The oldest untouched code running regularly here at my house would probably be in the '80s vintage Amana Radarange. (the kind with keypad and 4-digit green VFD display)
The oldest code running irregularly would be Atari 2600 code from as far back as 1977.
I know for sure that Clearcase doesn't do the equivalent of putting.svn directories all over the freaking place. There's a directory of tracking files at the checkout root, and that's it. And though it's been a while since I've used CVS, I don't remember CVS spamming control files all over the place like that either.
In fact, I'd have to say that all the.svn directory spam is probably the most annoying thing to me about svn.
Re:It's as if a thousands hands screamed out in pa
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The second was the Throw out and Replace mentality it pushed on consumers. Yes, you could upgrade the memory and you MIGHT be able to replace a dead drive. However real upgrades were right out.
As for the puck mouse, the problem wasn't carpal tunnel syndrome, the problem was that you couldn't know which way it was oriented without turning your head to look at the cable. With an oblong mouse, you can feel which way is "up" on the mouse and adjust accordingly.
Re:It looked like an ADM 3A
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iMac Turns 10
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· Score: 1
It's not just a dumb terminal, it's a very dumb terminal. It's all done in TTL logic. DEC's famous VT-100 used an actual CPU, and I'm sure that the VT-52 did too.
I have one that doesn't work right. Its raster works, but I was barely able to get it to show any characters on the screen. I found a schematic on the internet somewhere, so maybe someday I'll try to fix it.
...and I've heard that Apple insisted on selling them to retailers in evenly-mixed sets of colors. So you had to buy as many blues as greens as oranges as purples as reds. They were probably even mixed like that on the pallets. And they still did that when they came out with the flowers design. Retailers weren't too happy about that.
If a floppy is properly stored and kept indoors, it should still be readable after all that time. I have some TRS-80 floppies from the early '80s which read just fine a couple of years ago with a Catweasel board. There were some read errors, but those were probably there back in the day. So 25 years is certainly not unreasonable.
But it's still not too hard to find 5 1/4" floppy drives in relatively good condition. Good luck finding an Amstrad drive. Is there even an Amstrad users group in the US?
Even though I never had an Amstrad to recover disks from, I somewhat regret not having bought one of the three or four I saw at thrift stores over the years. As long as the interface is compatible with the standard Shugart interface (which it should be), you could hook it up to a Catweasel card. I did buy a few Amstrad disks when I found them (they were small), but by the time I cared, I didn't see any more of the computers.
But I was a TRS-80 guy back in the day, so all my old disks are already imaged thanks to the Catweasel. And thanks to Radio Shack using standard FM/MFM disk controller chips. (I've also played around with code to read Apple II and Commodore disks, and Commodore's GCR doesn't re-sync very well.)
Basically, there were three 3" formats back in the day fighting for who would be the next floppy drive. There was one which got used by some typewriters and the Famicom Disk System, another which got used by the Amstrad, and... the Sony 3 1/2" disk which got used by Apple and HP at about the same time in 1983-1984.
The way I started as a kid back in the late '70s was by playing with TTL parts from Radio Shack.
First, get a solderless breadboard and some 22ga solid wire. Then get a 555 chip, some resistors and capacitors, and hook it up. To drive an 8 ohm speaker, use a 100uf capacitor, and to drive an LED use a 270-470 ohm resistor. And find a 5 volt brick to power it. (That was the tricky part back in the day... getting my parents to be okay with me building a 7805-based power supply that actually plugged into the wall.)
Then get the TTL Cookbook, and some TTL chips (mainly 74LS00, 74LS02, 74LS04, 74LS74, 74LS90, 74LS93 for the basic stuff, and maybe a 7447/7448 and a 7-segment LED) and 4.7K resistors for pull-ups, and start playing around. Blinkenlights projects can be pretty fun.
TFA didn't even point out that two of the windows (Word and Explorer) have their window titles centered, when all the other apps have them on the left, presumably the default. Word even made the window title bar icon enormous for (presumably) no other reason than branding, because the Office icon would have been just as unrecognizable as all the rest at that size. And then it put some toolbar icons in the window title bar, which is totally alien from anything else.
Meanwhile, Explorer doesn't even have an icon on the left of its window's title bar, so in that screen shot it looks like it's an MDI sub-window of the IE window above it.
And stupid me noticed that total falsehood (Apple had UI guidelines before Microsoft even had Windows!), but kept reading on anyhow, and read four or five more of that guy's messages before giving up. Now I know how Windows users feel about the worst of the Mac zealots. Sheesh.
For example terminating strings with the $ symbol, FFS.
That was quite normal... if you were used to programming for CP/M. The DOS API was suspiciously similar to the CP/M API, because it was actually a thinly-veiled CP/M clone. If MSDOS 1.0 wasn't binary compatible with CP/M binaries, it was pretty close.
First was the "not ready in time" story. The way I heard it was that IBM asked both Intel and Motorola to commit to a certain date for availability of their CPUs. Motorola, being an older company with more attention to detail, refused to commit. Intel, being the upstart, and probably seeing a future in making this deal, was happy to commit.
Motorola did end up releasing the 68000 by the deadline, but by then it was too late.
Second is the story I got by reading the DTACK Grounded archive. Apparently the "advanced processors" division at Motorola wanted to sell tens of thousands of chips at a high price for $10,000+ Unix computers, rather than selling millions to the consumer and embedded markets. Basically, that division's management didn't understand that a small profit margin will still get you big profits if you can sell a lot of widgets. But the big problem was that they actively discouraged the consumer and embedded markets from using the 68000.
Motorola had a better and faster CPU, they had a better math co-processor, and Intel was having trouble making higher-speed (as in more than 5-8MHz!) versions of the 80x86 and 80x87. And Intel also had missteps with the 80186 (I think that was due to exception vector conflicts with PrtScr), and the 80286 (enforcing the segment model with no consideration for data blocks larger than 64K).
But the $10,000+ Unix computers were flops, and by the time Motorola wised up, it was too late.
(Before everybody says "What about the Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST?", that was after Motorola wised up. Look at the dates on DTACK Grounded. "But the Mac was already in development then!" Remember the Lisa? It wasn't Unix, but it was a $10,000+ 68000-based computer, wasn't it? So Apple already had a head start with the 68000. The 128K Mac started at $2,500 anyhow. And the first design for the Macintosh used a 6809.)
I used Google Finance to check it, just to be different. (I used to use Quicken Home for stock lookups, but they gave up a few years back and redirected to Yahoo. So I normally end up using Yahoo, even when I use the Dashboard widget.)
Hoover is a bad example, because the word has come to mean 'vacuum cleaner'.
In the UK, yes. But it didn't get verbed in the US, so we don't say "Hooverin' the carpet". Here, it's just a brand of vacuum cleaner. (And in Japan, the brand name "Hotchkiss" became the word for "stapler".)
Now does anyone know where I can get a new Refrigerator(R) brand, uh... food cooler cabinet?
Holy crap, I think there's some sliding scale or something now for how many mod points you get... I just got fifteen mod points!
Anyhow, as I understand it, the three days starts the first time a web page is generated showing that you have mod points (either the blurb on the home page, or the moderation pull-downs in article threads). I think it also goes up and down as a result of moderation and metamoderation to your posts. For a long time I didn't get mod points, and I think it was due to some mods going wild with the "redundant" tag. I don't see that much any more, so presumably they got weeded out by meta-moderation.
(And how come the new inline posting doesn't have a "No Karma Bonus" checkbox?)
And the compromised systems that become the hosts for malware often don't have "admins". They're just random computers hanging off of DSL or a cable modem somewhere. They don't have to be actual web site servers to be capable of hosting malware. In fact, it's better if they aren't, because there's not already something listening on port 80.
In other words, what he's saying is the equivalent of "Toyota is a copy of Ford. See, they all have four wheels and an engine, and you drive them with a steering wheel and a couple of pedals! And they both have doors and seats, too!"
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The oldest untouched code running regularly here at my house would probably be in the '80s vintage Amana Radarange. (the kind with keypad and 4-digit green VFD display)
The oldest code running irregularly would be Atari 2600 code from as far back as 1977.
I know for sure that Clearcase doesn't do the equivalent of putting .svn directories all over the freaking place. There's a directory of tracking files at the checkout root, and that's it. And though it's been a while since I've used CVS, I don't remember CVS spamming control files all over the place like that either.
In fact, I'd have to say that all the .svn directory spam is probably the most annoying thing to me about svn.
I've got news for you: http://lowendmac.com/compact/original-macintosh-128k.html And you couldn't even upgrade the memory. Well, not officially, anyhow. The first iMac was more expandable than the 128K.
As for the puck mouse, the problem wasn't carpal tunnel syndrome, the problem was that you couldn't know which way it was oriented without turning your head to look at the cable. With an oblong mouse, you can feel which way is "up" on the mouse and adjust accordingly.
It's not just a dumb terminal, it's a very dumb terminal. It's all done in TTL logic. DEC's famous VT-100 used an actual CPU, and I'm sure that the VT-52 did too.
I have one that doesn't work right. Its raster works, but I was barely able to get it to show any characters on the screen. I found a schematic on the internet somewhere, so maybe someday I'll try to fix it.
...and I've heard that Apple insisted on selling them to retailers in evenly-mixed sets of colors. So you had to buy as many blues as greens as oranges as purples as reds. They were probably even mixed like that on the pallets. And they still did that when they came out with the flowers design. Retailers weren't too happy about that.
If a floppy is properly stored and kept indoors, it should still be readable after all that time. I have some TRS-80 floppies from the early '80s which read just fine a couple of years ago with a Catweasel board. There were some read errors, but those were probably there back in the day. So 25 years is certainly not unreasonable.
But it's still not too hard to find 5 1/4" floppy drives in relatively good condition. Good luck finding an Amstrad drive. Is there even an Amstrad users group in the US?
Even though I never had an Amstrad to recover disks from, I somewhat regret not having bought one of the three or four I saw at thrift stores over the years. As long as the interface is compatible with the standard Shugart interface (which it should be), you could hook it up to a Catweasel card. I did buy a few Amstrad disks when I found them (they were small), but by the time I cared, I didn't see any more of the computers.
But I was a TRS-80 guy back in the day, so all my old disks are already imaged thanks to the Catweasel. And thanks to Radio Shack using standard FM/MFM disk controller chips. (I've also played around with code to read Apple II and Commodore disks, and Commodore's GCR doesn't re-sync very well.)
Basically, there were three 3" formats back in the day fighting for who would be the next floppy drive. There was one which got used by some typewriters and the Famicom Disk System, another which got used by the Amstrad, and... the Sony 3 1/2" disk which got used by Apple and HP at about the same time in 1983-1984.
Hey, where's the love for the humble Jackalope? Let's hear it for something above the equator!
I think the multiple inheritance involved here works best with Objective-C and its "protocols". So you'll have to use GCC. Visual Studio is right out.
The way I started as a kid back in the late '70s was by playing with TTL parts from Radio Shack.
First, get a solderless breadboard and some 22ga solid wire. Then get a 555 chip, some resistors and capacitors, and hook it up. To drive an 8 ohm speaker, use a 100uf capacitor, and to drive an LED use a 270-470 ohm resistor. And find a 5 volt brick to power it. (That was the tricky part back in the day... getting my parents to be okay with me building a 7805-based power supply that actually plugged into the wall.)
Then get the TTL Cookbook, and some TTL chips (mainly 74LS00, 74LS02, 74LS04, 74LS74, 74LS90, 74LS93 for the basic stuff, and maybe a 7447/7448 and a 7-segment LED) and 4.7K resistors for pull-ups, and start playing around. Blinkenlights projects can be pretty fun.
TFA didn't even point out that two of the windows (Word and Explorer) have their window titles centered, when all the other apps have them on the left, presumably the default. Word even made the window title bar icon enormous for (presumably) no other reason than branding, because the Office icon would have been just as unrecognizable as all the rest at that size. And then it put some toolbar icons in the window title bar, which is totally alien from anything else.
Meanwhile, Explorer doesn't even have an icon on the left of its window's title bar, so in that screen shot it looks like it's an MDI sub-window of the IE window above it.
And stupid me noticed that total falsehood (Apple had UI guidelines before Microsoft even had Windows!), but kept reading on anyhow, and read four or five more of that guy's messages before giving up. Now I know how Windows users feel about the worst of the Mac zealots. Sheesh.
...and that's CP/M-86 binaries, for those of you who were about to hit the reply button to whine about my missing that detail.
That was quite normal... if you were used to programming for CP/M. The DOS API was suspiciously similar to the CP/M API, because it was actually a thinly-veiled CP/M clone. If MSDOS 1.0 wasn't binary compatible with CP/M binaries, it was pretty close.
Ah, now I remember the days of "use CRT;" in Turbo Pascal. So why exactly were the BIOS text routines so slow anyhow?
I thought its lineage went back to Macromind VideoWorks (later Macromind Director), which was a Mac program.
I've heard two stories:
First was the "not ready in time" story. The way I heard it was that IBM asked both Intel and Motorola to commit to a certain date for availability of their CPUs. Motorola, being an older company with more attention to detail, refused to commit. Intel, being the upstart, and probably seeing a future in making this deal, was happy to commit.
Motorola did end up releasing the 68000 by the deadline, but by then it was too late.
Second is the story I got by reading the DTACK Grounded archive. Apparently the "advanced processors" division at Motorola wanted to sell tens of thousands of chips at a high price for $10,000+ Unix computers, rather than selling millions to the consumer and embedded markets. Basically, that division's management didn't understand that a small profit margin will still get you big profits if you can sell a lot of widgets. But the big problem was that they actively discouraged the consumer and embedded markets from using the 68000.
Motorola had a better and faster CPU, they had a better math co-processor, and Intel was having trouble making higher-speed (as in more than 5-8MHz!) versions of the 80x86 and 80x87. And Intel also had missteps with the 80186 (I think that was due to exception vector conflicts with PrtScr), and the 80286 (enforcing the segment model with no consideration for data blocks larger than 64K).
But the $10,000+ Unix computers were flops, and by the time Motorola wised up, it was too late.
(Before everybody says "What about the Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST?", that was after Motorola wised up. Look at the dates on DTACK Grounded. "But the Mac was already in development then!" Remember the Lisa? It wasn't Unix, but it was a $10,000+ 68000-based computer, wasn't it? So Apple already had a head start with the 68000. The 128K Mac started at $2,500 anyhow. And the first design for the Macintosh used a 6809.)
I used Google Finance to check it, just to be different. (I used to use Quicken Home for stock lookups, but they gave up a few years back and redirected to Yahoo. So I normally end up using Yahoo, even when I use the Dashboard widget.)
...except a VAX 11/730. (I actually saw one in person back in my college days. It was a couple of half-height cabinets in a computer engineering lab.)
In the UK, yes. But it didn't get verbed in the US, so we don't say "Hooverin' the carpet". Here, it's just a brand of vacuum cleaner. (And in Japan, the brand name "Hotchkiss" became the word for "stapler".)
Now does anyone know where I can get a new Refrigerator(R) brand, uh... food cooler cabinet?
Holy crap, I think there's some sliding scale or something now for how many mod points you get... I just got fifteen mod points!
Anyhow, as I understand it, the three days starts the first time a web page is generated showing that you have mod points (either the blurb on the home page, or the moderation pull-downs in article threads). I think it also goes up and down as a result of moderation and metamoderation to your posts. For a long time I didn't get mod points, and I think it was due to some mods going wild with the "redundant" tag. I don't see that much any more, so presumably they got weeded out by meta-moderation.
(And how come the new inline posting doesn't have a "No Karma Bonus" checkbox?)
And the compromised systems that become the hosts for malware often don't have "admins". They're just random computers hanging off of DSL or a cable modem somewhere. They don't have to be actual web site servers to be capable of hosting malware. In fact, it's better if they aren't, because there's not already something listening on port 80.
Darl isn't saying that they copied Unix V7.
4 - Drink bad coffee!
In other words, what he's saying is the equivalent of "Toyota is a copy of Ford. See, they all have four wheels and an engine, and you drive them with a steering wheel and a couple of pedals! And they both have doors and seats, too!"