mschaef

14 ms·

61.
by mschaef 3y ago
Flappy Bird too, for that matter.
62.
by mschaef 3y ago
The other divergence is in expectations. A kid in the early to mid-80's could get enough working that they could imagine it possible to match a store bought game. Once hardware capabilities went up, so did the need for more specialized
63.
by mschaef 3y ago
I wasn't talking as much about marketplace success as I was about the ability to support engineering efforts to develop specific features requiring high amounts of sustained, focused effort. There's a big difference between '
64.
by mschaef 3y ago
> How long will it take before GIMP has usability on-par with Photoshop? Here's the bleak assessment: It's been almost thirty years - If it was going to happen, it would have happened already. The economics and development mod
65.
by mschaef 3y ago
This is a screenshot from a COSMAC ELF program that displayed a picture of Enterprise. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iconic_COSMAC_Elf_space... The machine was short enough on RAM by default that even at runtime
66.
by mschaef 3y ago
> w/o the bloat of a full GUI, I remember that logic making sense when I tried to run Emacs on an 8MB 486... but that was about the last time it did.
67.
by mschaef 3y ago
It's a good book, but with a heavy emphasis on design at the logic level. (James Thornton, the author, is the engineer that helped Cray's designs become real, while at CDC. He focused more on detailed execution of the design, etc.
68.
by mschaef 3y ago
The CDC 6600 could run multiple functional units (adder, multiplier, logic, etc.) at the same time, and the CDC 7600 added pipelining to the mix. These machines were organized in such a way that the main CPU did not run (most of) the OS and
69.
by mschaef 3y ago
Any large scale interruptible compute, for that matter.
70.
by mschaef 3y ago
Personaly speaking, it was nice when it was all there was, but there is no conceivable world where I would go back to those 90's machines. The machines were heavy and slow, the OS was limited, and the vast majority of features I take f
71.
by mschaef 3y ago
The interesting thing about Turbo Pascal is that by the time it was TP6 it was just about as expressive as C itself. (Evidenced by the fact Turbo Pascal for Windows could easily interoperate with the heavily C-based Win16 API).
72.
by mschaef 3y ago
I used blue/yellow in Emacs until I bought a laptop with a glossy screen in 2011. Now it's grey/yellow. Some habits die hard.
73.
by mschaef 3y ago
Interesting question... based on DOS 1.25, I can't imagine there are many choices. (Maybe the earliest Compaq machines among them).
74.
by mschaef 3y ago
Agreed, although the relationship of DOS and Windows 95 is significantly stranger than that wording implies. DOS boots Windows 95, and legacy I/O can go through DOS, but DOS is also hosted by V86 machines to run DOS apps. I'm pret
75.
by mschaef 3y ago
> I still remember sitting on my bed totally transfixed during the install when I moved from 95 to 98. For me, the key Windows 95 moment happened while I was sitting in an IBM lab working as a tester for OS/2 Lan Server. We had a c
76.
by mschaef 3y ago
> Is the book labelled as fiction? > I understand that early versions of NT emitted error messages identifying itself as OS/2. Did the book explain when NT became "brand new OS from scratch". Windows NT started out as M
77.
by mschaef 3y ago
The Sony Playstation was originally conceived as exactly that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_CD-ROM Part of the issue with these sorts of console add ons is that they just split the addressable market further
78.
by mschaef 3y ago
> His primary interest lies in the patterns, structures, and the mathematical beauty of the scriptures, rather than in theological or moral interpretations, Knuth hasn't written much about theology, but he has written some. How much
79.
by mschaef 3y ago
> biz users are email and a few small spreadsheets. I don't get why biz users need multicore anything. That's a fairly narrow view of what a business user might do. The spreadsheets aren't necessarily small, there's u
80.
by mschaef 3y ago
> Most countries will want their share of your property of you try to move out, Under your model, what happens if I buy property and default on my military/police payment? Presumably I at least lose the rights to access that propert
81.
by mschaef 3y ago
Comparing Windows NT with OS/2, I'd totally agree with you. Comparing Windows 95 with OS/2, there was way too much 16-bit legacy in Windows. Major parts of Windows 95 were still 16 bit code and protected with a giant lock ser
82.
by mschaef 3y ago
This makes me wonder about the free rider problem. If a hostile force invades the country, what do you do with the people that are delinquent on their "Military Defense" subscription?
83.
by mschaef 3y ago
Where does that leave you funding commonly useful services? (Military, Police, Roads, etc.)
84.
by mschaef 3y ago
Often times, people with this sort of wealth will extract value by borrowing against the stock as collateral.
85.
by mschaef 3y ago
This is not unheard of. IIRC, Microsoft did something similar with QuickBASIC 4. The surface language was QuickBASIC, but the underlying implementation was some threaded representation.
86.
by mschaef 3y ago
> He had OS/2 Warp and it was superior in every way, especially for power users. The technology of OS/2 Warp was a better than Win9x, but once you started caring about having native 32-bit software it didn't really matter.
87.
by mschaef 3y ago
> Programming is much more accessible to a much bigger audience today and we have better tools and techniques. Much of your point seems debatable. I had a band director that was able to write a GUI app in 1992 on a 12MHz 80286 with a co
88.
by mschaef 3y ago
It's really worth looking at a few of the collections. There are lots of slide rules on display, and many if not most are far beyond plain linear slide rules. (Most are special purpose and application specific.)
89.
by mschaef 3y ago
? I can think of at least three. (1989, 2011, 2021) Maybe you can quibble over the definition of 'collapse', but in each of those three events there was a significant inability of the grid to meet demand (and subsequent involuntar
90.
by mschaef 3y ago
> One interesting option is the option to let customers choose where they want to be on the reliability vs price scale. ... > t could just as easily be implemented by your own electricity meter - effectively a breaker which opens w

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