I recently commented about a deeply misguided comment on HN that claimed that Windows 98 was the beginning of integrated networking in Windows. Wolfie Pauli (as I like to call him) applies: that is not only not right, that is not even wrong! But, to be fair, which I rarely feel t … | Continue reading
Someone on HN claimed the arrival of built-in Windows Networking in Windows 98 . Since that is, IMHO, not even wrong, I felt I had to reply... This is not correct. Windows 95 had built-in networking from launch and an email client on the desktop. (It did not have a bundled… | Continue reading
Some companies sell laptops with Linux pre-installed. However in some cases I have read about, there may be significant caveats. Some examples: Dell pre-installed their own drivers for Ubuntu on their laptops, and if you format the machine and reinstall, or reinstall a different … | Continue reading
I must be mellowing in my old age (possibly as opposed to bellowing) because I have been getting praise and compliments recently on comments in various places. Dont worry, there are still people angrily shouting at me as well. This was the earlier, I think... There was a slightly … | Continue reading
Earlier today, I saw a link on the ClassicCmp.org mailing list to a project to re-implement the DEC VAX CPU on an FPGA. Its entitled First new vax in ...30 years? Someone posted it on Hackernews . One of the comments said, roughly, that they didnt see the significance and… | Continue reading
[Another recycled mailing list post] I was asked what options there were for blind people who wish to use Linux. The answer is simple but fairly depressing: basically every blind person I know personally or via friends of friends who is a computer user, uses Windows or Mac. There … | Continue reading
But there is a catch of course. WordPerfect came to totally dominate the DOS wordprocessor market, crushing pretty much all competition before it, and even today, some people consider it to be the ultimate word-processor ever created . Indeed the author of that piece maintains a … | Continue reading
The ordinary version of Windows 2/2.01 ran on an XT-class computer: that is, an Intel 8088 or 8086 CPU. These chips can only access 1MB of RAM and 384kB was reserved for ROM and I/O, so, maximum 640kB of RAM. Thats not a lot for Windows, but it did support _expanded_ memory (EMS) … | Continue reading
My talk should be on in about an hour and a half from when I post this. A possible next evolutionary step for computers is persistent memory: large capacity non-volatile main memory. With a few terabytes of nonvolatile RAM, who needs an SSD any more? I will sketch out a proposal … | Continue reading
Everyone hated the Win8 UI. I used it for a couple of months, until it timed-out and wanted to be activated at which point I went back to Ubuntu. I learned Windows on a machine with no mouse at the end of the 1980s, my employers didnt own a single PC mouse so I drive it… | Continue reading
Thirteen years ago this weekend, Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone, as former Microsofty Steve Sinofsky discusses in a great Twitter thread . The demo was epochal, but very hard to pull off behind the scenes, as the NY Times discussed six years later . I was already a frus … | Continue reading
Interesting in running DOS programs on 64-bit Windows (or x86 macOS or Linux)? Would you like to run classic DOS applications such as WordPerfect, natively and without emulation on a modern OS? Would you like to get an MS-DOS prompt back under Windows 10 on AMD64? I found a copy … | Continue reading
[Repurposed from a Reddit comment ] Ethernet is not just a kind of cable. Its also the electronic signals carried over that cable, and the format of the data packets that are sent over it. Token Ring is a totally different kind of network, with totally different signals. You cant … | Continue reading
[Repurposed from Stack Exchange, here ] The premise in the question is incorrect. There were such chips. The question also fails to allow for the way that the silicon-chip industry developed. Moores Law basically said that every 18 months, it was possible to build chips with twic … | Continue reading
The first computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and I retain a lot of fondness for these tiny, cheap, severely-compromised machines. I just backed the ZX Spectrum Next kickstarter, for instance. But after I left university and got a job, I bought myself my first proper com … | Continue reading
[Repurposed from a Reddit comment here .] Non everyone hates jaggies with a burning passion, or loves anti-aliasing. Well-designed GUIs for relatively low-res displays, even monochrome ones, can and did look great, and arguably, the fact that modern GUIs tend to need antialiasing … | Continue reading
I have just recently discovered that my previous post about Commodore BASIC went modestly viral, not only featuring on Hacknernews but getting its own story on Hackaday . Gosh. This in itself has provoked some discussion. Its also resulted in a lot of people telling me that NO CO … | Continue reading
I was a huge Archimedes fan and still have an A310, an A5000, a RiscPC and a RasPi running RISC OS. But no, I have to disagree. RISC OS was a hastily-done rescue effort after Acorn PARC failed to make ARX work well enough. I helped to arrange this talk by the project lead a few y … | Continue reading
Commodores Jack Tramiel got a very sweet deal from Microsoft for MS BASIC, as used in CBMs PET, once of the first integrated microcomputers. The company didnt even pay royalties. The result is that CBM used pretty much the same BASIC in the PET, VIC-20 and C64. It… | Continue reading
I have several RasPis lying around the place. I sold my 2 when I got a 3, but then that languished largely unused for several years, after the fun interlude of getting it running RiscOS in an old ZX Spectrum case. Then I bought myself a 3+ in a passive-cooling heatsink/case for Y … | Continue reading
[Repurposed from a reply in a Hackernews thread ] Apple looked at buying in an OS after Copland failed. But all the stuff about Carbon, Blue Box, Yellow Box, etc. -- all those were NeXT ideas after the merger. None of it was pre-planned. So, they bought NeXTstep, a very weird UNI … | Continue reading
[Repurposed mailing list reply] I mentioned that I still dont use GNOME even though there are extensions to fix a lof of the things I dont like. (My latest attempted ended in failure just yesterday.) Someone asked what functionality was still missing. Its a reasonable question,… | Continue reading
(30th June 2007 on The Inquirer) THERES ANOTHER NEW social networking site around, from the guy behind Digg. Its called Pownce, its still invitation-only and if theyre offering anything genuinely new and different they arent shouting about it. In particular, nobodys… | Continue reading
There have been multiple generations of Macs. Apple has not really divided them up. 1. Original 680x0 Macs with 24-bit ROMs (ending with the SE/30, Mac II, IIx IIcx) 2. 32-bit-clean-ROM 680x0 Macs (starting with the Mac IIci) 3. NuBus PowerMacs (6100, 7100, 8100) 4. OldWorld ROM … | Continue reading
Choose 68K. Choose a proprietary platform. Choose an OS. Choose games. Choose a fucking CRT television, choose joysticks, floppies, ROM cartridges, and proprietary memory. Choose no pre-emption, crap programming languages and sprite graphics. Choose a safe early-80s sound chip. C … | Continue reading
[Nicked from the FB Vintage Computer Club] Someone was claiming that the big innovation of OS/2 2 was that it used CPU protection rings, and that made it better than any version of Windows ever. XKCD 386 got me. Protection rings date back to the 1960s or even the 1950s — the Mul … | Continue reading
Note, there were 2 products: • Netscape Communicator: full suite • Netscape Navigator: just a browser Mozilla was always the codename for the product while it was in development. Netscape started out as just a browser. Then it gained email -- see Zawinski's Law:… | Continue reading
Another Quora answer . I cant say. My family was not rich enough to afford such high-end computers that cost thousands. Only Americans could. In early-1980s Britain we had Sinclair, Commodore and Oric computers (e.g. the ZX Spectrum or C64.) The better-off had Acorn machines. (Th … | Continue reading
The evolution of DOS is interesting, and few remember the bigger picture now. MS did a great deal when supplying DOS to IBM; MS retained the rights to sell it itself to other manufacturers. So in the early days, there were other MS-DOS machines that werent IBM compatible, such as … | Continue reading
Apparently Im renowned for my enthusiam for ancient software. I find it fun to play with kit that I couldnt dream of affording when it was current, in my youth. And its very instructive to compare it with new stuff. But I also use some of it for actual paying work. I run MS Word … | Continue reading
(Adapted from a Quora answer.) OS/2 1.x was a clean-sweep, largely legacy-free OS with only limited backwards compatibility with DOS. OS/2 2.x and later used VMs to do the hard stuff of DOS emulation, because they ran on a chip with hardware-assisted DOS VMs: the 80386s Virtual86 … | Continue reading