First computer that I remember using: An Atari 800, running Atari Logo, sometime in 1982 or 1983. This also makes Logo the first programming language I bothered learning.
First computer that my family actually bought: Coleco ADAM, early 1984. We kept it under lock and key at first because it was such a BIG DEAL (we'd never owned a computer before, and I had a tendency of taking things apart when I was bored, which was pretty often), but eventually, I found the programmer's manual and learned BASIC...which also turned out to be helpful when my school started using Apple IIes, since ADAM "SmartBASIC" was essentially a ripoff of Applesoft + DOS 3.3. By the way, I was only 6 at the time, so I started programming way early. ^_^ Oh yeah, and having a built-in ColecoVision made it a good gaming system, too.
We didn't have much money then, so we didn't get another computer until 1990 (by that time, Dad was bringing home loaner PCs from work for various things); okay, it was a PCjr, but it was a good DOS learning machine.
Most fondly remembered computers: The aforementioned Apple IIes, and the Apple IIgs. I was also a big Mac fan during the tail end of their original heyday (circa 1990-1992), even though there was no way we could afford one at the time.
The page you linked describes QuickTime, all right, but it's also QuickTime Player 4.0, which is nearly 5 years old now.
Apple fixed the most glaring problems shown here in QuickTime 5 and 6. The volume control is now a slider, the fast forward and rewind buttons are on the main pane of the window (and the "advanced settings" dropdown is gone), and they also killed the favorites tray.
-lee
Re:Things will get worse
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I dunno if they actually sued, but the phrase "Macintosh is a trademark of McIntosh Laboratory, Inc. and is being used with express permission of its owner" appeared in mid-late 1980s Apple documentation. I have an old ImageWriter II manual in front of me (copyright 1985) that shows this notice, and IIRC the first Mac ads had it as well.
It seems to have fallen out of use with time, so I guess there was some sort of agreement reached...I'll have to check the manual for my PowerMac at home (which is 1995-1996 vintage) to double check.
Yikes!!!! $155 for a network card for a IIgs? The machine itself is probably worth around $25!
Indeed...the price they're asking for that card is nothing short of ridiculous, considering that good PC network cards (I'm thinking 10/100 here; I'm not experienced with gigabit cards) rarely go for more than $50 these days, and can be found for $10-20 or so if you're willing to deal with Realtek chips and the like.
Considering the fact that the IIgs really isn't fast enough to appreciate Ethernet, and has a serial-based networking system built in (LocalTalk) that's actually decently fast for a computer of its power and age, and can be bridged to Ethernet for cheap (someone's already mentioned the GatorBoxes on eBay), I'd skip it...and spend that $150 on a CF memory card and adapter.:D
The original Apples (I, II, II+, IIc, IIe, IIc+) were 8-bit machines running processors out of the 6502 family. The IIgs was actually 16-bit internally (it kept the 8-bit Apple II slots) and used the 65C816 CPU, which had a 6502 compatibility mode.
Yes, OpenFirmware and OpenBoot are usually in ROM. I think the original poster was getting confused with the Apple "NewWorld" Mac OS ROM file, which is loaded by Open Firmware on the iMac, Blue and White G3 and newer. It contains the basic MacOS routines that used to be in ROM (along with a ELF loader stub, a small startup icon, and a short Forth program to unpack everything and start the stub).
...unless you take away the main reason they were using it.
Even then, it can be difficult if there's politics in the way. You see, I'm a regular (and sometime admin, when I bother to have my server up) on the same network as A.P., and we moved several channels away from DALnet in 1998, at a time when DAL was nothing but 10-minute lag (seriously) and multi-way splits. Several people who were regulars in the channel that moved to our network (WTnet) were also regulars in another channel that (because of the politics) moved to a different network. Later on (mid-1999), when that network self-destructed, the populace of the other channel wanted to move to WTnet, but the higher-ups were against it, fearing their authority would be usurped. Eventually, they moved to WTnet anyway, and all was well, for a while anyway. There's more to this story, but I'm not sure I want to talk about it here.
It was one person in particular who was responsible for the grandstanding and stubbornness (and several others who complained about having to run two IRC clients, but that's also partially Khaled Mardam-Bey's fault for not having proper multi-server support:P), and that's mainly what A.P. is upset about. The dynamics are different for every network and every channel, and your mileage may vary, of course.
That's one of my pet peeves about certain programs, especially when 1) I know the program only needs GTK+, and will work fine without all of GNOME's baggage 2) the packaging system (in my case, APT, since I run Debian unstable on my Mac) defaults to installing the version with all the bells and whistles.
I don't use or like GNOME very much (I've preferred KDE in the past, and found myself gravitating toward XFCE recently since it's not as piggish), and I'd rather not install it unless a program I want (like gnucash) insists on having it around and won't work otherwise.
As for the state of Linux video...A.P. and jwz are mostly right. There's a whole myriad of different players that all behave differently and have their own quirks regarding what they will or will not play. In my experience, mplayer is the most complete, though I've run into a few things (the odd raw-YUV variant the old Apple Video Player spits out, for one) even the latest mplayer can't handle -- I have to use xanim to play that. (I've tried to get that working by dinking with the config file, but I guess I'll have to tell Arpad about it, since I can't figure it out.) Also, mplayer was distributed as source-only for a long time, which made configuring things difficult for non-techies. Ogle is great for playing DVDs (on x86, since my DVD-ROM drive is on my PC, and even with a G3/400 my Mac would still be too slow), but not much else. I never got Xine to work satisfactorily.
As for general video stuff, I usually do it in Windows 2000 on the PC. I know it goes against the conventional wisdom here, but I got kinda tired of fighting with Unix (in my case, FreeBSD) as a desktop, and I also wanted to play with Linux. I use my Mac (in MacOS 9.1, since fbtv and xawtv don't quite work right with PlanB just yet) for video capture.
The PlayStation retread of a few years ago was through Atari, but Q*Bert himself is actually still owned by Columbia Pictures (who owned Gottlieb when Q*Bert was created, and also assumed all the Gottlieb/Mylstar video game rights after the big crash of the mid-1980s).
We take eighteen ounces of sizzling ground beef, and soak it in rich,
creamery butter, then we top it off with bacon, ham, and a fried egg.
We call it the Good Morning Burger.
-- Homer watches a television advertisement, ``Bart's Friend Falls in Love''
Lisa resolves, ``I've gotta help him.''
Something like this has been around a while...
on
eSuds
·
· Score: 1
...at least as far as the "electronic pay" part.
When I was at Virginia Tech in 1995-1996, they had just upgraded their network to support doing EFT/POS transactions on just about every vending machine on campus that could accept money. They called the system the "Hokie Passport", and it basically used your VT ID card as a debit card.
One of the applications was in the on-campus laundromats. THey had boxes on the wall where you'd type in what washer or dryer you were using, swipe your card, and it'd deduct the money from your account over the network. The only downside was that it only worked with the VT IDs (no credit cards, and ATM network based EFT/POS was in its infancy then), and I couldn't be bothered to go the the Passport office and put money in my card.
AFAIK, the system is still in place, though (since I haven't been on campus since 1997) I don't know what improvements have been made.
I don't know of a chipset that was ever called "PhoenixView", but I do know that that was the name of Phoenix's generic VGA BIOS product. I get the feeling the chip in your machine was either one of NCR's own (like the 77C22), or a *very* early Cirrus or AcuMOS chip (most likely the the AVGA2/CL-GD5420).
Yeah, we'll write it for you, just give us a couple of years to 1) raise interest in the project and get coders 2) design the thing 3) write it 4) make it talk to everything else.
In the meantime, you'll just have to use hand tools. Sorry!
I do, just barely...Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends came out in 1981, and (IIRC; I haven't seen it in years) was more like Superfriends (i.e. wasn't played for laughs, but didn't take itself entirely seriously either).
It was also one of the first shows produced by DePatie-Freleng (probably best known for the Pink Panther shorts and some of the mid-1960s fake-WB cartoons) after Freleng left and Marvel bought them out.
Not true on older Power Macs (everything before the Blue and White G3 and the iMac). With these "OldWorld" Macs, the Mac OS ROM is still actually in ROM on the motherboard. Newer Macs use the "NewWorld" architecture, where the Mac OS ROM is just another boot image to load from disk (think SPARCstation here).
You can already do this with SCSI (in Debian, install the scsiadd package and use rescan-scsi-bus.sh), so doing the same with IDE shouldn't be that much harder. I just wonder when someone'll write the support.
Actually, it's NOT technically okay to have a dozen wives (I won't go into the details), but you'd never know the difference from some of the loonies I hear live out in the boonies.
-lee...and what the hell do you do with 60 kids, anyway?
Let's just say, right off the bat, that I never use UPS Ground unless I have to. They're slow, unreliable, and (as this thread show) have a habit of destroying the things they ship.
Anyway, here goes:
Small items to US addresses: USPS Priority Mail. It's cheap (cheaper than UPS Ground, even with delivery confirmation and insurance), very fast (2-3 days), and less chance of what you ship getting damaged.
Small items anywhere else: I haven't had to do this, but I would probably use FedEx. It's what we use at work to ship small packages/products to international addresses.
Large items: It depends on the item. If it's not too big, it goes USPS or FedEx. It's it's bulky, fragile, or a keepsake, I'd seriously consider either paying custom-critical movers to do it (yeah right), or loading it up in my Big-Ass 1984 Mercury Wagon and hauling it myself.
Slashdot Mirror
First computer that I remember using: An Atari 800, running Atari Logo, sometime in 1982 or 1983. This also makes Logo the first programming language I bothered learning.
First computer that my family actually bought: Coleco ADAM, early 1984. We kept it under lock and key at first because it was such a BIG DEAL (we'd never owned a computer before, and I had a tendency of taking things apart when I was bored, which was pretty often), but eventually, I found the programmer's manual and learned BASIC...which also turned out to be helpful when my school started using Apple IIes, since ADAM "SmartBASIC" was essentially a ripoff of Applesoft + DOS 3.3. By the way, I was only 6 at the time, so I started programming way early. ^_^ Oh yeah, and having a built-in ColecoVision made it a good gaming system, too.
We didn't have much money then, so we didn't get another computer until 1990 (by that time, Dad was bringing home loaner PCs from work for various things); okay, it was a PCjr, but it was a good DOS learning machine.
Most fondly remembered computers: The aforementioned Apple IIes, and the Apple IIgs. I was also a big Mac fan during the tail end of their original heyday (circa 1990-1992), even though there was no way we could afford one at the time.
-lee
The page you linked describes QuickTime, all right, but it's also QuickTime Player 4.0, which is nearly 5 years old now.
Apple fixed the most glaring problems shown here in QuickTime 5 and 6. The volume control is now a slider, the fast forward and rewind buttons are on the main pane of the window (and the "advanced settings" dropdown is gone), and they also killed the favorites tray.
-lee
I dunno if they actually sued, but the phrase "Macintosh is a trademark of McIntosh Laboratory, Inc. and is being used with express permission of its owner" appeared in mid-late 1980s Apple documentation. I have an old ImageWriter II manual in front of me (copyright 1985) that shows this notice, and IIRC the first Mac ads had it as well.
It seems to have fallen out of use with time, so I guess there was some sort of agreement reached...I'll have to check the manual for my PowerMac at home (which is 1995-1996 vintage) to double check.
-lee
Yikes!!!! $155 for a network card for a IIgs? The machine itself is probably worth around $25!
:D
Indeed...the price they're asking for that card is nothing short of ridiculous, considering that good PC network cards (I'm thinking 10/100 here; I'm not experienced with gigabit cards) rarely go for more than $50 these days, and can be found for $10-20 or so if you're willing to deal with Realtek chips and the like.
Considering the fact that the IIgs really isn't fast enough to appreciate Ethernet, and has a serial-based networking system built in (LocalTalk) that's actually decently fast for a computer of its power and age, and can be bridged to Ethernet for cheap (someone's already mentioned the GatorBoxes on eBay), I'd skip it...and spend that $150 on a CF memory card and adapter.
-lee
The original Apples (I, II, II+, IIc, IIe, IIc+) were 8-bit machines running processors out of the 6502 family. The IIgs was actually 16-bit internally (it kept the 8-bit Apple II slots) and used the 65C816 CPU, which had a 6502 compatibility mode.
-lee
Yes, OpenFirmware and OpenBoot are usually in ROM. I think the original poster was getting confused with the Apple "NewWorld" Mac OS ROM file, which is loaded by Open Firmware on the iMac, Blue and White G3 and newer. It contains the basic MacOS routines that used to be in ROM (along with a ELF loader stub, a small startup icon, and a short Forth program to unpack everything and start the stub).
-lee
...unless you take away the main reason they were using it.
:P), and that's mainly what A.P. is upset about. The dynamics are different for every network and every channel, and your mileage may vary, of course.
Even then, it can be difficult if there's politics in the way. You see, I'm a regular (and sometime admin, when I bother to have my server up) on the same network as A.P., and we moved several channels away from DALnet in 1998, at a time when DAL was nothing but 10-minute lag (seriously) and multi-way splits. Several people who were regulars in the channel that moved to our network (WTnet) were also regulars in another channel that (because of the politics) moved to a different network. Later on (mid-1999), when that network self-destructed, the populace of the other channel wanted to move to WTnet, but the higher-ups were against it, fearing their authority would be usurped. Eventually, they moved to WTnet anyway, and all was well, for a while anyway. There's more to this story, but I'm not sure I want to talk about it here.
It was one person in particular who was responsible for the grandstanding and stubbornness (and several others who complained about having to run two IRC clients, but that's also partially Khaled Mardam-Bey's fault for not having proper multi-server support
-lee
That's one of my pet peeves about certain programs, especially when 1) I know the program only needs GTK+, and will work fine without all of GNOME's baggage 2) the packaging system (in my case, APT, since I run Debian unstable on my Mac) defaults to installing the version with all the bells and whistles.
I don't use or like GNOME very much (I've preferred KDE in the past, and found myself gravitating toward XFCE recently since it's not as piggish), and I'd rather not install it unless a program I want (like gnucash) insists on having it around and won't work otherwise.
As for the state of Linux video...A.P. and jwz are mostly right. There's a whole myriad of different players that all behave differently and have their own quirks regarding what they will or will not play. In my experience, mplayer is the most complete, though I've run into a few things (the odd raw-YUV variant the old Apple Video Player spits out, for one) even the latest mplayer can't handle -- I have to use xanim to play that. (I've tried to get that working by dinking with the config file, but I guess I'll have to tell Arpad about it, since I can't figure it out.) Also, mplayer was distributed as source-only for a long time, which made configuring things difficult for non-techies. Ogle is great for playing DVDs (on x86, since my DVD-ROM drive is on my PC, and even with a G3/400 my Mac would still be too slow), but not much else. I never got Xine to work satisfactorily.
As for general video stuff, I usually do it in Windows 2000 on the PC. I know it goes against the conventional wisdom here, but I got kinda tired of fighting with Unix (in my case, FreeBSD) as a desktop, and I also wanted to play with Linux. I use my Mac (in MacOS 9.1, since fbtv and xawtv don't quite work right with PlanB just yet) for video capture.
Oh, and did I mention that VirtualDub rocks?
-lee
The PlayStation retread of a few years ago was through Atari, but Q*Bert himself is actually still owned by Columbia Pictures (who owned Gottlieb when Q*Bert was created, and also assumed all the Gottlieb/Mylstar video game rights after the big crash of the mid-1980s).
-lee
...at least as far as the "electronic pay" part.
When I was at Virginia Tech in 1995-1996, they had just upgraded their network to support doing EFT/POS transactions on just about every vending machine on campus that could accept money. They called the system the "Hokie Passport", and it basically used your VT ID card as a debit card.
One of the applications was in the on-campus laundromats. THey had boxes on the wall where you'd type in what washer or dryer you were using, swipe your card, and it'd deduct the money from your account over the network. The only downside was that it only worked with the VT IDs (no credit cards, and ATM network based EFT/POS was in its infancy then), and I couldn't be bothered to go the the Passport office and put money in my card.
AFAIK, the system is still in place, though (since I haven't been on campus since 1997) I don't know what improvements have been made.
-lee
What part of "World-Wide Web" implies "something that ought to be accessible by any computer ever made?"
Hey, if an Apple II or a PC/XT can do it...not that you'd want to use either as a daily driver...
-lee
I don't know of a chipset that was ever called "PhoenixView", but I do know that that was the name of Phoenix's generic VGA BIOS product. I get the feeling the chip in your machine was either one of NCR's own (like the 77C22), or a *very* early Cirrus or AcuMOS chip (most likely the the AVGA2/CL-GD5420).
-lee
Learn the ways of the Karma, young Jedi. You will soon be able to wh0re and burn with the best of them.
-lee
Yeah, we'll write it for you, just give us a couple of years to 1) raise interest in the project and get coders 2) design the thing 3) write it 4) make it talk to everything else.
In the meantime, you'll just have to use hand tools. Sorry!
-the management
You can do UW happily on a U160 controller; the only caveat is that the entire bus will drop back to UW speed (40 MB/s).
-lee
And it runs just about everything I throw at it just fine. *shrug*
My next processor buy will be a G3 card for my Mac, if any Slashbots care.
-lee
I do, just barely...Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends came out in 1981, and (IIRC; I haven't seen it in years) was more like Superfriends (i.e. wasn't played for laughs, but didn't take itself entirely seriously either).
It was also one of the first shows produced by DePatie-Freleng (probably best known for the Pink Panther shorts and some of the mid-1960s fake-WB cartoons) after Freleng left and Marvel bought them out.
-lee
This article was a well-thought-out, informative critique of the US. Did someone just take it too personally?
Oh well. This IS Slashdot, after all.
(PS: mod this up)
-lee
Not true on older Power Macs (everything before the Blue and White G3 and the iMac). With these "OldWorld" Macs, the Mac OS ROM is still actually in ROM on the motherboard. Newer Macs use the "NewWorld" architecture, where the Mac OS ROM is just another boot image to load from disk (think SPARCstation here).
-lee
You can already do this with SCSI (in Debian, install the scsiadd package and use rescan-scsi-bus.sh), so doing the same with IDE shouldn't be that much harder. I just wonder when someone'll write the support.
-lee
Actually, it's NOT technically okay to have a dozen wives (I won't go into the details), but you'd never know the difference from some of the loonies I hear live out in the boonies.
-lee...and what the hell do you do with 60 kids, anyway?
And really big stuff? Forget it, it's U-Haul time.
-lee
Let's just say, right off the bat, that I never use UPS Ground unless I have to. They're slow, unreliable, and (as this thread show) have a habit of destroying the things they ship.
Anyway, here goes:
Small items to US addresses: USPS Priority Mail. It's cheap (cheaper than UPS Ground, even with delivery confirmation and insurance), very fast (2-3 days), and less chance of what you ship getting damaged.
Small items anywhere else: I haven't had to do this, but I would probably use FedEx. It's what we use at work to ship small packages/products to international addresses.
Large items: It depends on the item. If it's not too big, it goes USPS or FedEx. It's it's bulky, fragile, or a keepsake, I'd seriously consider either paying custom-critical movers to do it (yeah right), or loading it up in my Big-Ass 1984 Mercury Wagon and hauling it myself.
-lee
Which makes me wonder: Who'll be the Amtrak of the desktop?
-lee