mschaef

32 ms·

271.
by mschaef 6y ago
They were working with code that already pretended to be in protected mode anyway (with the exception of locking and unlocking blocks of memory... which was unnecessary with a hardware MMU.) Even saying that, it was amazing at the time to r
272.
by mschaef 7y ago
The first thing I'd suggest you do is understand why you want to do a side project at all. Unless you have a specific goal you want to achieve and you actually value that goal, you'll have a hard time convincing yourself to do the
273.
by mschaef 7y ago
> As long as you are reasonably sure you can hold your stocks for a few years then just hold on to them. What's 'a few years' mean to you? The Nikkei hit its high of 40K around 1989-89 and hasn't traded above 80% of
274.
by mschaef 7y ago
> If you want to store only the year, why not store the years since 1900? That way in a single byte you can go all the way up until 2155. You're making an assumption in that statement that there's a byte and it's eight bit
275.
by mschaef 7y ago
I worry about this aspect of it too. When I was in school, I was in easy driving distance (3 hours) of stable alternative housing at my parent's place. Not everybody has 'stable alternative housing', much less available to th
276.
by mschaef 7y ago
> If I had to sum up the NeXT, I'd call it "a much better Mac". Which is pretty much how it wound up, eventually.
277.
by mschaef 7y ago
> Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. There were a bunch of dropped balls there. To rattle off a few: * They targeted academic institutions first,
278.
by mschaef 7y ago
> When something breaks you log in to the machine and make incremental updates to fix it, right? Not generally, and you do a good job explaining why I don't in your next sentence. > This approach leads to non-reproducible deploym
279.
by mschaef 7y ago
> Once you know Docker you will realize that all other ways of deploying applications are outmoded. This is a strong and absolute statement to be making in a field as broad and diverse as software engineering. My experience from being on
280.
by mschaef 7y ago
> Unfortunately, re-creating a SID chip is almost impossible given that we don't have 1970s era NMOS semiconductor manufacturing facilities available. Do you have any idea how hard that would be to recreate? Would it be in the realm
281.
by mschaef 7y ago
The Excel object model is really a COM/IDispatch object model... it's been accessible from non-VBA applications essentially since the beginning. Not Excel, but one of my first consulting projects was at a company that developed so
282.
by mschaef 7y ago
It'd honestly be a shame if it did (but I understand the stresses that might cause it to happen). Flash back to ~1986, and Bill Gates wrote an article for a Byte magazine special edition in which he described a unified version of BASIC
283.
by mschaef 7y ago
Joel Spolsky was making the claim that they had, fifteen years ago. (And I really tend to agree with him, both then and now.) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... (Particularly rele
284.
by mschaef 7y ago
> I think that's a result of modern safety requiring you to get a much bigger vehicle in order to have a similar seating position in the vehicle as cars of old, not some selfish desire to drive a land yacht. Agreed. Nobody [1] goes
285.
by mschaef 7y ago
I'm not sure why it's a surprise that people buy cars because of the image they project. That's been true from the beginning, and for more than about transportation.
286.
by mschaef 7y ago
> What would you say is the final model that "has it"? For me, at least, probably the combination of the 48GX and 42S. Both represent the end of the line of HP's traditional hardware engineering, which is such a significan
287.
by mschaef 7y ago
> I consider HP-28S a work of art. I'd extend that to the whole HP calculator lineup through about 1994 or 95. There are a lot of aspects I could single out, but William Kahan's involvement in their numerical algorithms is a pa
288.
by mschaef 7y ago
At the time I bought my 48SX, I remember briefly considering a 42S. I had a lot of fun with the 48, but in retrospect, I'd have gotten more use out of the 42. (But what I really regret is not having bought a 16C.)
289.
by mschaef 7y ago
> I did pick up a 28 at one point but never really bonded with it. IMO, the 28 and follow ons lost a lot of the focus of the earlier (more 'primitive') devices. They were more cumbersome to use, and whatever marginal improvemen
290.
by mschaef 7y ago
I have a 42S emulator running on my iPhone, but it really isn't the same as being able to press physical keys on a hardware device. One of the charms of these devices was that they were built to last. ie: the keys were injection molded
291.
by mschaef 7y ago
> Wow that sounds a lot more complicated than the one I had, HP 42S, Yeah... the 42S derives from the earlier 41 series, and the 41 series was the first to use alphanumeric symbolic names for programming commands. Prior to that, there wa
292.
by mschaef 7y ago
> This is really cool. I never got to play with a proper NeXT machine, but WindowMaker was my window manager of choice for several years in the late 90s/early 2000s. Same here, and that's even before I knew about the elegance o
293.
by mschaef 7y ago
They make the extent of syntactic expressions more obvious to both people and tools.
294.
by mschaef 7y ago
> back in the day, Jobs hated networking because it was "just an umbilical cord back to the mothership" I didn't realize this... but it completely fits both the person and the time. For those that might be unaware, back in
295.
by mschaef 7y ago
Now that I think about it, it's also interesting that it's shared with Jef Raskin's Canon Cat. (Which had to be a frustration with Raskin, given that Jobs took over his original Macintosh project and then arranged to have Can
296.
by mschaef 7y ago
I tried (and failed). Once I got to college, the basement of my dorm had a computer shop that specialized in x86 NeXTStep hardware. I tried to find a way to make that work too, but the costs were just too high. You didn't need just a 4
297.
by mschaef 7y ago
> If you had told me they used the same processor family, I probably wouldn't have believed you. I don't know how real it was, but one of NeXT's marketing points at the time was the power of all the supporting logic they p
298.
by mschaef 7y ago
Mainframes are a good place to look. IBM VM dates back to 1972. IBM's other mainframe operating systems trace their lineage back to OS/360, which is 1966. The XEDIT editor is 1980. I believe codebases for all of the above are stil
299.
by mschaef 7y ago
> Except that I don't have to understand the underlying data structure to use a more basic VCS like Mercurial. What makes git so special that I would have to do that before being able to use it? I don't think it is special. Gen
300.
by mschaef 7y ago
> And why does Git require this whereas other VCS don't? It doesn't. It just works better when you take the time to learn how it works. (Which is an experience I commonly have with the tools I use, for whatever that's wort

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