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It works best on scientific skills, but works on a few people with social talents as well. Focus, employed by the Emergents, allows them to combine the power and speed of a computer with the reasoning and intuitive skills of a tireless, dedicated human, although the human infected seems decidedly less "human" to the unfocused.

See here.

Is it just me, or does this getting disturbingly close to Focus?

There's always SoundApp...a lean, mean player. However, they never got around to making a MacOS X version of it. It also never got .OGG support.

SoundApp seems to be abandoned now...
http://www.spies.com/~franke/SoundApp/

It is also kinda odd that apple corps never got pissed at the Blue Meanies references that abound in the early mac os's (option click about in the graphics control panel among other places.) Since Blue Meanies is a SGT Pepper Refernce

I'm not sure about Austrian toilets, but I'm afraid they may resemble German toilets.

In Austria you can find both types of toilets. The german kind is preferred in homes whereas the "normal" one is often found in public places (restaurants etc.).

From personal experience I have to say that I like the german toilets better because you don't have to throw loads of toilet paper into the water to dampen the fall in order to prevent splashing yourself.
When water pressure is low you can use the toilet brush which you should do anyway. By the way, when bestriding the toilet facing the plumbing you don't have to direct the stream vertically down into the hole at the front of the shelf. Just pee on the horizontal shelf you mentioned. That's even possible when peeing through the fly.

Austria is that island where the toilets flush backwards, no?

Austria is an island, in the sense that it's surrounded by Europe.

I'm not sure about Austrian toilets, but I'm afraid they may resemble German toilets.

-kgj

See, for me it's support of Sun Audio (AU), IMA ADPCM and PSION sound formats (see details of these here)

How dare Apple mock my insistence on using these obscure^H^H^H^H^H^H^H highly reputable formats!

I hate to feed the trolls but criminy...

can only be useful in the context of searching for and downloading hardcore or violent pornography

The emphasis is in the original post and it's an utterly ridiculous claim. Trust me, these fantastic features are every bit as useful and functional for downloading and cataloging even low-key, family-friendly porn that has nothing to do with whips, chains, or farm animals in leather pants.

Besides which, your cheap attempt to inject a little extra hype carries a distinct tone of shrill hysteria, which detracts from any attempt at a more reasoned argument. Your attempt to use one narrow aspect of the whole broad, rich spectrum of glorious pornography is misleading enough that it probably has its own latin name.

I guess it also goes without saying that the uses for tabbed browsing are limited only by the imagination and intelligence of the person who browses.

Consequently, your options may be severely limited. Let me help you get started.

• The glorious power of tabbed browsing:
• Allows you to open up every category of the Chadwick's Catalog at once
• You can do a Google search for "Moral Purity" and open each result in its own tab
• Each article on the American Family Association's Website can be opened in its own tab. You can read the current article while the others load.
• You don't have to use Firefox's handy extensions on pictures of porn. Because Satan and his Mozillian Minions made them available through the GPL for free, you can use them to collect and trade pictures of Jesus or even pictures of beautiful cathedrals, without ever worrying that your licensing fee will be used to fund sex-correction surgery for a 16-year old Taiwanese lady-boy.
• If you have Bible questions, you can open a tab for each answer, drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to hide those words in your heart.
• Tabbed browsing is so useful that you can go to the Anti-Porn Guy's website and open each of his informative links in its own window to find others who will help you with your crusade against tabbed browsing.

To sum up: tabbed browsing is your friend. Whether you are cruising www.hotasiansluts.com or www.jesus.com, tabbed browsing can make your internet experience faster, easier, and better.

The Dalai Llama
...tab for the children...

P.S. - I gather that your tirade against tabbed browsing is a recurring theme. Feel free to bookmark this post and refer to it as needed.

I hate to feed the trolls but criminy...

can only be useful in the context of searching for and downloading hardcore or violent pornography

The emphasis is in the original post and it's an utterly ridiculous claim. Trust me, these fantastic features are every bit as useful and functional for downloading and cataloging even low-key, family-friendly porn that has nothing to do with whips, chains, or farm animals in leather pants.

Besides which, your cheap attempt to inject a little extra hype carries a distinct tone of shrill hysteria, which detracts from any attempt at a more reasoned argument. Your attempt to use one narrow aspect of the whole broad, rich spectrum of glorious pornography is misleading enough that it probably has its own latin name.

I guess it also goes without saying that the uses for tabbed browsing are limited only by the imagination and intelligence of the person who browses.

Consequently, your options may be severely limited. Let me help you get started.

• The glorious power of tabbed browsing:
• Allows you to open up every category of the Chadwick's Catalog at once
• You can do a Google search for "Moral Purity" and open each result in its own tab
• Each article on the American Family Association's Website can be opened in its own tab. You can read the current article while the others load.
• You don't have to use Firefox's handy extensions on pictures of porn. Because Satan and his Mozillian Minions made them available through the GPL for free, you can use them to collect and trade pictures of Jesus or even pictures of beautiful cathedrals, without ever worrying that your licensing fee will be used to fund sex-correction surgery for a 16-year old Taiwanese lady-boy.
• If you have Bible questions, you can open a tab for each answer, drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to hide those words in your heart.
• Tabbed browsing is so useful that you can go to the Anti-Porn Guy's website and open each of his informative links in its own window to find others who will help you with your crusade against tabbed browsing.

To sum up: tabbed browsing is your friend. Whether you are cruising www.hotasiansluts.com or www.jesus.com, tabbed browsing can make your internet experience faster, easier, and better.

The Dalai Llama
...tab for the children...

P.S. - I gather that your tirade against tabbed browsing is a recurring theme. Feel free to bookmark this post and refer to it as needed.

here

I wonder if he has to prepare himself in any way before he carries out one of these "missions".

C was invented a shorthand for assembler, in particular PDP-11 assembler.

Yes, C is basically an abstracted PDP-11.

Dave Conroy at Teklogix in Mississauga, Ontario, had written and made work the only C compiler not written by Bell Labs

Is this the same Dave Conroy that does FPGA re-implimentations of old DEC computers?

http://www.spies.com/~dgc/

The reason that I don't remember is that I couldn't listen to it. This was very early on in '96 or '97, and there still weren't any mp3 decoders for the Mac at the time.

Hate to break it to you after you trashed your MP3s, but SoundAPP PPC was released April 1, 1996. It would've been able to play the songs (if you had at least a PowerPC) :-).

You mean when you boot up the latest KDE, you get a splash screen that looks like the Xerox Alto?

i did this with a quantum fireball too! check it out here

I know later ones like BASIC-PLUS-TWO did, but I'm reasonably sure that the canonical BASIC on STOP-10 did as well, at least left$() or something very much like it. And bingo, here it is, from 1974, first printing 1968 [warning, huge PDF], page 8.10 (PDF page #80), ya gotta love Google! (-:

for recreational motivational purposes, i prefer dextromethorphan, the active ingredient in robotussin. see this page for details: http://www.spies.com/~gus/musings/tussin/

But I just love those names. It bring memories from Iain Banks' books. (he has universe in which spaceships are self-aware and have names in style of 'Just Testing', 'Killing Time').. read more here.

Nah, I think the Sosumi sound came about in part after Apple's legal tussles with Apple Records, the Beatles old label. Check here and grep for sosumi. Horribly off topic, but I had to correct this.... Back to the discussion at hand.

Can you connect to it with an Apple? Then I'd say core dump is more appropriate.

I think they should market this in Germany where they might appreciate technical bathroom apparatus.

Its blazing computational stats:

BCPL: 5-10 uSec for a simple expression
Nova Asm: 1-2uSec / instruction
Microcode: 170 nSec / micro instruction

Can be found with a lot of other cool information on its original programming language and some software on this very cool page by an Alto collector.

Neat machine. I think I want one now.

-----

Ok, you asked, so here is what I've got so far:
----------
Creating DVDs from TiVo Series 1 Recordings on the Mac
I spent the better part of a weekend trying to burn a DVD containing shows I recorded on my TiVo, after extracting them from the TiVo and editing out the cruft with iMovie. As it turned out, the easy part was getting the TiVo networked so I could pull the video out of it with my Mac. The hard part was getting it into a format that I could easily edit, once it was sitting on my Mac's hard drive. After much trial, error, and cursing, I have written the procedure down for my own future reference. I decided to share it with other Mac users who also may want to archive their TiVo recordings to DVD.

These instructions assume the following:
You have a Series 1 TiVo with Ethernet, telnet and ftp capability.
The TiVo also has TiVoWeb installed on it, and has been modified by following the procedures here.
Your Mac has QuickTime Pro 6 ($29) and the QuickTime MPEG2 Component ($19), both available from Apple.

(Steps 1 through 3 originally by Alexander Fajkowski, and are just included here for completeness)

1. Using the modified TiVoWeb page at <http://your.tivo.ip.address/ui/nowshowing>, find and note the FSIDs of the recording you want to retrieve.

2. Retrieve the recording from the TiVo:
a. Open two Terminal windows (Window 1, Mac. Window 2, TiVo.)
b. Window 1: cd /directory_where_you_keep_nc
c. Window 1: ./nc -l -p 1200 > /desired_directory_path/desired_filename.ty (Don't hit Enter yet)
d. Window 2: Telnet to TiVo
e. Window 2: cd /directory_where_you_keep_sendstream
f. Window 2: ./sendstream -s FSID1 [FSID2] [...] | ./nc -n -w 5 your.mac.ip.address 1200 (Don't hit Enter yet)
g. Hit Enter in Window 1, then Window 2. This starts the Mac listening for the stream, and the TiVo sending the stream.

3. Once file has been retrieved, convert it to MPEG2:
a. Window 1: ./tyc -s < /desired_directory_path/desired_filename.ty > /desired_directory_path/desired_filename.mpg
4. Separate the MPEG2 file into separate audio and video files with BBDemux or your preferred demultiplexing utility.

5. Convert the audio file to AIFF format with SoundApp or your preferred sound conversion utility.

6. Open the MPEG video track and the AIFF audio track in QuickTime Player, in separate windows.

7. Do a "Select All" and a "Copy" on the audio track.

8. Make sure there is no selection in the video track, and make sure the playhead/insertion point is at the very start of the movie. Then do "Add Scaled."

9. Now you should once again have a movie with sound-- the difference is, the sound will now remain in the finished product if you export to another format. Export it to DV Stream format.

10. Open the DV stream version of the movie file in QuickTime Player.

11. Divide the DV stream up into chunks iMovie can handle. NOTE: There is now an Applescript that automates this process, available here.
a. Starting at the beginning of the movie, select a segment about 4 to 5 minutes long (or slightly longer, but they must be 2GB for use in iMovie)
b. Cut the segment, open a new QuickTime window and paste the segment into it.
c. Save it as a self-contained (DV stream) movie, and stick a number in the filename so you know how to reorder the segments in iMovie.
d. Repeat as necessary until you have divided the whole movie up into DV video segments 5 minutes long.

12. Open iMovie, create a new project, and drag and drop the collection of segments on the clip shelf

You must have last used VM a LOT more than 15 years ago or didn't know it very well; VMCF has existed since VM/370 release 3 in 1976 ....

on building to last for a long time is How Buldings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. by Stewart Brand (See also here, here and here

The book covers everything about buildings after they are built from leaks, technological changes to changing styles. Have a look at the Amazon link for the samples pages to get an idea of the content and especially the pictures. The book covers modern homes, office buildings, castles, farm houses. small shacks and everything in between. It is definately the place to start if you want to build something that will be around and used in 50 or 500 years.

It's not a howto or builders guide except in the general sense. However it covers the general picture of the things you need to think about and provides links to other sources with more specific information. Overall it is one of my favourate books.

The author is president of the Long Now Foundation which is building the 10 ,000 year clock so he's very much into thinking about the longer term.

Remember, Grafitti was developed by Palm for Newton.

• Alastair Reynolds
• Iain Banks
• Greg Egan

As a matter of fact, it's how Smalltalk started out (well, alright, Smalltalk wasn't used as a systems language on those machines, but it was used a lot for the interfaces and other stuff).

They have playlists too; I just which they were instantly updated rather than a couple weeks old..someone needs to script that..

USB is really Intel's baby

PC manufacturers wouldn't include USB until the software was there

Apple was really the one to put it on the market with the i* series

okay, lesse,

Citizen Cain,
Thelma & Louis,
Crying Game
Titanic
The sixth sense

This game is GREAT!

"The PDP-8/X is a reimplementation of the PDP-8/I, with 32K words of memory (all the memory you can put on a PDP-8/I), an extended memory control, an interface to an RS-232 terminal, and an interface to an IDE disk, which I built just for fun.

I consider this machine to be a new model compatible with something from the past, as opposed to a clone of the past, so I feel no shame in introducing new model-specific variations. The PDP-8/X, therefore, uses IDE disks with a new disk interface, because I thought that it would not be unreasonable for a new model to come out with a new disk controller, especially considering that customer-written PDP-8 device handlers were both common and encouraged."

"The PDP-8/X is a reimplementation of the PDP-8/I, with 32K words of memory (all the memory you can put on a PDP-8/I), an extended memory control, an interface to an RS-232 terminal, and an interface to an IDE disk, which I built just for fun.

I consider this machine to be a new model compatible with something from the past, as opposed to a clone of the past, so I feel no shame in introducing new model-specific variations. The PDP-8/X, therefore, uses IDE disks with a new disk interface, because I thought that it would not be unreasonable for a new model to come out with a new disk controller, especially considering that customer-written PDP-8 device handlers were both common and encouraged."

This is by no means a new or unique project. PDP-8s have been cloned using various chips for years. There is the SBC-6120, the PDP-8/X and many others.
Of course, none of these are as much fun as the real PDP-8/E and PDP-11 I have in my basement.

My knowledge of electronics is old and musty, but couldn't you load the schematics into SPICE or other electronics simulator and fire it up? I would think that there are simulators that can do video output.

Here's are a bunch of screenshots.

Yeah, books are nice, but there's nothing like the real thing. Ever desired to own almost every video game ever made? Yeah, everyone knows about MAME, but perhaps you don't know about Tombstones, which is network of volunteers who will send you CD-ROMS of all of the MAME roms -- for about $7. 3,486 roms (about 1900 unique games, I think).

It's unbelievable how much game you can put in about 4K of ROM space.

Now, what I want to know is when is SOMEONE going to make a hardware emulator of Death Race. The schematics are available on the web. [it didn't you use a microprocessor... all electronic! ]

Actually UNIX owes as much to the Berkeley Timeshring System developed for Project Genie running on the hacked SDS 930 that became the SDS 940 as it does to Multics.

The UNIX name pun and the command names like "ls" are Multicisms but fork() is from Project Genie

Although Alan Kay et. al. designed the Xerox Alto to use 80% of its resources for the Graphical User Interface (the real innovation -- understanding that the purpose of the computer is its user interface), SmallTalk needed extra memory and used the bottom part of the screen video memory for its stack. As a result, you could see when something crashed or went into infinite recursion.

Found it. --
Evan (no reference)

Owen Rubin- creator of Atari coinops Major Havoc, Space Duel, and others.

Howard Delman- coinop hardware and software engineer. Designed the vector graphics hardware for Asteroids and Lunar Lander.

Mike Albaugh- coinop hardware and software engineer.

Ed Rotberg- programmer of Battlezone, Atari Baseball, and other coinops. Only a family page, I'm afraid.

Jed Margolin- hardware engineer, designed TONS of coinop hardware. LOTS of techie stuff on his page :)

And for the hell of it, Carol Shaw- programmer of early 2600 games (3D Tic Tac Toe) as well as River Raid for Activision.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the only ones I can think of at the moment.

Brian Deuel
Webmaster
http://www.orubin.com

Actually they used to have a good-sized computer business. The first computer I ever programmed on was a Xerox running CP/M, around 1985. My father worked for the U.S.D.A. (retired now), and back then he would let me play around on it whenever I would go in to work with him. The Xerox Alto was their graphical computer. I never used one of them myself, but they weren't just "prototypes". You can read about them at this guys website.

Is there good Free software to do this kind of syncing ?

The German Toilet, complete with Turd Inspection Shelf!

Darin Adler was 23 or 24 years old when he was technical lead for Apple's System 7. Take a look at his "20 Years of Computer Software" page for details, during the 1987-1991 period. (From the info on his page, he turned 13 in '78; that makes him 23 years old in '88...)

Looks like a young gun was good enough to lead an entire operating system project for Apple back in the day, but not good enough now to be a contributor to part of part of an OS now.

Darin Adler was 23 or 24 years old when he was technical lead for Apple's System 7. Take a look at his "20 Years of Computer Software" page for details, during the 1987-1991 period. (From the info on his page, he turned 13 in '78; that makes him 23 years old in '88...)

Looks like a young gun was good enough to lead an entire operating system project for Apple back in the day, but not good enough now to be a contributor to part of part of an OS now.

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

Take a look at the Vintage Computer Festival. There are a lot of people who are working hard to preserve the history of the computer industry.

Keep in mind that it's also important to show people that what they think is new just might not be.

P.S., You can check out my collection too.

After being in the coin-op biz for a while, you hear the same microprocessors mentioned over and over: Z80, 6800, 6809, 68000, 6502. That pretty much covers arcade history from 1980 to 1987. Sure, there were custom chips for I/O, sound, video, what have you, but it seems that most of the hardware designers pulled out their Moto or Zilog book and went from there. Remember that cost is king, and if you can find a commodity chip that will make your design even cheaper that's a good thing. Being cutting-edge and exotic didn't win you any fans upstairs, or from your technicians that had to field repair these things.

*grin*

You'll like the derivative work:

Toad Head.

It just goes to show, that even Gates is a deep, touching author, if only we could read between the lines.

Couple of Star/Alto links for anybody interested. The Alto project started in the early seventies. The Star was a halfhearted commmercialization of this kewl technology, released in 1981.

Cute pix, good links; Star history; overview stuff; Links to Alto documentation, including Mesa and BCPL manuals etc.

PARC developed so much great stuff, especially in those days. I still think that Cedar and Mesa were fabulous.

Actually, I believe that Xerox did NOT have overlapping windows, it only appeared to.

Then you believe wrong.

I personally used Xerox 1108 ('Dandelion') and 1186 ('Daybreak') machines from 1984 until 1988. They definitely, without question or possibility of doubt, had multiple overlapping windows, and, indeed, all the features of a modern WIMP environment. Xerox Stars, Dolphins, Dorados, Dandetigers and a number of other Xerox machines (including the Smalltalk ones whose model designations I've forgotten) had multiple overlapping windows at least as far back as 1978. It's probable (but I don't know this for a fact because I never saw one) that the Alto also had multiple overlapping windows, at least in it's Smalltalk mode.