it stops once it finds the file it’s searching for
qingcharles 372 days ago | parent | on: Two Stop Bits' birthday
There are exactly three sites in my bookmarks I check when I wake up. BBC News, HN and Two Stop Bits :)
qingcharles 391 days ago | parent | on: Beige Box LAN Party Fall 2024
This is awesome.
qingcharles 392 days ago | parent | on: Pioneer LaserActive : gaming console
Always wanted one of these. When I have cash again, going to invest...
- KODust 390 days ago
  might also need to be handy with a soldering iron and maybe general EE skills -- late-period LaserDisc players were generally reliable, but they're quite old now
qingcharles 392 days ago | parent | on: The unreleased Commodore HHC-4's secret identity
I wrote a significant amount of code on one of these as a kid: https://www.vintage-calculators.nl/page89.html
It's amazing how creative you have to be when faced with such harsh constraints. I made a ton of fun games, and spent almost every lesson programming instead of listening to the teachers.
"L'art naît de contraintes et meurt de liberté."
qingcharles 393 days ago | parent | on: Recreating my ’80s dev system
I'm still wracked with guilt over an incident of wanton vandalism in 1984 when, as a child, I came across an Einstein on floor display in a store and promptly figured out how to reformat the boot floppy and basically killed their demo box.
Hopefully they had a backup? :(
- bmonkey325 392 days ago
  maybe not as destructive, but I can confirm to you that I used to vandalize any Micro on display that booted to a basic prompt with the program:
  10 PRINT "Van Halen kicks ass ";
  20 GOTO 10
  It was the 80s after all...
  - qingcharles 392 days ago
    Oh god, you too. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
    10 PRINT "CHAZ WOZ ERE " 20 GOTO 10
    EVERY. ONE.
    It was the nerd version of graffiti tagging. Definitely the first code I learned to write as a 5 year old kid :)
    - seclorum 376 days ago
      10PING:EXPLODE:SHOOT:ZAP:PING
      20PAPERRND(1)7:INKRND(1)7:GOTO10
qingcharles 393 days ago | parent | on: Recreating my ’80s dev system
This was great. The rest of the article is on his blog too if you click on his header.
qingcharles 398 days ago | parent | on: IPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project
See also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegacyJailbreak/wiki/index/
https://mega.nz/folder/k4FAXCIB#Fk7pxs6ikYzL3YBvAGX5ig
More