4 ms·

In my quest to reverse-engineer the Ensoniq Mirage software I reached out to one of the original authors, who replied to my email and said that while he remembe

In my quest to reverse-engineer the Ensoniq Mirage software I reached out to one of the original authors, who replied to my email and said that while he remembered working on the Mirage fondly he couldn't remember any details and no longer had any of his notes or paperwork from the 1980s.

KerrAvon 4y ago
In fairness, I've found this also tends to be the answer one receives when asking the author of some code from two years ago about some important details. Comment your code well, kids. Remember to document intent -- the why, not the what.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  "Comment your code as if a violent sociopath who knows where you live were going to maintain it". Eventually one will.
joezydeco 4y ago
It's a sensible reply when you don't want to be accused of holding onto IP that you don't own. I have kept source code from many projects that I've worked on but if some stranger asked me for details about any of them I'd give the exact same response. It could also be the complete truth.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  At this point the company that bought the company that bought Ensoniq is gone, so it's hard to imagine who would come looking for 12kB worth of 6809 assembly code.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    Any patents about it should also have expired by now.
lproven 4y ago
I can well believe that. I moderated a talk between 4 of the original team members at Acorn that wrote RISC OS [explanation below] in the 1980s a few months ago. They're all of retirement age now. Three of them were full of anecdotes and stories and details about the company, the machines, the buildings, etc. The other could barely remember anything about it; his former colleagues were prompting him for details of what he wrote about 35Y ago, but he had little idea. Too much other work since, he said, and too long ago, and he'd forgotten. I hang out in various retrocomputing fora for fun, and it amazes me the utter nonsense that some people come up with from vaguely-remembered things they knew 30Y ago. They don't know that they've forgotten, so they free-associate stuff and just make it up, and then many get resentful when their wildly wrong answers are corrected. RISC OS, for youngsters and Americans (where Acorn didn't sell much) is the original native OS for the ARM CPU, written by the company that developed the CPU and the machine it would power. It is still around today, it's FOSS now, and it runs on some modern ARM hardware such as the Raspberry Pi. It is a multitasking GUI OS with a rich desktop, networking, internet support, and so on. It ran in from 512kB to 4MB of RAM. It was the first ever GUI computer to anti-alias screen fonts as standard, to move the whole window when it was dragged, rather than a dotted outline and then a redraw when the mouse button was released. The OS, its GUI, its core apps (text editor, image editor, console prompt, filer, etc.) fitted into and executed directly from ROM, that is, without being copied into RAM. It was also the first GUI with a dedicated panel showing icons for running apps, plus a system control menu, a clock, and so on -- it inspired the Dock in NeXTstep (which came out 2Y later), which both inspired the taskbar in Windows 95 (which came out another 7Y after that). And the whole OS was written by about 6-7 programmers, and the vast majority of it in hand-coded assembly language.
- selestify 4y ago
  What retro computing forums are you on?
  - lproven 4y ago
    Me? The ClassicCmp mailing lists, among others. Half a dozen subReddits and a dozen Facebook groups. A handful of Usenet groups. I don't use web fora much so I won't count them.

KerrAvon 4y ago

In fairness, I've found this also tends to be the answer one receives when asking the author of some code from two years ago about some important details. Comment your code well, kids. Remember to document intent -- the why, not the what.

rbanffy 4y ago
"Comment your code as if a violent sociopath who knows where you live were going to maintain it". Eventually one will.

joezydeco 4y ago

It's a sensible reply when you don't want to be accused of holding onto IP that you don't own. I have kept source code from many projects that I've worked on but if some stranger asked me for details about any of them I'd give the exact same response. It could also be the complete truth.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
At this point the company that bought the company that bought Ensoniq is gone, so it's hard to imagine who would come looking for 12kB worth of 6809 assembly code.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  Any patents about it should also have expired by now.

lproven 4y ago

I can well believe that. I moderated a talk between 4 of the original team members at Acorn that wrote RISC OS [explanation below] in the 1980s a few months ago. They're all of retirement age now. Three of them were full of anecdotes and stories and details about the company, the machines, the buildings, etc. The other could barely remember anything about it; his former colleagues were prompting him for details of what he wrote about 35Y ago, but he had little idea. Too much other work since, he said, and too long ago, and he'd forgotten. I hang out in various retrocomputing fora for fun, and it amazes me the utter nonsense that some people come up with from vaguely-remembered things they knew 30Y ago. They don't know that they've forgotten, so they free-associate stuff and just make it up, and then many get resentful when their wildly wrong answers are corrected. RISC OS, for youngsters and Americans (where Acorn didn't sell much) is the original native OS for the ARM CPU, written by the company that developed the CPU and the machine it would power. It is still around today, it's FOSS now, and it runs on some modern ARM hardware such as the Raspberry Pi. It is a multitasking GUI OS with a rich desktop, networking, internet support, and so on. It ran in from 512kB to 4MB of RAM. It was the first ever GUI computer to anti-alias screen fonts as standard, to move the whole window when it was dragged, rather than a dotted outline and then a redraw when the mouse button was released. The OS, its GUI, its core apps (text editor, image editor, console prompt, filer, etc.) fitted into and executed directly from ROM, that is, without being copied into RAM. It was also the first GUI with a dedicated panel showing icons for running apps, plus a system control menu, a clock, and so on -- it inspired the Dock in NeXTstep (which came out 2Y later), which both inspired the taskbar in Windows 95 (which came out another 7Y after that). And the whole OS was written by about 6-7 programmers, and the vast majority of it in hand-coded assembly language.

selestify 4y ago
What retro computing forums are you on?
- lproven 4y ago
  Me? The ClassicCmp mailing lists, among others. Half a dozen subReddits and a dozen Facebook groups. A handful of Usenet groups. I don't use web fora much so I won't count them.