jdswain

6 ms·

31.
by jdswain 1y ago
Well Woz was pretty good at software too. He wrote a lot of the early Apple software, including Integer Basic (to write games) and the low level disk software, called RWTS for Read/Write Track/Sector.
32.
by jdswain 1y ago
I'm not good at this at all, but if you do want to thank people that helped you, and let them know what it meant to you, don't leave it too late. I've had one regret after another as people who were significant in my early li
33.
by jdswain 1y ago
It has 32-bit registers, but it has a 16-bit ALU, so it's a matter of opinion if that makes it a 16 or 32-bit processor. I'd go with 32-bit in that it's instruction set gives the impression to the programmer that they are wor
34.
by jdswain 2y ago
For some of us it brings back bad memories of sitting watching progress bars for hours and occasionally getting asked to feed another disk into the drive. Office was probably the worst for the number of floppies, but linux was even more, an
35.
by jdswain 2y ago
Not at all the same, but they did have QuickDraw II for the IIgs. This library had the benefit of using the simpler IIgs graphics modes, avoiding all the Apple II weirdness. With a little bit of searching the source can be found online.
36.
by jdswain 2y ago
For anyone wanting to build sprite type code on the Apple II, you really should read this article in Byte magazine: Preshift-Table Graphics on your Apple by Bill Budge, with Gregg Williams and Rob Moore. A23 Move blocks of pixels across the
37.
by jdswain 2y ago
It's not that they consumed publicly available material, it's that they re-published that information, and sold it.
38.
by jdswain 2y ago
I've implemented both UPnP discovery and mDNS, and mDNS was quite a bit easier to make reliable than UPnP. However, if they did have a reliable UPnP system, it would almost certainly destabilise the software for any transition like thi
39.
by jdswain 2y ago
I liked this comment because it said what I was basically thinking. In my last job I kept everything seperate, a lot of people didn't and when we all got made redundant, I just closed my work laptop and walked away, some of the others
40.
by jdswain 2y ago
I got an 8" Android tablet instead of an iPad mini. What I wanted, was to have something really compact that I could use emacs on, mainly for org-roam, notes and writing in general, not for writing code. It works well with termux, I do
41.
by jdswain 2y ago
The trouble is there is no way to turn it off. I've nothing against that kind of thing in the right place, but for me Facebook is not that place, and it sneaks in no matter how hard you try and prevent it. Here's some funny fail v
42.
by jdswain 2y ago
I've come to a similar conclusion lately. I used to spend a lot of time jumping on my latest idea, researching and even writing a bit of code to get started. I'm much better off writing my ideas down, hopefully in a form where I c
43.
by jdswain 2y ago
I think the built-in keyboard idea had run its course, so any possible Apple IV would probably end up looking a lot like an Apple IIgs. The little keyboard extension on the IIgs case is kind of reminiscent of the Apple ///. I
44.
by jdswain 2y ago
It slowed down to 1 MHz for I/O and Apple ][ compatibility. I wouldn't call it a disaster, sales and marketing wise mainly, but that also had a lot to do with the IBM PC coming out around the same time. It was probably the most co
45.
by jdswain 2y ago
Rockwell and WDC had 65C02's up to 4 MHz relatively early on, but the 4 MHz versions seemed to be quite rare. WDC now has 65C02's rated at 14 MHz, but they go quite a bit higher than that if you've got fast enough RAM. There
46.
by jdswain 2y ago
People used to get productive work done on DECstations, they were big and expensive in their time. Now we can recreate them for just a few dollars (plus the cost of a screen and keyboard). Today almost everything we do relies on the interne
47.
by jdswain 2y ago
The article title reminded me of when I was young and used to read Byte Magazine. Byte used to cover a wide range of topics, and could get quite technical, but the big thing that is vastly different to today is that you would get a monthly
48.
by jdswain 2y ago
No, and there was no (easy) way to detect the vertical retrace. For a lot more on that topic have a look at the Apple II mouse card, they needed to synchronise with the video and did work out a software based way of doing it, but the final
49.
by jdswain 2y ago
Some other hardware features were very good for the time. It gets a lot of heat for the initial reliability issues, but they were eventually solved. They also limited the Apple ][ emulation to 2+ features, so no 80 columns, and that was pro
50.
by jdswain 2y ago
The main constraint appears to be the number of available GPIO's. For 8-bit projects the bus can take a large number of pins, not leaving a lot for the other functions.
51.
by jdswain 2y ago
At least I think I can tell when I am reading AI generated content, and stop reading and go somewhere else. Eventually though it'll get better to the point where it'll be hard to tell, but maybe then it's also good enough to
52.
by jdswain 3y ago
It was big. Compared to textbooks today it was probably very good. Hardcover and probably 500 pages. This was 1984, in New Zealand, but I think the textbook was British. I tried to help my daughter with some maths a few months ago and I cou
53.
by jdswain 3y ago
When something I work on gets cancelled or not released, I try to feel better about it by thinking of the learning involved. Sometimes when I've been on projects that are going nowhere I will try and find ways to learn new things. A ve
54.
by jdswain 3y ago
That reminds me of a story about a friend of mine from high school. In fourth form (age 14) he did every exercise in our maths textbook and sent the author a list of corrections to the printed answers. I don't think this was very well
55.
by jdswain 3y ago
That would be Project Builder and Interface Builder. Project Builder was kind of a graphical make tool and Interface Builder was the real star of the show, it was the graphical user interface builder. And there was Edit for source code edit
56.
by jdswain 3y ago
I had the machine lightning version for the Commodore 64. I remember that the manual was printed red paper so you couldn't photocopy it.
57.
by jdswain 3y ago
It was called SOS on the Apple ///, originally Sara's Operating System but officially Sophisticated Operating System. It was a very advanced OS for its time, most notably one of the first to include a useful driver model
58.
by jdswain 3y ago
And that is why I dislike the label 'sprint'. A sprint is a short (unsustainable) extreme effort, not something that you do continuously.
59.
by jdswain 3y ago
Core Graphics is an implementation of the same imaging model as Postscript and is very close to PDF (and can easily be used to render PDF documents). With Display Postscript you could type in real Postscript commands into your C/Object
60.
by jdswain 3y ago
That brings back memories. I did almost exactly the same thing, but I created a Postscript program to render a "Common Seal" stamp, that through some process unknown to me could be converted from the printout to an actual stamp. I

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