256 bytes RAM, hex keypad, 7-segment displays, CDP1802 processor, no OS at all. $106.99 in 1981 as a kit from Quest Electronics. I later got the Super Expansion (adds 4 KB of SRAM and a couple of sort-of-S-100 slots) and finally a 64 KB S-100 DRAM card as a bare board (remember bare boards?).
It almost doesn't matter as long as it's more than one medium, stored in more than one place. I keep copies of everything on HDDs (and sometimes tape) here at home, but also copy the most vital stuff onto 3.5" magneto-optical disks (Fuji DynaMO -- they never caught on but they've been super reliable) and keep that in a safe deposit box at the bank. $25/year is pretty good for getting my life's work back if my house burns down. If you do choose a removable medium, make sure you keep a spare drive too. It'd be a shame to have pristine media you can't read.
I seriously don't get how this is possible. Weren't we all told that works by the federal government automatically fall into the public domain (except classified works) since the federal government *can't* hold copyrights? How is having a university create the work with federal money any different from the feds doing it themselves? (It would be a "work for hire" if it *were* copyrightable.) And the whole concept of copyleft licenses depends on copyrights, ironically, so you can't release something under GPL etc. if you don't hold the copyright.
So this all sounds as if we're supposed to be happy about the government actually doing much less than it was supposed to do, or overreaching and doing what it can't do, depending on how you look at it. Every single line of code they've ever written is ours ours ours, no strings attached, unless it's classified.
If you mean TSS/8, it didn't have file versions, and neither did RSTS/E (and actually I don't remember it on T10 either but I barely used that). But yeah T20 definitely had versions and was the inspiration for the later systems (RSX/VMS quietly accept T20 filename syntax too -- <dir>file.ext.ver instead of [dir]file.ext;ver). Very very useful feature -- saved my ass plenty of times.
I'm wondering the same thing about moths. In the last few years I've really started noticing that when I'm driving my car at night on a quiet road with no traffic, moths that are fluttering over the lane will suddenly drop to the pavement as my headlights hit them.
Sort of like a fainting goat, only more useful -- moths who have mini-seizures when they see headlights must have a higher survival rate because now all they have to worry about (besides being bashed up a bit by the fall) is my tires, which are a lot less likely to cream them than the windshield/grill.
From the abstract, it sounds as if they made no attempt at all to train the cows -- they were just seeing what would stimulate a cow to poop with no training at all. Or, they were seeing what's the least that counts as a master's thesis! A much more interesting question.
These seemed to be marketed to people who wanted to make mini-disc mix tapes, which seemed weirdly specific and obviously didn't catch on. But they were really good for recording live music and sucking it into a computer. Flash is obviously much better, but MD was around for eons before flash got cheap...
Your employer absolutely should be entitled to any IP you produce... *if* they're paying you for 168/hours a week. If it's only 40 hours/week then there has to be room for you to do your thing on the time that belongs to you. I hate it (and refuse to sign -- cost me a great job once) when they try to just stick a catchall into your employee contract. Contracts are supposed to be quid pro quo deals, not quid pro nothing.
For about two seconds a few years ago, starroms.com had a bunch of classic ROM images for sale, all nice and legal-like, and reasonably priced too. But then Atari/etc. sat on it for some reason (they didn't like getting royalties from zero additional effort?). It was a real shame -- that's *exactly* what should happen to abandonware...
This has always baffled me too, especially among programmers, because programming involves endless iterations of writing code and then having the computer laugh in your face. How can you think you're such a genius when a zillion times a day, a machine tells you you're not?
With college students it makes sense though. Because they don't really notice things which haven't happened to catch their interest, they live in a tiny subset of the real world, and they've largely mastered that subset, so as far as they know they ARE geniuses. It takes them an annoyingly long time to realize that the 95% of the universe that they don't care about matters too.
It didn't have a name -- kernel 0.13 plus a wad of basic utils, around 1991. Booting from floppy only (LILO came later) and you had to patch the boot disk with DEBUG.COM to set the root. No networking (Taylor UUCP came soon, TCP/IP later). I was actually pretty offended when distributions came along and started charging $$$ for balling up stuff they got for free from Linus and GNU, but it quickly became the most reasonable way to get Linux as it became enormous. I forget whether I tried SLS briefly before switching to Slackware which is what I've used up until now. Even when it was N floppies you didn't really use N floppies -- for most of them you could rewrite the disk with the next image as soon as the installer spat it out since it wouldn't ask for it back. Very long evening, each time.
I did a summer internship at Apple in the late 80s and I'm sure things have changed quite a bit since then, but still one thing I thought was pretty clever of them as out-in-the-open evil schemes go was that they made it very very easy for employees to have no life outside of work. There was *tons* of social stuff built into work (happy hour every Friday afternoon, off-site stuff like going to a ball game or an amusement park with your group during work hours), and there were showers in the building and sleeping in your cube was tolerated. Adding a nice restaurant seems obvious -- one more thing covered that might otherwise make you leave work.
Actually, the Arduino (or at least, the Arduino Uno I'm holding in my hand right now) does have a CE mark on the back. Now this is making me paranoid about some of my own projects! What does CE testing cost?
>UEFI is an overdesigned solution to a non-problem.
Well it does solve the problem of 30 years of backwards compatibility. Thank god that's over! I really *hate* the fact that I can pull out any floppy, CD, or USB drive from when I was 1/3 my current age and expect it to boot up beautifully on my latest PC. I mean it's not as if backwards compatibility is the only reason x86 stuff rules the Earth... there have got to be lots of other things everyone loves about it!
Seriously, I don't get it either. Slow booting is caused by slow BIOSes, not by the fact that the BIOS model is inherently slow -- it isn't! Many popular BIOSes have ridiculously long POSTs but that's their fault. Once that's over, loading the boot image from disk takes a few hundred milliseconds (max) even in real mode with INT 13h. Switching from real mode to protected mode takes a few dozen microseconds, using boilerplate code that we all debugged back when the 386 came out. Why complain about that now? They've increased the BIOS disk size limit a bazillion times and there's nothing stopping them from doing it again (last time around they finally generalized it so all you have to do is increase the packet size that can be accepted by the same EDD calls).
Exactly! The really amazing part is sending a manned vehicle some place insane. We (humans, I mean) were really good at that back in the 1960s -- an impressive number of crazy stunts worked on the first try.
Building something with motors and a decent oxygen supply would also be very cool, but the truly awesome part is withstanding the pressure and it's already been done, *fifty-one years* ago. So why should Branson get so much credit for something which, so far, is just a painting anyway?
Once I made up a batch of little circuit cards that adapt the 8" drive bus to work with 3.5" controllers, and put up a dinky little web page advertising them at a price that would just about get me my money back (with nothing for my time) if I ever managed to sell all ten. Now it's twelve years later and I sold eight of them in January alone!!! Usually it's more like one a month but it absolutely blows my mind how many other retro-geeks like me are in the world.
Admittedly the users are mostly/entirely people like me who want to take snapshots of all their old disks for use under emulation, so that might not fit the definition of "using" them (since they'll stop once they have read everything).
It's kind of funny that CDs aren't considered antiques, even though they came out in 1982 so they're not that much younger than 8" floppies. I guess no one ever really thought they were too big (physically) or expensive so the upgrade path was just to increase the capacity at the same form factor and maintain backward compatibility (so it's convenient to keep using them even now, for things that fit). It was very odd that the first direction floppies went was to the 5.25" mini-floppies, which were slower and had much less capacity, instead of upgrading 8" drives to store 8 MB per disk or something amazing like that.
Anyway I'd love to know where the original poster thinks you can buy brand new 8" floppy drives. My Googling just turns up mislabeled NOS 5.25" stuff, and a blank media vendor whose page is copyrighted 14 years ago.
This may not count since it was in the 1990s (so the mid-1970s were a lot more recent then), but I read what I understood to be the original source code for MBASIC-80 off of PDP-10 DECtapes for one of Paul Allen's people. (If the stories we've all heard are true, MBASIC-80 was originally cross-assembled on PDP-10s, starting at Harvard before Microsoft was founded.)
The hardware was a PDP-11/34a with a TC11/TU56 DECtape rig, with FILEX.SAV on RT-11 and also my own home-grown utility that takes snapshots of tapes in 18-bit mode. The TU56 drive crapped out in the middle of it all, which was really embarrassing since I had to repair it in front of the Vulcan guy (who'd flown across the country just to visit my squalid nerd lair, but apparently working DECtape gear was rare enough that he didn't have much choice), but at least the whole thing was successful.
This might not cause that much trouble, because when you *register* a trademark (as in (R)) you have to specify what business the mark will be used in and it's limited to that. A non-registered trademark (as in TM) is harder to defend but has a lot more wiggle room for the trademark holder. IANAL but I'll continue using the word "Face" w/o worrying, unless I'm building a social networking web site.
I have CVT Avant Stellar keyboards on the two PCs I use most. They're not the "ergonomic" style (I don't think I have whatever problem those solve) but they're supposed to be designed by whoever did the original Omnikey keyboard (which I have on another machine and love), and indeed they have the same wonderful clicky feel and metal back. I like them so much that I bought a spare (even though it was $189) since I didn't want to go through withdrawal when one of these dies, but it's never happened. Once in a while a key will get flaky (stubborn and/or bouncy) but then I'll just pull off the keycap (tool is included), dribble some 91% rubbing alcohol into the switch, and then I'm back in business.
Besides the reliability, nice feel, duplicate set of pre-EKB F-keys on the left (I've been using the same editor since 1983 and pressing those keys is involuntary at this point), I *really* like the fact that they included extra keycaps (and that tool I mentioned) so you could put Ctrl to the left of ASDF (as God intended, or anyway, all the non-PC keyboards I ever use) even though the Ctrl and CapsLock keycaps aren't the same size and so aren't swappable. There seems to be a slight bug in the firmware though -- obviously I programmed the keyboards to exchange those two keys, but once in a while they get confused and what's now the Ctrl key ends up working as CapsLock anyway (so the LED comes on and I'm shouting until I notice and fix it). It doesn't happen often enough to affect my loyalty, but it's weird.
ANYWAY so if the Northgate name on this ergonomic thing means it's in any way similar to the earlier Omnikey and Stellar KBs, definitely definitely buy one.
Remember back a couple of years ago when the cable industry ran those ads (on Comcast here in W. Mass.) reassuring us all that we didn't have to worry about all this digital nonsense because they had our backs? And here we are a short time later, where they've deleted 3/4 of the channels and reduced the signal quality of what's left. Thanks a ton guys, and you're welcome for all that money I've sent you over the years. I refuse to get their digital box because I don't want Comcast always knowing what channel I'm watching (the one good thing about analog TV is privacy!), and anyway their cheapest digital plan is 3x the price of basic (analog) cable and wouldn't work with my DVRs.
One of my DVRs does have a digital tuner and it picks up *nothing*. Everything is either "Scramble Program" or else a blue screen -- not the one my TV generates on no signal and I don't *think* the DVR does either -- so is Comcast really broadcasting a blue screen 24/7 on the unencrypted channels? Seems a little spiteful even for them.
ANYWAY -- does the town's free cable deal include free broadband? Maybe this has already been done but if not it might be a really interesting project (even if it's not practical for a town): put together a box which decodes video off Hulu/etc., not just into a single NTSC video-out (there are plenty of boxes for that), but with RF modulation to the usual CATV channel numbering system so you could use it to drive a local piece of cable (within a school), and put in a schedule of which videos get played at what time on which channel. That way you could keep your existing TVs and not have to put a 20-watt set-top-box on each one.
Sure, if you were a Genuine Degreed BS-EE with the job title to match, salesdroids would pretty much send you anything you ask for as samples. The general public, believe it or not, was expected to actually pay for printed appnotes and even printed datasheets.
If you were lucky!! Most of the time the data sheets were free, and when someone gives something away for free that means they don't have to if they don't feel like it. So the salesdroids would always sound receptive on the phone, and they'd assure you the stuff was going in the mail, but you were never sure whether you'd actually receive anything.
So as far as I'm concerned, these are what will eventually be the good old days! You can get almost any data sheet (even if the quality varies -- yeah you, RealTek!) instantly (or semi-instantly after NDA) for free, and samples are done online so you don't have to have a good corporate-sounding voice for those either. I totally agree about eval boards -- they're both cheap and well designed, and they have to be because the first one that the engineer has a positive experience with is the one that gets the sale for the parts themselves. So the manufacturers are falling over each other to give you cheap, easy-to-use kits that will have you getting something (simple) working the same day the kit comes in the mail.
I still sell my software commercially on 3.5" floppies. Honestly I'm just goofily proud of the fact that 1/4 million lines of assembly code builds into an.EXE that fits on one disk with space to spare for the.PDF doc, but more importantly, I bought an old automatic floppy disk duplicating machine ages ago and I love it (mailing out mass updates was used to be a nightmare but now it's a piece of cake). Every robotic CD duplicator I've seen for less than 3x the price is a flimsy plastic toy.
I'll bet I won't be able to get more custom-printed floppy labels any more when I run out (and OK yes they're pin-feed so I can add the version # and copyright year with a dot matrix printer; this is all retro-themed stuff if that isn't obvious) so that's probably when I'll have to switch to using CDs no matter how expensive it is. But shipping 1.1 MB on a (much more delicate) CD is just so STUPID!
Meanwhile I use floppies all the time in day-to-day life... I have three computers in my office running three different OSes and floppies are what they all have in common. Why mess with what's always worked?
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256 bytes RAM, hex keypad, 7-segment displays, CDP1802 processor, no OS at all. $106.99 in 1981 as a kit from Quest Electronics. I later got the Super Expansion (adds 4 KB of SRAM and a couple of sort-of-S-100 slots) and finally a 64 KB S-100 DRAM card as a bare board (remember bare boards?).
It almost doesn't matter as long as it's more than one medium, stored in more than one place. I keep copies of everything on HDDs (and sometimes tape) here at home, but also copy the most vital stuff onto 3.5" magneto-optical disks (Fuji DynaMO -- they never caught on but they've been super reliable) and keep that in a safe deposit box at the bank. $25/year is pretty good for getting my life's work back if my house burns down. If you do choose a removable medium, make sure you keep a spare drive too. It'd be a shame to have pristine media you can't read.
I seriously don't get how this is possible. Weren't we all told that works by the federal government automatically fall into the public domain (except classified works) since the federal government *can't* hold copyrights? How is having a university create the work with federal money any different from the feds doing it themselves? (It would be a "work for hire" if it *were* copyrightable.) And the whole concept of copyleft licenses depends on copyrights, ironically, so you can't release something under GPL etc. if you don't hold the copyright.
So this all sounds as if we're supposed to be happy about the government actually doing much less than it was supposed to do, or overreaching and doing what it can't do, depending on how you look at it. Every single line of code they've ever written is ours ours ours, no strings attached, unless it's classified.
OK rip me to pieces.
If you mean TSS/8, it didn't have file versions, and neither did RSTS/E (and actually I don't remember it on T10 either but I barely used that). But yeah T20 definitely had versions and was the inspiration for the later systems (RSX/VMS quietly accept T20 filename syntax too -- <dir>file.ext.ver instead of [dir]file.ext;ver). Very very useful feature -- saved my ass plenty of times.
I'm wondering the same thing about moths. In the last few years I've really started noticing that when I'm driving my car at night on a quiet road with no traffic, moths that are fluttering over the lane will suddenly drop to the pavement as my headlights hit them.
Sort of like a fainting goat, only more useful -- moths who have mini-seizures when they see headlights must have a higher survival rate because now all they have to worry about (besides being bashed up a bit by the fall) is my tires, which are a lot less likely to cream them than the windshield/grill.
From the abstract, it sounds as if they made no attempt at all to train the cows -- they were just seeing what would stimulate a cow to poop with no training at all. Or, they were seeing what's the least that counts as a master's thesis! A much more interesting question.
These seemed to be marketed to people who wanted to make mini-disc mix tapes, which seemed weirdly specific and obviously didn't catch on. But they were really good for recording live music and sucking it into a computer. Flash is obviously much better, but MD was around for eons before flash got cheap...
Your employer absolutely should be entitled to any IP you produce ... *if* they're paying you for 168/hours a week. If it's only 40 hours/week then there has to be room for you to do your thing on the time that belongs to you. I hate it (and refuse to sign -- cost me a great job once) when they try to just stick a catchall into your employee contract. Contracts are supposed to be quid pro quo deals, not quid pro nothing.
For about two seconds a few years ago, starroms.com had a bunch of classic ROM images for sale, all nice and legal-like, and reasonably priced too. But then Atari/etc. sat on it for some reason (they didn't like getting royalties from zero additional effort?). It was a real shame -- that's *exactly* what should happen to abandonware...
This has always baffled me too, especially among programmers, because programming involves endless iterations of writing code and then having the computer laugh in your face. How can you think you're such a genius when a zillion times a day, a machine tells you you're not?
With college students it makes sense though. Because they don't really notice things which haven't happened to catch their interest, they live in a tiny subset of the real world, and they've largely mastered that subset, so as far as they know they ARE geniuses. It takes them an annoyingly long time to realize that the 95% of the universe that they don't care about matters too.
It didn't have a name -- kernel 0.13 plus a wad of basic utils, around 1991. Booting from floppy only (LILO came later) and you had to patch the boot disk with DEBUG.COM to set the root. No networking (Taylor UUCP came soon, TCP/IP later). I was actually pretty offended when distributions came along and started charging $$$ for balling up stuff they got for free from Linus and GNU, but it quickly became the most reasonable way to get Linux as it became enormous. I forget whether I tried SLS briefly before switching to Slackware which is what I've used up until now. Even when it was N floppies you didn't really use N floppies -- for most of them you could rewrite the disk with the next image as soon as the installer spat it out since it wouldn't ask for it back. Very long evening, each time.
I did a summer internship at Apple in the late 80s and I'm sure things have changed quite a bit since then, but still one thing I thought was pretty clever of them as out-in-the-open evil schemes go was that they made it very very easy for employees to have no life outside of work. There was *tons* of social stuff built into work (happy hour every Friday afternoon, off-site stuff like going to a ball game or an amusement park with your group during work hours), and there were showers in the building and sleeping in your cube was tolerated. Adding a nice restaurant seems obvious -- one more thing covered that might otherwise make you leave work.
Actually, the Arduino (or at least, the Arduino Uno I'm holding in my hand right now) does have a CE mark on the back. Now this is making me paranoid about some of my own projects! What does CE testing cost?
>UEFI is an overdesigned solution to a non-problem.
Well it does solve the problem of 30 years of backwards compatibility. Thank god that's over! I really *hate* the fact that I can pull out any floppy, CD, or USB drive from when I was 1/3 my current age and expect it to boot up beautifully on my latest PC. I mean it's not as if backwards compatibility is the only reason x86 stuff rules the Earth ... there have got to be lots of other things everyone loves about it!
Seriously, I don't get it either. Slow booting is caused by slow BIOSes, not by the fact that the BIOS model is inherently slow -- it isn't! Many popular BIOSes have ridiculously long POSTs but that's their fault. Once that's over, loading the boot image from disk takes a few hundred milliseconds (max) even in real mode with INT 13h. Switching from real mode to protected mode takes a few dozen microseconds, using boilerplate code that we all debugged back when the 386 came out. Why complain about that now? They've increased the BIOS disk size limit a bazillion times and there's nothing stopping them from doing it again (last time around they finally generalized it so all you have to do is increase the packet size that can be accepted by the same EDD calls).
Exactly! The really amazing part is sending a manned vehicle some place insane. We (humans, I mean) were really good at that back in the 1960s -- an impressive number of crazy stunts worked on the first try.
Building something with motors and a decent oxygen supply would also be very cool, but the truly awesome part is withstanding the pressure and it's already been done, *fifty-one years* ago. So why should Branson get so much credit for something which, so far, is just a painting anyway?
Why are we pretending this hasn't already been done? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste
Once I made up a batch of little circuit cards that adapt the 8" drive bus to work with 3.5" controllers, and put up a dinky little web page advertising them at a price that would just about get me my money back (with nothing for my time) if I ever managed to sell all ten. Now it's twelve years later and I sold eight of them in January alone!!! Usually it's more like one a month but it absolutely blows my mind how many other retro-geeks like me are in the world.
Admittedly the users are mostly/entirely people like me who want to take snapshots of all their old disks for use under emulation, so that might not fit the definition of "using" them (since they'll stop once they have read everything).
It's kind of funny that CDs aren't considered antiques, even though they came out in 1982 so they're not that much younger than 8" floppies. I guess no one ever really thought they were too big (physically) or expensive so the upgrade path was just to increase the capacity at the same form factor and maintain backward compatibility (so it's convenient to keep using them even now, for things that fit). It was very odd that the first direction floppies went was to the 5.25" mini-floppies, which were slower and had much less capacity, instead of upgrading 8" drives to store 8 MB per disk or something amazing like that.
Anyway I'd love to know where the original poster thinks you can buy brand new 8" floppy drives. My Googling just turns up mislabeled NOS 5.25" stuff, and a blank media vendor whose page is copyrighted 14 years ago.
This may not count since it was in the 1990s (so the mid-1970s were a lot more recent then), but I read what I understood to be the original source code for MBASIC-80 off of PDP-10 DECtapes for one of Paul Allen's people. (If the stories we've all heard are true, MBASIC-80 was originally cross-assembled on PDP-10s, starting at Harvard before Microsoft was founded.)
The hardware was a PDP-11/34a with a TC11/TU56 DECtape rig, with FILEX.SAV on RT-11 and also my own home-grown utility that takes snapshots of tapes in 18-bit mode. The TU56 drive crapped out in the middle of it all, which was really embarrassing since I had to repair it in front of the Vulcan guy (who'd flown across the country just to visit my squalid nerd lair, but apparently working DECtape gear was rare enough that he didn't have much choice), but at least the whole thing was successful.
This might not cause that much trouble, because when you *register* a trademark (as in (R)) you have to specify what business the mark will be used in and it's limited to that. A non-registered trademark (as in TM) is harder to defend but has a lot more wiggle room for the trademark holder. IANAL but I'll continue using the word "Face" w/o worrying, unless I'm building a social networking web site.
I have CVT Avant Stellar keyboards on the two PCs I use most. They're not the "ergonomic" style (I don't think I have whatever problem those solve) but they're supposed to be designed by whoever did the original Omnikey keyboard (which I have on another machine and love), and indeed they have the same wonderful clicky feel and metal back. I like them so much that I bought a spare (even though it was $189) since I didn't want to go through withdrawal when one of these dies, but it's never happened. Once in a while a key will get flaky (stubborn and/or bouncy) but then I'll just pull off the keycap (tool is included), dribble some 91% rubbing alcohol into the switch, and then I'm back in business.
Besides the reliability, nice feel, duplicate set of pre-EKB F-keys on the left (I've been using the same editor since 1983 and pressing those keys is involuntary at this point), I *really* like the fact that they included extra keycaps (and that tool I mentioned) so you could put Ctrl to the left of ASDF (as God intended, or anyway, all the non-PC keyboards I ever use) even though the Ctrl and CapsLock keycaps aren't the same size and so aren't swappable. There seems to be a slight bug in the firmware though -- obviously I programmed the keyboards to exchange those two keys, but once in a while they get confused and what's now the Ctrl key ends up working as CapsLock anyway (so the LED comes on and I'm shouting until I notice and fix it). It doesn't happen often enough to affect my loyalty, but it's weird.
ANYWAY so if the Northgate name on this ergonomic thing means it's in any way similar to the earlier Omnikey and Stellar KBs, definitely definitely buy one.
As Inigo would say: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Remember back a couple of years ago when the cable industry ran those ads (on Comcast here in W. Mass.) reassuring us all that we didn't have to worry about all this digital nonsense because they had our backs? And here we are a short time later, where they've deleted 3/4 of the channels and reduced the signal quality of what's left. Thanks a ton guys, and you're welcome for all that money I've sent you over the years. I refuse to get their digital box because I don't want Comcast always knowing what channel I'm watching (the one good thing about analog TV is privacy!), and anyway their cheapest digital plan is 3x the price of basic (analog) cable and wouldn't work with my DVRs.
One of my DVRs does have a digital tuner and it picks up *nothing*. Everything is either "Scramble Program" or else a blue screen -- not the one my TV generates on no signal and I don't *think* the DVR does either -- so is Comcast really broadcasting a blue screen 24/7 on the unencrypted channels? Seems a little spiteful even for them.
ANYWAY -- does the town's free cable deal include free broadband? Maybe this has already been done but if not it might be a really interesting project (even if it's not practical for a town): put together a box which decodes video off Hulu/etc., not just into a single NTSC video-out (there are plenty of boxes for that), but with RF modulation to the usual CATV channel numbering system so you could use it to drive a local piece of cable (within a school), and put in a schedule of which videos get played at what time on which channel. That way you could keep your existing TVs and not have to put a 20-watt set-top-box on each one.
Sure, if you were a Genuine Degreed BS-EE with the job title to match, salesdroids would pretty much send you anything you ask for as samples. The general public, believe it or not, was expected to actually pay for printed appnotes and even printed datasheets.
If you were lucky!! Most of the time the data sheets were free, and when someone gives something away for free that means they don't have to if they don't feel like it. So the salesdroids would always sound receptive on the phone, and they'd assure you the stuff was going in the mail, but you were never sure whether you'd actually receive anything.
So as far as I'm concerned, these are what will eventually be the good old days! You can get almost any data sheet (even if the quality varies -- yeah you, RealTek!) instantly (or semi-instantly after NDA) for free, and samples are done online so you don't have to have a good corporate-sounding voice for those either. I totally agree about eval boards -- they're both cheap and well designed, and they have to be because the first one that the engineer has a positive experience with is the one that gets the sale for the parts themselves. So the manufacturers are falling over each other to give you cheap, easy-to-use kits that will have you getting something (simple) working the same day the kit comes in the mail.
I still sell my software commercially on 3.5" floppies. Honestly I'm just goofily proud of the fact that 1/4 million lines of assembly code builds into an .EXE that fits on one disk with space to spare for the .PDF doc, but more importantly, I bought an old automatic floppy disk duplicating machine ages ago and I love it (mailing out mass updates was used to be a nightmare but now it's a piece of cake). Every robotic CD duplicator I've seen for less than 3x the price is a flimsy plastic toy.
I'll bet I won't be able to get more custom-printed floppy labels any more when I run out (and OK yes they're pin-feed so I can add the version # and copyright year with a dot matrix printer; this is all retro-themed stuff if that isn't obvious) so that's probably when I'll have to switch to using CDs no matter how expensive it is. But shipping 1.1 MB on a (much more delicate) CD is just so STUPID!
Meanwhile I use floppies all the time in day-to-day life ... I have three computers in my office running three different OSes and floppies are what they all have in common. Why mess with what's always worked?
So I assume they're also going to hunt down, speed-boost and/or pay LOW-bandwidth users.