No error correction? Really? My first-gen Zoom did V.42 and MNP out of the box as I recall, but they're no silver bullets. Of course, that doesn't guarantee an error free connection, and I did have to scour the manual for the incredible AT command string to set it up. I was never ballsy enough to download a ton of stuff w/out basic CRCs to protect it, though. I've done a few YMODEM/G downloads in my day, but mostly stuck to ZMODEM. There were some days where the line was bad enough that ZMODEM would fail.
The walled garden and centralized content and a stupid name all those other reasons people have pointed out are good reasons why Viewtron didn't take off. But I can think of another glaring reason that I don't think anyone's mentioned yet: The fscking keyboard BEEPS. Watch the video. With each keystroke, that chicklet-covered monstrosity BEEPS!
The Hayes Smartmodem 300 was introduced in 1981; before that, it was all acoustic couplers for normal folks, even 3l33t ones with high-end IMSAI systems who were intelligent, but under-achievers, alienated from their parents, with few friends (and of course, at the time, such people would have been classic cases for recruitment by the Soviets).
Nice War Games reference.;-)
Still, the round-trip time for interactive characters was probably a half second. So, typed text did lag a bit behind. That's also one of the reasons XMODEM sucked so hard--it wouldn't send the next block of 64 bytes before it got the ACK for the current block. But you're right about raw throughput.
BTW, with 8-N-1, a 2400 baud modem should top out at 240cps, and IIRC a basic 2400 baud modem did top out at just about that. (start bit, 8 data bits, stop bit == 10 bits) The reason it got up to ~274 is that MNP stripped the start/stop, so it only had to send 8 bits. The reason it didn't get up to 300 is that it had some error-correction built in, which made the effective symbol size somewhere between 8 and 9 bits. So, if you were running MNP like all the cool kids were, you got a modest speed boost and a cleaner line.
I still remember when Rockwell released their famous "Rockwell chipset" (as all the BBSers I knew called it) and you could get a 14.4k modem cheap! I paid only $272 (after tax) for my blistering fast Zoom modem in 1992. (Later, I sprung another $50 for a 16550 UART so I could downlaod with YMODEM/G and YMODEM/1K more reliably.) Man... I could download 100s of kilobytes of cheesy GIFs and demo programs from BBSes in mere minutes! Much better than the one time I tried to download a 15K GIF at 300 baud... almost got kick-banned for that. With XMODEM and 64 byte blocks that took like 15 minutes. The SysOp didn't appreciate anyone running slower than 1200 baud tying up the line like that with downloads.
This thread is bringing back way too many memories.
Well, there's a fair bit of Javascript in most web pages these days, and an awful lot of websites built around Flash. Back in the old days, even the cursor movements were dictated by escape sequences sent by the server. The server wasn't just computing what to display, but also how. I guess page-oriented TN3270s relied on a little more smarts on the local terminal, marking writable and unwritable fields and the like, keeping the interaction at page granularity. That's perhaps closer to the early HTML paradigm with forms. The widely used VT-xxx and ANSI terminals / terminal software (the choice of BBS users nearly everywhere) had way less smarts by comparison.
Other way around, at least for me. On a basic unexpanded XT, to boot to a DOS prompt took like 15 - 20 seconds to get through POST and loading COMMAND.COM, but typically you weren't loading much of anything else. On a 386, the POST took a little longer, and typically CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT did a lot more--you have to load your EMM386 (or QEMM if you were in the know), MSCDEX, MOUSE.COM and all these other things. Of course, if you had a "games boot disk" (or later, a "games boot config" once DOS 5 added menu support to CONFIG.SYS), that usually loaded a bit faster by virtue of loading fewer things.
I still remember the "brrrr-dee-brrrr" of the old 5.25" floppy drive (and later, the dual "brrr-dee-brrr"/"bmmm-drrr-bmmm" of a 5.25"/3.5" dual drive setup). Ah, the memories.
Employer-covered health care is part of your compensation. This draws a line saying where the employer's discretion ends and the employee's discretion begins in terms of how it's spent. Every argument you can make about protecting the employer's moral stance can be made for protecting the employee's as well.
Hardly. It allows employees to make choices about their own lives in an area where their employer has absolutely no business mucking about. This is about access to healthcare, pure and simple. I mean, what's next? Your boss handing you a paycheck with an asterisk saying "but don't spend it on condoms! I don't pay you to spend money on that." How is that really any different?
Of course, this is from a country that now has ordered a private business to give a product away for free. That is, ordered insurance companies to cover birth control without any co-pay. Why no co-pay? Because it's so cheap to begin with ($20-$50/month).
Holy non-sequitur Batman. Actually, insurance companies generally like giving out contraception because it saves them money overall. Giving someone contraception is cheaper than covering them through pregnancy and raising children. All this "mandate" does is prevent businesses from asking for a plan for their employees that stops the insurance companies from doing something they already want to do.
I've been driving for over 30 years, and have yet to back up into someone. Why should I have to pay for your inability to drive???
Well, for one thing, because there's no way you can get all the idiots off the road. Americans treat driving as a birthright, no matter how bad they are at it. Either have extensive, mandatory driver's training and strict road tests to keep the morons out from behind the wheel, or build some basic safety measures into every car.
Now as others have pointed out, this issue boils down to sight lines. Even if you look for them there are places where children can stand around a vehicle where they simply cannot be seen by the driver, period. Camera and display technology has gotten so cheap, that it doesn't make sense not to do this. $200 is almost nothing on the price of a new car. It's 2% of the cost on a $10K econobox. Do they even make cars that cheap any more?
And a funny thing happens when you make something like this mandatory -- it gets cheaper! Economies of scale and such.
I really think you're tilting at windmills here, Mr. Quixote.
It's still there in Win7. Not a bad compromise between quick-n-dirty and full-featured apps for some things, but nothing I'd use more than 5 minutes.
Maybe they took it out of the default path, then. Dunno. I just remember typing "wordpad foo.txt" at a prompt and getting an error. I perhaps do a little too much from cmd.exe windows.;-)
[...] but the reliable, pre-installed aspect of Notepad/Wordpad is a slam dunk for basic needs. The four keystrokes to open Notepad (nine if you use the "Run..." window in XP) have become reflex when I sit at someone else's PC.
Oh, indeed. In fact, that's pretty much the biggest place I use it: Other peoples' computers, since I know it's there. Also, if I'm writing generic instructions for Windows users, I know I can refer to Notepad if needed.
(BTW: retro console stuff in your sig. looks like fun.)
It is! I'm helping someone port Colossal Cave Adventure to the system right now. Hop over to AtariAge.com if you're interested in banging around with any of these old machines.
Oh, I do the same. But does anyone actually write or edit much of anything in there, or just use it as a visible text clipboard? vi (or these days, vim) probably sees a lot more use for actual editing tasks. Heck, Notepad can't even properly handle files with *nix newlines. Among the software Microsoft provides with Windows, you have to jump to wordpad for that, and that's no longer even around, is it?
For my Windows-using friends that aren't versed in old school editors like vi, I recommend Notepad++. I haven't used it, but I hear good comments about it from the GUI-leaning crowd. It's kinda sad, though, that Windows doesn't come with a decent text editor.
Yeah, I doubt anyone actually uses notepad for more than a few seconds. It's too painful, and there are too many alternatives that are far, far better.
I'm with you. Heck, the next crop of cell phones coming out will beat the crap out of desktops from just a few years ago. Cell phones! Heck, my approx 2 year old cell phone is still 2x to 10x the specs of the computer I bought in 1997:
Processor: 300MHz Pentium II vs. 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 + C64x+ DSP.
RAM: 64MB EDO RAM vs. 256MB of embedded SDRAM
Storage: 3GB of SCSI 2 UltraWide (oooOOOOooo!) on a 7200 RPM SCA disk (yeah, I bought a server drive, and paid $$$...), vs. 32GB of flash storage.
Connectivity: 56k dialup modem vs. 3G wireless+802.11 wifi.
Graphics / display: 1152x868 on a 19" CRT vs. 800x480 touch screen -- ok, apples vs. oranges on this one.
Sound: AWE32 Wavetable Synthesis vs. hardware accelerated MP3+whatever you can shove across a 48kHz 16-bit pipe -- again a bit of apples vs. oranges, but the main point is that the old computer couldn't really keep a DAC fed and relied on hokey hardware to generate complex sound, but the new hardware just gives you a fat, clean pipe to output whatever you want, and the CPU's up to the task.
Energy consumption: Easily 200W or more (display + computer + speakers) vs. all day on a 1350mAh battery with charge to spare.
And that's for a nearly 2 year old phone. The next crop of high end phones will have 2 to 4 ARM Cortex-A15s running 1.5GHz, likely with 2GB of DDR or more of system memory and embarrassing amounts of flash storage. And that's just phones.
My first computer had a whopping 16640 bytes of RAM, and ran 3MHz. (16K video RAM + 256 bytes of CPU addressable memory.) I wrote everything in BASIC at first. Later, after I got a battery-backed 4K RAM cartridge, I learned assembly language. Amazing stuff. I look back at everything I did with that machine with painstaking effort, and how trivial it all is now. An icon on my desktop takes up almost as much storage as that entire computer had available to it. Its display resolution (256x192) is roughly a postage-stamp sized preview on a modern display. And yet, we got stuff done with those old machines.
I too am continually amazed at what we can do these days. And, in my day job, I work to keep advancing that curve. I love it.
(Ok, I don't know why my <UL> and <LI> tags aren't working in the preview, but trust me, that list up there has them. I don't feel like fighting w/ Slashdot any more this morning.)
You know, it's a little ironic, but the standard subdivisions of an inch (1/2, 1/4, etc.) or of fluid measure (8oz cup, 16oz pint, 32oz quart, 64oz half gallon, 128oz gallon), all of which are related by powers of 2, are a better match for binary arithmetic than powers of 10.
Sure, that's about the only place imperial measure works out better. But, I still find it a little ironic.
The powers of 10 in metric really don't mesh as nicely with computer arithmetic as you might like. If you start with meters, stick with meters until the end of the calculation. Converting to km then cm or whatever, will lose some precision due to the fact that ten isn't a power of 2.
Yeah, like nobody ever made the same mistake converting between cm^3 and m^3. 1 cm^3 = 1mL, and 1000 cm^3 is 1 L. 1000 cm = 10 m, but 10 m^3 is 1,000,000 L. But, folks in chem class made that mistake readily. Metric doesn't magically make the "forgot to cube the ratio" problem go away when dealing with volumes.
There's a more detailed article that the first one links to. In the more detailed article, it says:
Every year, I excavate about 2 to 3 cubic yards of material. I mine it from the walls during the winter, put it through the crusher, screen it, and then haul it out during a summer’s worth of Sundays.
So what we have is a unit conversion failure in the first article. 1 yard = 3 feet, but 1 cubic yard = 27 cubic feed. 3 cubic yards is 81 cubic feet, then.
So 7 * 81 = 567, which gives you a cube just over 8' on a side, as you suggest.
Not only that, but could it be that some of the pieces came from one place and others from others? For example, you could have one set of reactions near hydrothermal vents, filling the ocean with one set of building blocks, and another happening on land. A major land shift or oceanic event then mixes the two sets. Wash, rinse, repeat over a billion years. To me, the argument that it couldn't happen on land because what land there was was too unstable is more an argument that it could happen with pieces coming from both land and sea.
Slashdot Mirror
No error correction? Really? My first-gen Zoom did V.42 and MNP out of the box as I recall, but they're no silver bullets. Of course, that doesn't guarantee an error free connection, and I did have to scour the manual for the incredible AT command string to set it up. I was never ballsy enough to download a ton of stuff w/out basic CRCs to protect it, though. I've done a few YMODEM/G downloads in my day, but mostly stuck to ZMODEM. There were some days where the line was bad enough that ZMODEM would fail.
Are you sure he used his fingers? And the brain part is questionable too.
The walled garden and centralized content and a stupid name all those other reasons people have pointed out are good reasons why Viewtron didn't take off. But I can think of another glaring reason that I don't think anyone's mentioned yet: The fscking keyboard BEEPS. Watch the video. With each keystroke, that chicklet-covered monstrosity BEEPS!
Nice War Games reference. ;-)
Still, the round-trip time for interactive characters was probably a half second. So, typed text did lag a bit behind. That's also one of the reasons XMODEM sucked so hard--it wouldn't send the next block of 64 bytes before it got the ACK for the current block. But you're right about raw throughput.
BTW, with 8-N-1, a 2400 baud modem should top out at 240cps, and IIRC a basic 2400 baud modem did top out at just about that. (start bit, 8 data bits, stop bit == 10 bits) The reason it got up to ~274 is that MNP stripped the start/stop, so it only had to send 8 bits. The reason it didn't get up to 300 is that it had some error-correction built in, which made the effective symbol size somewhere between 8 and 9 bits. So, if you were running MNP like all the cool kids were, you got a modest speed boost and a cleaner line.
You missed out. It was one of my favorite USENET haunts back in the day, along with alt.hackers.
"Joe Sixpack?" This is France we're talking about. Wouldn't it be "Jacques Winebottle"? ;-)
I don't think 28.8 came around until sometime into the 90s. The fastest you could have gone in the 80s was probably a USR HST modem with the old asymmetric baud. (9600 down/1200 up, IIRC, although it'd switch if you started uploading.) HST didn't hit 14.4k until 1989. V.32 (9600 baud full duplex) didn't get standardized until 1989 also, and V.32bis came later in 1991.
I still remember when Rockwell released their famous "Rockwell chipset" (as all the BBSers I knew called it) and you could get a 14.4k modem cheap! I paid only $272 (after tax) for my blistering fast Zoom modem in 1992. (Later, I sprung another $50 for a 16550 UART so I could downlaod with YMODEM/G and YMODEM/1K more reliably.) Man... I could download 100s of kilobytes of cheesy GIFs and demo programs from BBSes in mere minutes! Much better than the one time I tried to download a 15K GIF at 300 baud... almost got kick-banned for that. With XMODEM and 64 byte blocks that took like 15 minutes. The SysOp didn't appreciate anyone running slower than 1200 baud tying up the line like that with downloads.
This thread is bringing back way too many memories.
Well, there's a fair bit of Javascript in most web pages these days, and an awful lot of websites built around Flash. Back in the old days, even the cursor movements were dictated by escape sequences sent by the server. The server wasn't just computing what to display, but also how. I guess page-oriented TN3270s relied on a little more smarts on the local terminal, marking writable and unwritable fields and the like, keeping the interaction at page granularity. That's perhaps closer to the early HTML paradigm with forms. The widely used VT-xxx and ANSI terminals / terminal software (the choice of BBS users nearly everywhere) had way less smarts by comparison.
Other way around, at least for me. On a basic unexpanded XT, to boot to a DOS prompt took like 15 - 20 seconds to get through POST and loading COMMAND.COM, but typically you weren't loading much of anything else. On a 386, the POST took a little longer, and typically CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT did a lot more--you have to load your EMM386 (or QEMM if you were in the know), MSCDEX, MOUSE.COM and all these other things. Of course, if you had a "games boot disk" (or later, a "games boot config" once DOS 5 added menu support to CONFIG.SYS), that usually loaded a bit faster by virtue of loading fewer things.
I still remember the "brrrr-dee-brrrr" of the old 5.25" floppy drive (and later, the dual "brrr-dee-brrr"/"bmmm-drrr-bmmm" of a 5.25"/3.5" dual drive setup). Ah, the memories.
Please tell me I'm not the only one who thought of that when they read the description.
Employer-covered health care is part of your compensation. This draws a line saying where the employer's discretion ends and the employee's discretion begins in terms of how it's spent. Every argument you can make about protecting the employer's moral stance can be made for protecting the employee's as well.
Hardly. It allows employees to make choices about their own lives in an area where their employer has absolutely no business mucking about. This is about access to healthcare, pure and simple. I mean, what's next? Your boss handing you a paycheck with an asterisk saying "but don't spend it on condoms! I don't pay you to spend money on that." How is that really any different?
Holy non-sequitur Batman. Actually, insurance companies generally like giving out contraception because it saves them money overall. Giving someone contraception is cheaper than covering them through pregnancy and raising children. All this "mandate" does is prevent businesses from asking for a plan for their employees that stops the insurance companies from doing something they already want to do.
Well, for one thing, because there's no way you can get all the idiots off the road. Americans treat driving as a birthright, no matter how bad they are at it. Either have extensive, mandatory driver's training and strict road tests to keep the morons out from behind the wheel, or build some basic safety measures into every car.
Now as others have pointed out, this issue boils down to sight lines. Even if you look for them there are places where children can stand around a vehicle where they simply cannot be seen by the driver, period. Camera and display technology has gotten so cheap, that it doesn't make sense not to do this. $200 is almost nothing on the price of a new car. It's 2% of the cost on a $10K econobox. Do they even make cars that cheap any more?
And a funny thing happens when you make something like this mandatory -- it gets cheaper! Economies of scale and such.
I really think you're tilting at windmills here, Mr. Quixote.
Maybe they took it out of the default path, then. Dunno. I just remember typing "wordpad foo.txt" at a prompt and getting an error. I perhaps do a little too much from cmd.exe windows. ;-)
Oh, indeed. In fact, that's pretty much the biggest place I use it: Other peoples' computers, since I know it's there. Also, if I'm writing generic instructions for Windows users, I know I can refer to Notepad if needed.
It is! I'm helping someone port Colossal Cave Adventure to the system right now. Hop over to AtariAge.com if you're interested in banging around with any of these old machines.
Oh, I do the same. But does anyone actually write or edit much of anything in there, or just use it as a visible text clipboard? vi (or these days, vim) probably sees a lot more use for actual editing tasks. Heck, Notepad can't even properly handle files with *nix newlines. Among the software Microsoft provides with Windows, you have to jump to wordpad for that, and that's no longer even around, is it?
For my Windows-using friends that aren't versed in old school editors like vi, I recommend Notepad++. I haven't used it, but I hear good comments about it from the GUI-leaning crowd. It's kinda sad, though, that Windows doesn't come with a decent text editor.
Well, he didn't come up with INTERCAL, but he did write a compiler for it.
My "Jump To Conclusions" mat is currently being laundered.
He wrote an INTERCAL compiler. I guess that counts for something, right?
Yeah, I doubt anyone actually uses notepad for more than a few seconds. It's too painful, and there are too many alternatives that are far, far better.
I was wondering the same thing. *chuckle*
I'm with you. Heck, the next crop of cell phones coming out will beat the crap out of desktops from just a few years ago. Cell phones! Heck, my approx 2 year old cell phone is still 2x to 10x the specs of the computer I bought in 1997:
And that's for a nearly 2 year old phone. The next crop of high end phones will have 2 to 4 ARM Cortex-A15s running 1.5GHz, likely with 2GB of DDR or more of system memory and embarrassing amounts of flash storage. And that's just phones.
My first computer had a whopping 16640 bytes of RAM, and ran 3MHz. (16K video RAM + 256 bytes of CPU addressable memory.) I wrote everything in BASIC at first. Later, after I got a battery-backed 4K RAM cartridge, I learned assembly language. Amazing stuff. I look back at everything I did with that machine with painstaking effort, and how trivial it all is now. An icon on my desktop takes up almost as much storage as that entire computer had available to it. Its display resolution (256x192) is roughly a postage-stamp sized preview on a modern display. And yet, we got stuff done with those old machines.
I too am continually amazed at what we can do these days. And, in my day job, I work to keep advancing that curve. I love it.
(Ok, I don't know why my <UL> and <LI> tags aren't working in the preview, but trust me, that list up there has them. I don't feel like fighting w/ Slashdot any more this morning.)
You know, it's a little ironic, but the standard subdivisions of an inch (1/2, 1/4, etc.) or of fluid measure (8oz cup, 16oz pint, 32oz quart, 64oz half gallon, 128oz gallon), all of which are related by powers of 2, are a better match for binary arithmetic than powers of 10.
Sure, that's about the only place imperial measure works out better. But, I still find it a little ironic.
The powers of 10 in metric really don't mesh as nicely with computer arithmetic as you might like. If you start with meters, stick with meters until the end of the calculation. Converting to km then cm or whatever, will lose some precision due to the fact that ten isn't a power of 2.
Yeah, like nobody ever made the same mistake converting between cm^3 and m^3. 1 cm^3 = 1mL, and 1000 cm^3 is 1 L. 1000 cm = 10 m, but 10 m^3 is 1,000,000 L. But, folks in chem class made that mistake readily. Metric doesn't magically make the "forgot to cube the ratio" problem go away when dealing with volumes.
There's a more detailed article that the first one links to. In the more detailed article, it says:
So what we have is a unit conversion failure in the first article. 1 yard = 3 feet, but 1 cubic yard = 27 cubic feed. 3 cubic yards is 81 cubic feet, then.
So 7 * 81 = 567, which gives you a cube just over 8' on a side, as you suggest.
Not only that, but could it be that some of the pieces came from one place and others from others? For example, you could have one set of reactions near hydrothermal vents, filling the ocean with one set of building blocks, and another happening on land. A major land shift or oceanic event then mixes the two sets. Wash, rinse, repeat over a billion years. To me, the argument that it couldn't happen on land because what land there was was too unstable is more an argument that it could happen with pieces coming from both land and sea.