thought_alarm

11 ms·

91.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
At this point in 1978 people who wanted to play around with a computer were picking up a TRS-80 from their local Radio Shack. Apple barely exists, and probably would have already gone bankrupt if not for the genius-level engineering of Woz
92.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
The sudo commands are system settings, the rest are user account settings.
93.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Atari eventually provided excellent support for 3rd party developers, but for the first few years they didn't support any kind of 3rd party development and kept the technical documentation under lock and key. Atari also didn't wa
94.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Firefox (or the Mozilla browser that became Firefox) gave us our modern idea of tabbed browsing. If I remember correctly, it was initially an experimental feature buried in the settings, but it quickly became a popular mainstream feature t
95.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Objective-C was adopted by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s for their app development framework. The modern version of Objective-C, the one that's still in use today, was developed by NeXT and Sun and was called OpenStep. The first Ope
96.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Yes, on the early models. Flashing text is a feature of the video hardware, and on early Apple II models the cursor is just a space character with the Flash bit enabled. You can turn on flashing text with the FLASH command. E.g.: FLAS
97.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
To get around Twitter's character limit, someone invented a way of encoding machine code into a BASIC listing. https://twitter.com/deater78/status/1348143447333597185 10 FOR I = 0 TO 143 : POKE 872+I,4
98.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Nintendo's greatest technical achievement is the staggered backward compatibility between the original GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, DS, and DS 3D. It's a game console compatibility lineage that stretches 30 years from
99.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
8 months later, Microsoft would release VBScript.
100.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
If using Safari, use System Preferences to assign a shortcut to the "Disable Javascript" menu command (I use command+K).
101.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
This is pretty old news; it was all covered at WWDC in the summer. It's still nice to see a thorough official writeup, and it will be interesting to see what the hobbyist hacker community comes up with.
102.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
The Apple III is actually a pretty interesting machine as far as older 8-bit systems go, and it includes some unique hardware features to work around the limitations of the 6502 CPU: - The machine supports a maximum of 512 kB of RAM. - The
103.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
The TMS9918 video chip is the common thread between those machines, and it's a fascinating bit of hardware. The interface between the TMS9918 and its host system is dead simple: 8 data bits, 1 mode bit, 1 chip select bit, and nothing e
104.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
I thought that by the time Windows XP was under development Microsoft had migrated to Perforce and individual dev teams were running their own full Windows builds.
105.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
When comparing Carbon and Cocoa, only a fool would choose to write an app in Carbon. But initially there were a few problems: - On old 90s hardware, Carbon could be faster (due to the C API) - Apple didn't invent AppKit or Objective-C
106.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
I suppose if Swift can only interoperate with C APIs, Win32 would be the only option.
107.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
I haven't done Windows development in over 10 years, but I really wasn't expecting to see what appears to be a stripped down implementation of AppKit wrapped around the old Win32 APIs, like it's 1999. (Nor Hungarian Notation
108.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Right, but in text mode the 9918 draws 6 native pixels for every 8 NTSC color "pixels". So, measured in NTSC color pixels, it's 320 wide (40x8) compared to 280 (40x7) for the Apple II. This image (white text on a blue backgr
109.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Bitmap mode is made up of 8x8 tiles. The screen is 32x24 tiles, or 256x192 pixels. 2 colors per line per tile. So a single tile can contain up to 16 colors. A single screen is divided into 3 separate tile maps, each 256 bytes long. It al
110.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Speaking of add on cards, I own a TMS9918 video card for my Apple II. It's remarkably simple. The 9918 manages its own 16 kB of VRAM and it doesn't place any timing restriction on the host system. You'd think that the 9918
111.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Right, but the Apple II video generator is already reading 40 bytes per scan line, and is using all 8 bits of each byte to generate the video signal. I would think that drawing 8 pixels per byte instead of 7 would have been the simpler thi
112.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Actually, the very first Apple IIs only supported 4 colors in hi-res mode. The 8th bit was ignored. A later revision added support for 6 colors, using the 8th bit to shift the pixels and change the pallet.
113.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
The Atari 400/800 and the TMS9918 (TI 99/4A, Colecovision, etc.) are 320 pixels wide and were designed to run on those same 1970s home television sets, and they didn't have an overscan problem (maybe some sets did, but most d
114.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
That's another thing I've wondered about. Did the Apple I also output 7 pixels per character? Since it doesn't do color and doesn't care about the color burst frequency, it's free to use any size of pixel it wants
115.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
That seems like a big price to pay for slightly better text spacing. Virtually every other home computer used 6 or 8 pixels per char/byte. I don't think overscan would be an issue. The TMS9918 is also (the equivalent of) 320 pixe
116.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
I've always wanted to know why Apple II video screen is only 280 pixels wide. The Apple II video screen is 40 bytes wide, but it only draw 7 pixels per byte, for a total of 280 pixels. The 8th bit was used for selecting the color palle
117.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
The Cube with matching LCD monitor and USB keyboard was way ahead of its time. A premium product at a premium price. The problem was software. Apple did not have the operating system to justify such a premium product. MacOS 9 was laughab
118.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
It's the first time in the 20 year history of Mac OS X that the major version number has changed. They're simply protecting against the likely possibility that some apps don't bother to check the major version. Going forward
119.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
I won't know until I actually use it, but based on looks alone I think it's the cleanest and most cohesive Mac UI since the peak Aqua era (OS X 10.4-10.6).
120.
by thought_alarm 6y ago
Given Apple's track record of supporting older Mac hardware, I would expect Intel Mac hardware to be supported for many years and many OS versions after the last Intel Mac has been produced. Also given Apple's recent MacBook track

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