Pardon me for having to point it out, but 'better tech' implies less need for massive wasteful all-out bombardment. It means better control and telemetry, and the 'surgical strike' attacks like recently in Iraq.
so you could hook a *hard drive* and a *CD-ROM* drive to thing. Apple sold each of these as options. Not bad for 1986, considering CD-ROMs didn't start appearing as standard equipment in higher-end PCs until around 1990 or so.
A CD-ROM never appeared as standard equipment on a IIgs. It was always just an option. Just like it was an option on any PC going back to 1986.
There's no point in starting with older technology, since nobody uses it anymore.
Yikes. Unfound claim number one.
Please explain what useful skills you can learn working on a IIGS that are practical today.
Assembly language programming on any platform gives you the 'chops' to move over to any other platform fairly easily.
When you walked into any electronics supply house or opened any electronics catalog, you wouldn't be able to find what you needed to "mess around for fun".
You'd be amazed at all the cool vintage parts that are available on eBay.
I can buy a complete functioning uC with onboard ethernet, digital and analog IO, etc for less than a single tube.
I can buy a whole tube (20 or so) of Z80 processors for what you pay for one of your 'module' processors. Furthermore, when my design is complete, I can get the PC board made and populate 20 of them fully for what you will pay for two or three of your 'modules.'
The parts to do lower-level fiddling around and programming are virtually Free these days. Every part you need, you can find on an old motherboard somebody is begging you to haul away for free.
Granted, it doesn't pay for the display ads in Circuit Cellar INK if we all stick to using old parts.
And your pen would surrepititously write information about what you wrote and send it to the manufacturer whenever you 'upgraded' the ink cartridge.
Wow. They must be putting a lot more 'smarts' in inkjet printers since back when I had a DeskJet 500. Has anybody tried to subvert and reuse all that embedded processing power? Maybe we could run Ghostscript in the printer itself.
Sorry. I drifted off there and hardly any of that was directed at you, really.
Thought I'll say the guy I was talking about should have stuck to C++, too. Not to denigrate it at all. I am horrible at that kind of abstraction. I like setting and clearing bits, and timing things based on instruction cycles. I'm a control freak who can't give up any control to a compiler. Or just archaic, maybe.
Some of my best code in the past has been written in pencil on printed paper copies of older versions of the code. Back in the day I always coded that way, and left behind huge notebooks of printout excerpts in chronological order that showed the progress of the code. I also heavily commented, of course, but it's great to have a physical paper history of your coding project.
Big deal. Salon.com has clearly come out on the side of the consumer with regard to the right to circumvent access controls. Why should their content be treated differently than that of music publishers?
Salon has lost $80M because they are effete snob-types who thought they had to take out a long-term lease on expensive real estate right in the center of dot.bomb San Francisco.
They should sublet it all out to the homeless people they tend to champion and move their offices to Omaha. Or quit whining about contributions and close up the shop.
I've worked with 'aw shucks' people like you before. People who can code and know all the tricks. But lack the skills and/or refuse to address fundamental design problems.
I've had to clean up embedded code from people like you, too. You invariably bring with you the experience from your past in system-level programming, and forget to initialize timers, etc. All the ground-up stuff that someone coding on bare silicon in Assembly learns fast, but people who've coded a lot in environments where there is an initialized underlying system assume will be done for them.
If everybody on the planet switched to wind powered electricity, the smell of all the rotting birds piled up around the windmills would probably be strong enough to attract extra-terrestrials. Let alone the sound of all those windmills.
UNIX was developed on the PDP7. And everybody knows that TTL is very portable.
Yes, there was a version of UNIX from Apple targeted to run on the Mac. One can still use the A/UX disk creation utilitys to set up NetBSD on an old Mac. I ran NetBSD on an SE/30 for a little while. It was frightening running X on that tiny little screen. But the Tab Window Manager rocked.
Well, I've finally gotten a sheet feeder for my scanner, and I'm scanning in all kinds of old manuals. I scanned in the CP/M-86 manual last week.
There isn't another package out there that I'd choose to use for full page scanning except Adobe Acrobat. And I like doing some after-processing on the scanned manuals, i.e. putting a bunch of bookmarks in the PDF and even sometimes hyperlinking from the scanned Table of Contents page to the relevant sections of the rest of the document.
I agree about the bloatware in Acrobat. I stopped upgrading at version 4.0. Adobe hasn't done the crap that Microsoft does, so all the Acrobat 4 PDF that I generate seems to be readable in the newer versions.
Unless you're creating real PDF documents, with hyperlinking, annotation, etc. If you're a light duty user and just wanting to turn Word documents into light duty simple PDF, you don't need full Acrobat.
Just 'printing to PDF' is a miniscule part of what you get when you buy Adobe Acrobat.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon me for having to point it out, but 'better tech' implies less need for massive wasteful all-out bombardment. It means better control and telemetry, and the 'surgical strike' attacks like recently in Iraq.
We're sorry. There's no button at buy.com you can click that will help you understand any of the above.
so you could hook a *hard drive* and a *CD-ROM* drive to thing. Apple sold each of these as options. Not bad for 1986, considering CD-ROMs didn't start appearing as standard equipment in higher-end PCs until around 1990 or so.
A CD-ROM never appeared as standard equipment on a IIgs. It was always just an option. Just like it was an option on any PC going back to 1986.
There's no point in starting with older technology, since nobody uses it anymore.
Yikes. Unfound claim number one.
Please explain what useful skills you can learn working on a IIGS that are practical today.
Assembly language programming on any platform gives you the 'chops' to move over to any other platform fairly easily.
When you walked into any electronics supply house or opened any electronics catalog, you wouldn't be able to find what you needed to "mess around for fun".
You'd be amazed at all the cool vintage parts that are available on eBay.
I can buy a complete functioning uC with onboard ethernet, digital and analog IO, etc for less than a single tube.
I can buy a whole tube (20 or so) of Z80 processors for what you pay for one of your 'module' processors. Furthermore, when my design is complete, I can get the PC board made and populate 20 of them fully for what you will pay for two or three of your 'modules.'
The parts to do lower-level fiddling around and programming are virtually Free these days. Every part you need, you can find on an old motherboard somebody is begging you to haul away for free.
Granted, it doesn't pay for the display ads in Circuit Cellar INK if we all stick to using old parts.
Oh yes, and it costs about $50 in single-unit quantities
Ouch! That's pricey. The Rabbit is one of those potted-in-epoxy modules, isn't it?
Some of us like our micros less integrated, and, say, more in the $2-6 range. I'll graft on ethernet where I need it.
The problem may have been the 'interpreted.'
BASIC code can be compiled to fast binaries, too.
You've owned three different Clie devices?
Do they wear out that fast?
And your pen would surrepititously write information about what you wrote and send it to the manufacturer whenever you 'upgraded' the ink cartridge.
Wow. They must be putting a lot more 'smarts' in inkjet printers since back when I had a DeskJet 500. Has anybody tried to subvert and reuse all that embedded processing power? Maybe we could run Ghostscript in the printer itself.
Sorry. I drifted off there and hardly any of that was directed at you, really.
Thought I'll say the guy I was talking about should have stuck to C++, too. Not to denigrate it at all. I am horrible at that kind of abstraction. I like setting and clearing bits, and timing things based on instruction cycles. I'm a control freak who can't give up any control to a compiler. Or just archaic, maybe.
That seems insane to me.
People are hosting content on websites paid for through credit card fraud???
It just seems totally out there....
He bolded it. Isn't that enough?
heh
That made front page news on Slashdot, because it is such an unusual thing.
Some of my best code in the past has been written in pencil on printed paper copies of older versions of the code. Back in the day I always coded that way, and left behind huge notebooks of printout excerpts in chronological order that showed the progress of the code. I also heavily commented, of course, but it's great to have a physical paper history of your coding project.
Big deal. Salon.com has clearly come out on the side of the consumer with regard to the right to circumvent access controls. Why should their content be treated differently than that of music publishers?
Salon has lost $80M because they are effete snob-types who thought they had to take out a long-term lease on expensive real estate right in the center of dot.bomb San Francisco.
They should sublet it all out to the homeless people they tend to champion and move their offices to Omaha. Or quit whining about contributions and close up the shop.
I've worked with 'aw shucks' people like you before. People who can code and know all the tricks. But lack the skills and/or refuse to address fundamental design problems.
I've had to clean up embedded code from people like you, too. You invariably bring with you the experience from your past in system-level programming, and forget to initialize timers, etc. All the ground-up stuff that someone coding on bare silicon in Assembly learns fast, but people who've coded a lot in environments where there is an initialized underlying system assume will be done for them.
Sorry for the rant.
He referred to Music Composition, not performing, not 'jamming' and not improvisation.
A skilled composer has formal training in harmony, counterpoint, and the other arcana of music, which is a discipline of applied mathematics.
If everybody on the planet switched to wind powered electricity, the smell of all the rotting birds piled up around the windmills would probably be strong enough to attract extra-terrestrials. Let alone the sound of all those windmills.
UNIX was developed on the PDP7. And everybody knows that TTL is very portable.
Yes, there was a version of UNIX from Apple targeted to run on the Mac. One can still use the A/UX disk creation utilitys to set up NetBSD on an old Mac. I ran NetBSD on an SE/30 for a little while. It was frightening running X on that tiny little screen. But the Tab Window Manager rocked.
Well, I've finally gotten a sheet feeder for my scanner, and I'm scanning in all kinds of old manuals. I scanned in the CP/M-86 manual last week.
There isn't another package out there that I'd choose to use for full page scanning except Adobe Acrobat. And I like doing some after-processing on the scanned manuals, i.e. putting a bunch of bookmarks in the PDF and even sometimes hyperlinking from the scanned Table of Contents page to the relevant sections of the rest of the document.
I agree about the bloatware in Acrobat. I stopped upgrading at version 4.0. Adobe hasn't done the crap that Microsoft does, so all the Acrobat 4 PDF that I generate seems to be readable in the newer versions.
I am trying to imagine what software they would run on said PPC computers.
I suspect Apple would use it's muscle to dissuade them, if they tried to run MacOS, and there isn't a heck of a lot else.
And I run NetBSD-prep on an old RS/6000 and know what software there is, so please don't get all preachy.
Say an HP XW4100 system (P4 3.2CGhz) system does the same work in a CAD app as a dual 1.6GHz G5 system
*bzzt*
There aren't any significant CAD apps for the G5 processor.
There aren't really very many for the x86 either, but there are significantly fewer for the G5. Like, ummm, maybe about none.
(yes, we see you waving furiously from back there. Your wobbly MacCAD whatever from 1997 doesn't count)
You seem to be implying that all Linux is good for is printer servers and commodity infrastructure tasks where any box could work well.
Is that really the message you want to deliver?
Unless you're creating real PDF documents, with hyperlinking, annotation, etc. If you're a light duty user and just wanting to turn Word documents into light duty simple PDF, you don't need full Acrobat.
Just 'printing to PDF' is a miniscule part of what you get when you buy Adobe Acrobat.
If you're a professional video producer, you don't likely use any of the junk that comes out on Personal Computers.
Let's be real here. Professionals use professional gear, not 'hobby' gear running on Macs or Windows boxes.