Two Stop Bits | qingcharles's comments

qingcharles 336 days ago | parent | on: Windows 95 and Early 80386 CPUs
Those early 386s had an insane amount of flaws:
https://www.pcjs.org/documents/manuals/intel/80386/
I used to have an old 386 server that was the size of a fridge and was apparently the first 386 commercial product. I wish I still had it now so I could take a look at the CPU!
See also for the official comment on the Windows 95/386 issue: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110112-00/?p=11...
qingcharles 336 days ago | parent | on: Running Llama on Windows 98
Also, as someone pointed out recently, if you arrived out of the blue in 1998 and had that AI working on the computer in this article you could probably sell it for a billion dollars immediately.
qingcharles 336 days ago | parent | on: Running Llama on Windows 98
As AI optimizations continue, such as Bitnet, we'll discover we could have been running full HAL-9000 level AI on our PCs in the 1980s. I used to run huge warez sites and certainly had big enough disk arrays to store a really good modern model.
qingcharles 338 days ago | parent | on: A design flaw in the Windows 3D Pipes screen saver...
Damn, now I wonder how many servers I left headless in data centers with 3D Pipes running and chewing up the CPU on software rendering.
- bmonkey325 337 days ago
  What you measure, you optimize. I got pinched by windows power management and sleep one time. After that all production equipment would be set to have no sleep mode for disks or screen. Losing a couple of hours across our cluster was costly.
  Today I think you can turn off the screen without running code. NT4 and windows 2000 not so much.
qingcharles 338 days ago | parent | on: Pixel GUIs
A lot of those are cool. I built a lot of those UIs back in the day. But the Lightwave one is truly awful, IMO. I hated using it.
qingcharles 339 days ago | parent | on: The IBM PalmTop PC110 : History and developments
God, I remember how cool this keyboard was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChlD_ZfpPdw
- bmonkey325 338 days ago
  Have you read the restoration project done by our benevolent overlord.
  https://blog.jgc.org/2023/12/restoration-of-ibm-thinkpad-701...
  - qingcharles 338 days ago
    What an awesome restoration. I didn't realize battery goo damaged plastic as much as it does.
    Looking online it looks like you could even stick a 64MB stick in that thing. Amazing.
    JGC is the kind of benevolent dictator we should all welcome.
qingcharles 339 days ago | parent | on: Running NetBSD 10.1 on a 1998 Toshiba laptop
I thought one of my NetBSD boxes from 1996 was still online, but it seems whoever has it now has updated it to CentOS at some point (looking at the errors), so it must be on newer hardware. The web site is still running unchanged though:
http://resworld.eolith.net/res.html
qingcharles 339 days ago | parent | on: Stay In Touch With Yahoo! Pager
That's funny. I don't ever remember their IM being named "Pager". What year was ICQ? 1996? What year was MSN Messenger and AIM?
qingcharles 339 days ago | parent | on: Running NetBSD 10.1 on a 1998 Toshiba laptop
I'm looking at him running a window manager on that laptop like o_O but then remembering we ran X on NetBSD with much lower spec systems at the time!
qingcharles 341 days ago | parent | on: The $5000 GIF royalty fiasco of 1994
I'm pretty sure I was using the 1x1 gif spacer in 1995. It was in pretty much any site I designed.
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