kabdib

11 ms·

121.
by kabdib 3y ago
There's a phrase for this that I've heard used by architecture critics. "That building probably won an award." Who cares if there aren't enough elevators, or if the cooling system can't keep up with insolation,
122.
by kabdib 3y ago
Oh, cool! I thought that only A/UX had made use of them.
123.
by kabdib 3y ago
Fun fact: The Macintosh II (68020) had two 6502 processors on its motherboard, somewhere in the I/O system. Originally intended to do some kind of I/O acceleration, they were never used by MacOS. I heard they just ran Mandlebrot-g
124.
by kabdib 3y ago
You might have wound up with something a lot like the Apple II GS. (At least one Atari engineer I know worked on the IIGS. Personally I thought it was crazy to work on 16-bit machines when 32-bit architectures like the 68000 were just comin
125.
by kabdib 3y ago
One that he iterated a lot on was a titled we called "Alan Turing and the Spiders from Mars". It was a multiplayer game (most of his games were, because the AI is free when you can just give another player a joystick). It was a si
126.
by kabdib 3y ago
I was taking a VLSI design course around that time; our instructor came into class with a fist-size block of plexiglass, with an iAPX 432 chipset embedded in it. A gift from Intel. The chips were HUGE. I have Elliot Organick's book on
127.
by kabdib 3y ago
I had a housemate who could make a cool game in an afternoon. He was a bottomless well of interesting ideas. He works in finance now :-) Anyway, his games were horrible messes of magical Peek and Poke statements in Atari BASIC. But . . . th
128.
by kabdib 3y ago
I grew up reading science fiction. I don't think my dad ever really understood what I liked about it. A while back, I bought a copy of Battlefield Earth and read it, just to see how bad it was (it was pretty bad). Anyway, my dad visits
129.
by kabdib 4y ago
ADT is garbage. I canceled ADT service about 15 years ago. For the next few years they were mailing open-air ads to my address asking me to reconnect the alarm system. I managed to reach someone in their C-suite, who told me directly that t
130.
by kabdib 4y ago
It was supposed to be a firing offense at Atari. We put easter eggs in the cartridges anyway (it helps when there is no source control at all, and your manager thinks that assembly language has something to do with LEGO).
131.
by kabdib 4y ago
11:34 comes around twice a day. (Okay, once if you're in the military).
132.
by kabdib 4y ago
> Segments would be forced to start on 256-byte boundaries, resulting in excessive memory fragmentation. Well, they were dead wrong about /that/.
133.
by kabdib 4y ago
Don't forget the direction bit in the 8086's status register. [Don't forget the decimal mode bit in the 6502's status register :-)]
134.
by kabdib 4y ago
I was seriously thinking of replacing an aging Dell laptop with a Mac running parallels. Until I saw the prices. I'm buying a new developer-class laptop today. Not one from Apple. It's not even a close decision.
135.
by kabdib 4y ago
This reminds me of a similar laser detailed in one of Scientific American's The Amateur Scientist articles from the 1970s. I grew up reading those articles, they used to be great. You just knew a project was going to be fun when it i
136.
by kabdib 4y ago
> 1s have weight compared to 0s This is a simplistic view how memory and data transmission systems work. Even in days of yore it took a schematic to figure out whether bits were being stored as "lots of electrons means a 1, few elec
137.
by kabdib 4y ago
How much do you have to worry about high-intensity IR damaging eyesight?
138.
by kabdib 4y ago
I had an account on a popular gaming platform banned for fraud. Fortunately, I knew devs on the team, and they dug into it and found a bug. Account unbanned. Meanwhile, support wouldn't tell me anything. Final suspension, we will tell
139.
by kabdib 4y ago
"Good news, analysis of the anti-lock brake system failure shows that you're only sixteen percent dead."
140.
by kabdib 4y ago
"Garbage In, Gospel Out"
141.
by kabdib 4y ago
I've been in a couple of companies that went under, and had held serial layoffs. (For example, when I started at Atari in 1982 there were perhaps 4,000 employees, and when I resigned about five years later there were less than 200). To
142.
by kabdib 4y ago
From Neuromancer (William Gibson): He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight. "Hey, bro," said a directionless voice. "It's Case, man. Remember?" "Miami, joeboy, quick study.&quot
143.
by kabdib 4y ago
Oh, hell no.
144.
by kabdib 4y ago
For the 1996 Olympics, the startup I was working at (Wayfarer Communications, you don't remember them) did a super fast, lightweight "medal watcher" service that took in event feeds from the games and broadcast them in real t
145.
by kabdib 4y ago
"All projects are divided into three phases, each consisting of 90% of the work." -- just about everything I've shipped :-)
146.
by kabdib 4y ago
Exactly.
147.
by kabdib 4y ago
I never let a company have access to my devices. They can buy me a phone if they want to (the last place I worked did).
148.
by kabdib 4y ago
I've survived multiple layoffs at various big tech companies in the 80s, 90s and 00s. I'm currently at Microsoft. It's always a bit of a gut clench. Ugh.
149.
by kabdib 4y ago
The Atari 800 was released (IIRC) in 1979. It was a surprisingly good platform, with a decent OS, a tolerable file system (for a slow floppy disk), and great documentation all around. I learned a lot reading the Atari docs, long before I wo
150.
by kabdib 4y ago
When I was working on video game cartridges, I discovered that one of my neighbors in my apartment building was a prolific pirate. I introduced myself and we had some fun chats. The Atari 800 cartridge address range could be populated with

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