greenbit

20 ms·

271.
by greenbit 4y ago
An interesting twist on numeric entry, for sure.
272.
by greenbit 4y ago
Was amused to see in the first review the comment that it was 'a bit disorganized'. This reminded me of the 'door stop' books of the 90s, those great thick things that weighed about 3 lbs. In the early days they tended t
273.
by greenbit 4y ago
How do you find your way around your home town? The brain's ability to handle that problem is so deep, most people don't even notice. It's taken for granted, like breathing. Graphic representation can plug into that brain sys
274.
by greenbit 4y ago
Used Macs back in mid/late 80s, and to this day that feature, that icons stay where you put them , is the part I miss the most. Before 95, Windows seemed like just a glorified program-launcher, but when 95 took on that icons-s
275.
by greenbit 4y ago
I know what NTSC is, and what Matlab is, what would be interesting to hear about now is how you got an NTSC signal turned into Matlab data. Was there some kind of video input hardware to digitise composite video for you, or were you just wo
276.
by greenbit 4y ago
The CRT acts like a capacitor, storing charge for quite considerable lengths of time. Consider that a B&W would typically run 10kV to 15kV, and color sets easily 25kV, and that should give you some idea of how much energy one of those t
277.
by greenbit 4y ago
I had a 4032 for a while, which had a nicer keyboard, but it had green phosphors. I think green was standard with the 4016, 4032, 8032s, but I liked that blueish phosphor on the 2001 better.
278.
by greenbit 4y ago
If you had a C64, you had to have that book, The Programmer's Reference Guide. It was all in there. Still have mine here somewhere
279.
by greenbit 4y ago
Commodity PCs were running 10MHz clocks by 1988, weren't they?
280.
by greenbit 4y ago
With the C64, you just knew what the machine was capable of, from the myriad games to be had, but the BASIC gave no direct support for any of that good stuff. The only graphics you could do from BASIC were the character cell glyphs (line
281.
by greenbit 4y ago
My son dabbled with Scratch for a while, where you can conjure up multiple large full color sprites with minimal effort, even animate them, but pretty quickly lost interest in programming altogether. Whereas when I entered "SET(1,1)&
282.
by greenbit 4y ago
The 'Level I' BASIC in the TRS80 managed to distinguish three errors WHAT? HOW? SORRY What a difference 4K made!
283.
by greenbit 4y ago
It's not just language abstractions or lack thereof, there was a really fundamental issue, that makes what you say true - at least if we're talking about line-numbered BASICs. None of those early ones had a proper editor . It str
284.
by greenbit 4y ago
The early BASICs, on the TRS80, the PET 4032 and the like, were all dreadful, but they were the only game in town. All variables were globals, the nearest thing to a procedure call was the 'GOSUB', there were inexplicable hold ove
285.
by greenbit 4y ago
"environmental qualification testing", good old EQT.
286.
by greenbit 4y ago
Iodine in water ionized on the picosecond scale, by laser pulse. Would be mildly surprised if that didn't happen that fast. I guess the interesting twist is that the medium is flowing liquid. How long does this state last? If one were
287.
by greenbit 4y ago
My take away from a quick read: If there are N items here that all need to be processed by procedure P, the naive solution is to loop N times spoon feeding the items into P. The preferred solution is to have P take a reference to entire set
288.
by greenbit 4y ago
Yeah, those WD 1771, 1773, 1793 FDC chips, and that NEC 765 were all over the place. Iirc they'd handle track seeking for you, and for sector read/write you either needed a DMA channel or a (fast enough) CPU to move data bytes to&
289.
by greenbit 4y ago
Whenever I see the gleeful declaration "NO SUGAR ADDED!" on the front of a product I'm considering, usually an inspection of the ingredients list reveals plenty of artificial sweeteners added instead. Seems like the label des
290.
by greenbit 4y ago
In the PDF at the link you provided, I found what you're referring to at page 311 (in-document numbering) which is page 321 per my pdf viewer. So, yes, it did auto increment. I think what happened is that after 35 years, I just recalle
291.
by greenbit 4y ago
Didn't it use the 80 column screen? It was my experience that the C128's 80 column screen was an absolute dog. I was pretty handy with 6502 assembly language but trying to get anything onto that screen was just disappointingly slo
292.
by greenbit 4y ago
Exactly this. That realization that that box of circuits sitting quietly there on the table, waiting for your commands, was in fact an Anything Machine. For me it was simulations. If you could write down the math for something, you could br
293.
by greenbit 4y ago
Plain old typewriters made CR and LF pretty self evident, too.
294.
by greenbit 4y ago
Ok, it can be other things than fear. Like the you-may-have-won, or incredible-breakthrough, probably many more. Fear is sufficient, but not necessary.
295.
by greenbit 4y ago
But wouldn't that leave the door open for the idea that "The Magic May Return"?
296.
by greenbit 4y ago
Click bait tries to induce a reflexive response, typically by trying to induce fear. E.g. something like "Safety Feature Quietly Being Removed from Linux Kernel"
297.
by greenbit 4y ago
This is awesome. We don't need some malevolent SkyNet style AI to bring us down, there doesn't have to be any kind of 'mind' in the machine to devise humanity's undoing. All we need is the right kind of feedback and
298.
by greenbit 4y ago
Frank Herbert was onto something with that line "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
299.
by greenbit 4y ago
DC to light! Well .. DC to medium-wave broadcast frequencies anyway.
300.
by greenbit 4y ago
Now we just need the NOR-puter, so they can have a race, and settle the old NAND-vs-NOR debate once and for all!

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