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I love the part where he compares it to the PC and says he can finish his task on the Atari in the time it takes the PC to boot up. Similarly on uptime, he just

I love the part where he compares it to the PC and says he can finish his task on the Atari in the time it takes the PC to boot up. Similarly on uptime, he just turns it on at the start of the season, leaves it running 24/7 and powers down months later. Beautiful.

kwanbix 5y ago
I remember travelling to NY with my father for turism, but also taking the opportunity to buy an original ibm PC XT for 5000 dollars, which was half of what it costed at my home country. IBM PC AT with a powerful 286 was already out but much more expensive. And we were too newbies to know that we could get a PC clone. Anyway, I remember there was both the Amiga and the Atari ST. But my father wanted an IBM. You know, nobody got fired for buying IBM ;)
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I have very little respect for the IBM PC. It was huge, heavy, loud, slow (writing characters via the BIOS had to wait for the blanking intervals on CGA or you’d get “snow”). My Apple II booted up faster, loaded programs faster and could print to the screen faster than the monitor could refresh.
  - specialist 5y ago
    Ya. At the time, I was an Apple partisan. I just could not understand how the PC XT was more successful than the Apple, Atari, and Commodore computers. With hindsight, it was probably my first experience with "worse is better". A phenomenon I still don't understand, frankly. JavaScript? ffs. -- There was one exception. My bestie's dad bought a HeathKit/Zenith Z-150 kit. That was kinda cool. https://www.ljkrakauer.com/LJK/80s90s/heathkit.htm https://www.ljkrakauer.com/LJK/80s90s/heathkit.htm https://archive.org/details/ZenithDataSystemsZ-150PcSalesFlyer https://archive.org/details/ZenithDataSystemsZ-150PcSalesFly...
  - joakleaf 5y ago
    I think, what is often overlooked as to why the PC won the market is exactly its hi-res textmodes; 1) The BIOS was insanely slow yes. But on the other hand it was really fast when you wrote to the screen memory directly (address $B8000). An entire screen in 720x400 resolution VGA, was represented by just 80x25x2=4000 bytes (2 bytes per char code + color attributes). A single plane bitmat graphics mode (just black and white) in same resolution would be 36000 bytes. So scrolling through documents/spreadsheets was very fast compared to graphics modes, which most other platforms used. And screens used less memory. The simple text-modes were also really easy to develop for. 2) The high-res text (720x400x16) and graphics modes (640x480x16) on VGA were non-interlaced (unlike e.g. the first Amigas), so they felt more solid and you could work with them longer before getting tired.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      While this is true - it is possible to bypass the BIOS (at the cost of "snow" on early CGA adapters), most of the competition for the IBM PC also had text modes. My Apple II+ running CP/M had a board with a 6845 CRTC, the same used in the CGA and MDA. Apple ///, //e and others had 80-column text modes pretty much built-in. While the memory layout on the Apple II was more complicated, you could call routines in ROM that were very fast. The same approach was used in later machines such as the Amiga, the Mac and the STs - using the ROM or OS routines was the standard way to do things, much like bypassing the BIOS and directly addressing the hardware was the standard way to work on the PC (remember how the "gold standard" of compatibility was being able to run Flight Simulator). With these later machines, we learned that looking to the hardware from too close was a compatibility issue.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> Similarly on uptime, he just turns it on at the start of the season, leaves it running 24/7 and powers down months later. Beautiful. It is beautiful but... That said a PC running Linux can do this too without any problem. Back when I was solving a long computation on one core, I've had my "workstation" at home (just a regular PC running Debian GNU/Linux) reach months of uptime. Typically a black out (I have no UPS battery) would end the uptime.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  You probably shouldn’t do this as much because kernel security vulnerabilities will get fixed in the meantime and your wireless router may have been breached making your local networks hostile.
  - speed_spread 5y ago
    I make my computer hostile enough that viruses and intruders backoff when they meet it.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Same here. Whoever gets past all the layered defenses has earned whatever data they can exfiltrate.
  - TacticalCoder 5y ago
    I'm not advocating to do this but anyway there are times at which more than six months goes by without any mandatory kernel vuln fix requiring a reboot. And not all kernel vulnerabilities do affect all setups, especially when the system is used not as a server but simply as a "workstation" (with 0 ports opened or maybe just the SSH one). I was just commenting that modern machines can be very reliable too.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Yeah, but then again, wouldn't the equivalent Atari have security issues and require reboots for updates, too? Provided anyone would provide those updates.
still_grokking 5y ago
Depending on what you were doing those bombs could appear. Then you would had to reboot the machine. But most of the time it was indeed pretty stable.
- a-dub 5y ago
  some of the ICs they used were socketed and with time (and perhaps transportation to a few too many midimaze parties) those connections would start to fail resulting in more bombs than one would like. there were two solutions: take the device apart and reseat the chips methodically, one by one. -or- lift the machine 3" off the desk and drop it flat to produce a terrifying crunch sound, if you dared. the second method was more effective and less risky in the end.

kwanbix 5y ago

I remember travelling to NY with my father for turism, but also taking the opportunity to buy an original ibm PC XT for 5000 dollars, which was half of what it costed at my home country. IBM PC AT with a powerful 286 was already out but much more expensive. And we were too newbies to know that we could get a PC clone. Anyway, I remember there was both the Amiga and the Atari ST. But my father wanted an IBM. You know, nobody got fired for buying IBM ;)

rbanffy 5y ago
I have very little respect for the IBM PC. It was huge, heavy, loud, slow (writing characters via the BIOS had to wait for the blanking intervals on CGA or you’d get “snow”). My Apple II booted up faster, loaded programs faster and could print to the screen faster than the monitor could refresh.
- specialist 5y ago
  Ya. At the time, I was an Apple partisan. I just could not understand how the PC XT was more successful than the Apple, Atari, and Commodore computers. With hindsight, it was probably my first experience with "worse is better". A phenomenon I still don't understand, frankly. JavaScript? ffs. -- There was one exception. My bestie's dad bought a HeathKit/Zenith Z-150 kit. That was kinda cool. https://www.ljkrakauer.com/LJK/80s90s/heathkit.htm https://www.ljkrakauer.com/LJK/80s90s/heathkit.htm https://archive.org/details/ZenithDataSystemsZ-150PcSalesFlyer https://archive.org/details/ZenithDataSystemsZ-150PcSalesFly...
- joakleaf 5y ago
  I think, what is often overlooked as to why the PC won the market is exactly its hi-res textmodes; 1) The BIOS was insanely slow yes. But on the other hand it was really fast when you wrote to the screen memory directly (address $B8000). An entire screen in 720x400 resolution VGA, was represented by just 80x25x2=4000 bytes (2 bytes per char code + color attributes). A single plane bitmat graphics mode (just black and white) in same resolution would be 36000 bytes. So scrolling through documents/spreadsheets was very fast compared to graphics modes, which most other platforms used. And screens used less memory. The simple text-modes were also really easy to develop for. 2) The high-res text (720x400x16) and graphics modes (640x480x16) on VGA were non-interlaced (unlike e.g. the first Amigas), so they felt more solid and you could work with them longer before getting tired.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    While this is true - it is possible to bypass the BIOS (at the cost of "snow" on early CGA adapters), most of the competition for the IBM PC also had text modes. My Apple II+ running CP/M had a board with a 6845 CRTC, the same used in the CGA and MDA. Apple ///, //e and others had 80-column text modes pretty much built-in. While the memory layout on the Apple II was more complicated, you could call routines in ROM that were very fast. The same approach was used in later machines such as the Amiga, the Mac and the STs - using the ROM or OS routines was the standard way to do things, much like bypassing the BIOS and directly addressing the hardware was the standard way to work on the PC (remember how the "gold standard" of compatibility was being able to run Flight Simulator). With these later machines, we learned that looking to the hardware from too close was a compatibility issue.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

> Similarly on uptime, he just turns it on at the start of the season, leaves it running 24/7 and powers down months later. Beautiful. It is beautiful but... That said a PC running Linux can do this too without any problem. Back when I was solving a long computation on one core, I've had my "workstation" at home (just a regular PC running Debian GNU/Linux) reach months of uptime. Typically a black out (I have no UPS battery) would end the uptime.

rbanffy 5y ago
You probably shouldn’t do this as much because kernel security vulnerabilities will get fixed in the meantime and your wireless router may have been breached making your local networks hostile.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  I make my computer hostile enough that viruses and intruders backoff when they meet it.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Same here. Whoever gets past all the layered defenses has earned whatever data they can exfiltrate.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  I'm not advocating to do this but anyway there are times at which more than six months goes by without any mandatory kernel vuln fix requiring a reboot. And not all kernel vulnerabilities do affect all setups, especially when the system is used not as a server but simply as a "workstation" (with 0 ports opened or maybe just the SSH one). I was just commenting that modern machines can be very reliable too.
- oblio 5y ago
  Yeah, but then again, wouldn't the equivalent Atari have security issues and require reboots for updates, too? Provided anyone would provide those updates.

still_grokking 5y ago

Depending on what you were doing those bombs could appear. Then you would had to reboot the machine. But most of the time it was indeed pretty stable.

a-dub 5y ago
some of the ICs they used were socketed and with time (and perhaps transportation to a few too many midimaze parties) those connections would start to fail resulting in more bombs than one would like. there were two solutions: take the device apart and reseat the chips methodically, one by one. -or- lift the machine 3" off the desk and drop it flat to produce a terrifying crunch sound, if you dared. the second method was more effective and less risky in the end.