mschaef

51 ms·

541.
by mschaef 8y ago
Agreed... 16-bit physical addressing was very limiting. (x86's 16-bit segment offsets were bad enough.)
542.
by mschaef 8y ago
> [Atari] ST.... what we really needed was wider address buses, Are you sure? With memory costing hundreds of dollars per MB in the mid-80's, I remember thinking a 24-bit address bus was plenty. (I actually don't think I person
543.
by mschaef 8y ago
> Yes, the death of 8-bit systems was obvious by 89, but so was the death of the 68000. Motorola was already pushing the failed 88000 by the late 80s. And the 68000 itself was killed off only a couple years later. You may be overstating
544.
by mschaef 8y ago
> BASIC is a terrible language... I would assume that something like Forth or Occam would be much better for this, and both are also age-appropriate. BASIC had a couple huge advantages in that it ran in minimal memory and had a reasonabl
545.
by mschaef 8y ago
Just the other day I was reading about retailers that would do this with perishable goods, just to give the impression of choice and there being plenty to choose from. Home Depot doing this doesn't surprise me at all. The comment linke
546.
by mschaef 8y ago
> I actually feel we're all a bit poorer as a result of DOS+Windows.... Agreed... I tend to think MS did a very good job incorporating a grab bag of ideas into their products, but a very poor job doing the work to really make it al
547.
by mschaef 8y ago
> You both seem to be enjoying the back and forth, Speaking for myself, yes. :-) Something I should point out here is that I grew up with reasonable access to both machines: Apple ][s and C64's. (My elementary school had a lab for e
548.
by mschaef 8y ago
> then you should include the C128/C128D. Where do the Plus-4 and C16 fit in? (Not to mention all of the 'Secret Weapons of Commodore' that they didn't manage to actually ship? As much as you talk about Apple hobbling
549.
by mschaef 8y ago
> B&W 9" 512x384 vs Color Commodore 1080S 13" @ 640x256 or 640x512 interlaced and doubled as a great TV. Let's say you didn't want to use interlaced mode Having used both machines, as well as an interlaced 1024x76
550.
by mschaef 8y ago
(You should keep in mind that I'm writing this in a spirit of friendly disagreement/discussion more than anything else... it's fun to think about these machines from my childhood... and I had formative experiences with both A
551.
by mschaef 8y ago
> Nobody is denying that Apple made it while Commodore failed Sure... my main point is that it's overstating the case a bit to say that the C64 was strictly more powerful than the Apple ][ series. There were technical aspects of the
552.
by mschaef 8y ago
> machine wise, the C64 was more powerful by virtue of flexibility. What do you mean? Are you referring to the demo scene being able to push the internal hardware as far as they've been able to? > The Mac128 was priced way outsid
553.
by mschaef 8y ago
> The Apple II was brutally outsold by the Commodore 64 which was far more powerful There's no doubt that the Commodore 64 had better graphics and sound hardware, but the idea that it's more powerful in general seems dubious a
554.
by mschaef 8y ago
That phrase came to my mind as I was writing. My first exposure to the term came in the context of Dave Cutler's requirement that Windows NT developers 'eat their own dogfood'... so it's a little ironic to me that one of
555.
by mschaef 8y ago
Turbo Vision (and the entire TP6 package) was an amazing environment. I think TurboVision in particular was helped by the fact it was Borland's productized version of the framework they used for the IDE itself. As a point of contrast,
556.
by mschaef 8y ago
My guess is 100% different, given that they ported it to C++ at some point.
557.
by mschaef 8y ago
The wooden escalators are truly a blast from the past for me. I grew up in Houston in the 1980's, and the Foley's department store downtown was one of the old-school, many floor department stores that used to be more common. (Like
558.
by mschaef 8y ago
What was the advantage of this over 'Terminate and Stay Resident'?
559.
by mschaef 8y ago
> A 2018 F-150 with EcoBoost will essentially get the same MPG as a 2018 Ford Taurus. My brother in law has a 2.7 EcoBoost F-150 that's getting about the same gas mileage as I got in my old 2010 Mazda 3.... the Mazda isn't clo
560.
by mschaef 8y ago
> my Crosstrek which can also tow, although not as much. You're comparing 1,500 pounds to between 5,000 and 13,200... I don't think "not as much" quite captures it...
561.
by mschaef 8y ago
SUV's are a lot different now than they were then... many of them are basically station wagons stretched up a bit, and the truck-style body-on-frame designs much less common. (For many good reasons.)
562.
by mschaef 8y ago
The step ups in API usage over the last year are rather dramatic: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/reading-web-page-...
563.
by mschaef 8y ago
Funny you should mention that... my first exposure to reddit was exclusively through /r/programming. (To give a sense of the scale of the site at the time, I distinctly remember a post celebrating 65,536 subscribers.) At some poin
564.
by mschaef 9y ago
I can relate... I never used an Atari 400, but did spend several afternoons entering code into a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (or ZX-81 if you prefer). (There the big problem wasn't so much the keyboard as it was the 16K memory expansion fallin
565.
by mschaef 9y ago
Does your Atari 400 still have a working keyboard?
566.
by mschaef 9y ago
> I prefer to support companies that have a moral backbone and criticize those who don't. What are some of the companies with a moral backbone that you support? I'm genuinely interested to see what that business model looks lik
567.
by mschaef 9y ago
> I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or not, but there is no "new" Microsoft. Their sole aim is to use all means to crush competition; Show me a business that doesn't want to win, and I'll show you a business tha
568.
by mschaef 9y ago
Agree that it's disappointing... but I'm very glad to see that he came up with a good way to deal with it. /dev/null (or its rough equivalent) has its uses.
569.
by mschaef 9y ago
I had a similar sort of experience with both a 48SX and a 48GX. They were great little portable computers back in high school, but as soon as I got better access to bigger machines, I lost interest/motivation. With that said, there ar
570.
by mschaef 9y ago
> Explain why RPN is so much better than infix. At least in my experience, it allows easier reuse of previous values. This makes RPN based calculators easier to use for exploratory kinds of work.

More ›