Two Stop Bits | KODust's comments

KODust 340 days ago | parent | on: Hints for Computer System Design – Lampson's timel...
This is mostly still good, relevant advice that software engineers in particular really should take heed of.
KODust 347 days ago | parent | on: Lunatic Fringe is a game originally distributed as...
Lunatic Fringe was a lot of fun — IIRC, at a time when there weren’t very many standalone arcade games for the Mac.
KODust 347 days ago | parent | on: Apple Rhapsody Report
A little more historical context. Rhapsody had two or three big problems:
- There was no transition plan for Mac apps other than Blue Box emulation. Adobe, Quark, Microsoft were the essential Mac developers and all of them completely refused to port to AppKit, full stop.
- Adobe refused to license Display PostScript under terms that would make it possible to ship as a consumer OS (supposedly they didn’t want to support DPS anymore, and refused to budge on a high per-seat price, as a way of tanking it the entire thing).
- Rhapsody was slower than classic MacOS on a wide variety of tasks, and unusable for others. The UI was a weird mashup of NeXT and Mac idioms
Note that it took until 2003 or 2004 for Mac OS X to become usable for non-technical end users. OpenStep had a lot of rough edges for non-Unix people; Rhapsody was the (false) start of a _long_ journey. (Ironically, given better engineering management, Apple could have shipped Copland well before then.)
KODust 362 days ago | parent | on: Dusting off Dreamcast Linux
Piracy did not take Dreamcast out -- the PS2 did
KODust 368 days ago | parent | on: Pioneer LaserActive : gaming console
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
KODust 368 days ago | parent | on: How Ed Roberts created the personal computer indus...
I do sort of wonder if the article is mixing him up with a different Dr. Ed Roberts on the west coast -- I wasn't previously aware that he worked with AIDs patients or had anything more exciting going on than a humble country practice. It's the kind of thing AI might easily be fooled by. But maybe.
- bmonkey325 367 days ago
  I dont know if its ficiontalized but there is a scene where Paul Allen flies out to New Mexico to meet Ed and test Altair Basic. Microsoft was originally founded in New Mexico before moving back to Bill and Pauls home town of Seattle.
  After computing Ed Robers did go to medical school and become an MD
  Bio for Ed Roberts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)
  - KODust 367 days ago
    That's my understanding as well from what I've read, but everything I've read (before AI existed) indicates he's more of a small-town family practice doctor; while that doesn't preclude award-winning work with AIDS patients, it doesn't sound right to me given the timing, location, and the fact that there is an Ed Roberts who did that sort of work on the other side of the country.
    More explicitly: I'm wondering if this wasn't at least partially AI-written, because that's a pretty fundamental error and you'd think a human researcher/writer would easily tell the difference between two Dr Ed Roberts's with no particular relationship on different coasts.
    Or maybe we're learning something new about Ed Roberts (Altair guy) -- but given the world today I suspect not.
    - KODust 367 days ago
      to be clear, the article is certainly largely structurally accurate -- that one detail sticks out suspiciously, though
KODust 412 days ago | parent | on: What Happened to the Japanese PC Platforms?
The Japanese firms should not have given up so completely on software. This is how you get to Sony being reduced to using Google's awful Android TV stuff on their otherwise compelling television lineup. If they didn't need tighter control over the kernel for performance reasons for PlayStation, it wouldn't be shocking to see PS6 powered by Google Gaming OS(tm), which would be a real shame.
KODust 431 days ago | parent | on: Macintosh Type/Creator Codes: Improving Identifica...
These aren’t “four-digit codes”; they are unterminated strings of exactly four 8-bit characters in the MacRoman text encoding.
KODust 431 days ago | parent | on: What we can learn from vintage computing
Win95 was viewed as an abomination by the rest of the tech industry at the time. Nostalgia for it was inevitable since it became a lot of people's first computing experience, but it's jarring if you were an adult in tech in 1995. Or simply a Mac user.
I think retrocomputing is an important way to think about an alternate history of personal computing where something other than Unix and Wintel won, and possibly viable alternate futures where we could still change to different paradigms.
- ddingus 426 days ago
  Yes! I often draw from experiences during that time.
  SGI made absolutely fantastic workstations, for example.
  I was 3D gaming with full video and audio chatter in the mid to late 90's, viewing models in stereo, running powerful applications remotely over X, with the 3D GLX extensions.
  Man so many good ideas in the Indigo Magic Desktop!
  Package management that included the ability to pause on events such as disk full so a guy could remove other software, or add disk, whatever.
  8 bit machines have relevance in embedded spaces.
  And it is fun to wonder what would have happened had the Amiga gained traction.
  It really was a beautiful time filled with all sorts of great tech people can draw inspiration from today.
KODust 456 days ago | parent | on: Mysteries of the Griffin iMate - classic Apple key...
Title could use minor clarification - the iMate was a cheap (in every sense) ADB -> USB adapter, not the keyboard itself
- apple4ever 454 days ago
  Good point. I still have 2! I used old Apple keyboards for a couple decades into USB because of them.
- bmonkey325 454 days ago
  They usually fillet me if I don't keep the OG title from the article. I usually only deviate if it's > 80 characters or if its too obscure to be known to a wider audience. In this instance, I added on the bit about being a classic apple keyboard for context.
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