buescher

81 ms·

961.
by buescher 5y ago
Great story.
962.
by buescher 5y ago
People moving far away and turning their lives around makes a great story for a reason: I'd bet it almost never happens (or happened).
963.
by buescher 5y ago
Didn't Netscreen (acquired by Juniper) do basically that? I think they had an ASIC but I definitely remember their claim to fame was doing packet filtering in hardware.
964.
by buescher 5y ago
If it's not powered by a coin cell or cells, I'll be very surprised. Maybe a tiny rechargeable lithium pack? Do they make them that small?
965.
by buescher 5y ago
Omega used to sell load bolts that were basically a hollow bolt with a strain gauge inside. Sort of like this: https://tml.jp/e/product/strain_gauge/btm_list.html#:~:text=... . If you need that kind of thing,
966.
by buescher 5y ago
I wonder how it would look on a CRT TV over RF.
967.
by buescher 5y ago
The Lucasfilm games ('84-'85) blew my mind at the time. Fractalus, Ballblazer, Koronis, Eidolon.
968.
by buescher 5y ago
Yeah, you had ROM space (and potentially cartridge ROM space) eating into your 64K on all the models and had to bank-switch for anything more than 48K IIRC. With a BASIC cartridge in place you'd lose another 8K. Also I don't reca
969.
by buescher 5y ago
I was expecting it to need 128K!
970.
by buescher 5y ago
To be pedantic, it needs a 64K machine like the 1982 1200Xl or 1983 800XL so would not run on the (max w/o 3rd party mods) 48K Atari 800 from 1979. But yes, wow!
971.
by buescher 5y ago
He tried the Légion Étrangère but it didn't work out.
972.
by buescher 5y ago
I like it too, enough that I'm thinking about whether I could make a pair of electrostats that small. The keyboard suggests some kind of awesome galaxy brain user experience like the Space Cadet keyboard, but would probably be more lik
973.
by buescher 5y ago
The 386 was still kind of expensive in 1990-1991 but it was not particularly high end. The high end was the 486, introduced in 1989. The 386 had gone into volume production in 1986, so in 1991 it was five years old . I wouldn't ev
974.
by buescher 5y ago
>"Since a base-3 electronic technique is not available, they decided to construct a base-4 machine and to utilize only 3 of the 4 possible states. The unused fourth state in each case is available for some form of checking." T
975.
by buescher 5y ago
It's lunchtime so I googled - Siemens did have a collaboration with Intel and built processors at least through the 286 in Europe - I found a picture of one marked "Austria". This would have been completely unremarkable at t
976.
by buescher 5y ago
That's pretty wild. Note that the PDP-11 was widely used in control and high-level embedded applications, the sort of thing you'd use a nice SBC for today. In a previous life, I used an LSI-11 as recently as the nineties that
977.
by buescher 5y ago
Yeah, looting has consequences. The UK did OK - Acorn launched the Archimedes in 1987 (without a parade) - but the rest of Western Europe was never really a personal computer or IC design powerhouse either. Commodore did some assembly in
978.
by buescher 5y ago
Compare to Japan, then.
979.
by buescher 5y ago
Right - and to get an idea of how behind the times they were, in the west CP/M office computers had an extinction level event occur in 1981 that some people might remember. The KC models were introduced in 1984, a year that saw the in
980.
by buescher 5y ago
Five years was an eternity back then. Motorola launched the 68000 (32 bit registers and 16 bit data bus) in 1979. The Intel 8086 was a year old. The first-generation Apple II, Commodore PET, and Radio Shack TRS-80 were two years old .
981.
by buescher 5y ago
Heathkit had the H11 in 1977: http://cini.classiccmp.org/heath_h11.htm
982.
by buescher 5y ago
For those that haven't seen Knuth's "Structured Programming with go to Statements" before: https://pic.plover.com/knuth-GOTO.pdf Enjoy!
983.
by buescher 5y ago
At least one of the versions of MISRA explicitly allows for the use of goto to break to cleanup code at the end of a function, if I remember correctly, and another is much more strict, but I don't have any copies of MISRA at hand at th
984.
by buescher 5y ago
And it wasn't Athanasius Kircher!
985.
by buescher 5y ago
I think it’s pretty plain that he’s cuing up the stories - which I’ve enjoyed by the way, he’s a good raconteur - as “what I learned about negotiation that day” rather than “how I didn't get hired”. The pivotal moments in his storie
986.
by buescher 5y ago
This sounds like a 1990s Microsoftean interview question. Next up, manhole covers...
987.
by buescher 5y ago
Am I the only one who reads these stories (others have linked to his Steve Jobs story - he was, um, not honest enough for Steve Jobs) as "I almost got acqui-hired twice by names you'd recognize but flunked the job interview both t
988.
by buescher 5y ago
Two things have kept "good enough" versions of these kinds of systems from being widely deployed: 1) Batteries are inherently dismal, and getting enough of a sci-fi aesthetic and feature set to wow the military brass will always d
989.
by buescher 5y ago
Yeah. Aspire to be good, fast, and expensive. Also, slow gets expensive fast anyway.
990.
by buescher 5y ago
My thoughts on "good, fast, cheap, pick (at most) two": 1) If you're not fast you will never get good 2) There's no such thing as "good, slow, and cheap" and if there is, that person is booked for the next 30 y

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