Comment Re: Why only four? (Score 3, Interesting) 151
Oracle? There is your answer why it failed after throwing away $50 million. They got off cheaper than a lot of other companies trying to do the same thing.
Oracle? There is your answer why it failed after throwing away $50 million. They got off cheaper than a lot of other companies trying to do the same thing.
His design for both the Apple I and Apple II were amazing, maximizing the available hardware available at the time. He wasn't just a wiz with hardware, he wrote some amazing software, too (in assembly without an assembler, so basically direct machine code as he hand assembled the software), and used it to further optimize his hardware designs. He truly is a genius and deserves way more credit than Steve Jobs who only managed to merely supply am external case.
No, the programmer has to understand the system as well, since the JCL required to run the code is very hardware specific.You need to know very specific details of all the parameters or you will abend pretty harshly.
Ever since the "Space Force" was mentioned by Trump a year or so ago, inquiring minds spent sleepless nights asking the most pressing question of the day--will the military ranks in Space Force be those like the Army and Air Force, or like the Navy similar to the fictional Starfleet of the Trek universe. It appears that question has been answered. Since the Space Force would be under the auspices of the Air Force, it's likely that they will use that rank and insignia over the vastly preferred Starfleet-style Naval nomenclature. That is a disappointment. Colonel Kirk just won't have the same ring to it.
You have it reversed. With the new standard tht APIs are copyrighted, it will kill open source software.
...that they can't go back in time and archive all the Compuserve content from way back. Compuserve was the first worldwide BBS, a forerunner to the consumer internet. It's "home" was DEC server in Columbus, Ohio. Since many companies and individuals used Compuserve as they do the web today, when the service disappeared, a ton of useful data was lost. Although nothing like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, it still was a great loss of history.
People aren't drinking as much soda pop anymore. The sugar stuff is bad for you with lots of calories. The diet stuff is turning out to be even worse for weight and blood sugar. Flavored waters are now the thing. I'm sure pepsi has some skin in that game, too, but not as much as they do traditional soda pop.
IIRC, AT&T was strangling Uverse so that they could force more people onto Direct TV thereby freeing bandwith. Now they are doing a 180? Strange!
You mean the movie War Games where a geeky hacker gets Ally Sheedy to fall head over heels for him wasn't a real life documentary?
They wanted an 8-bit data bus for easier access to peripherals...
For all its faults, MS-DOS was still a better disk operating system than Apple DOS.
I don't know about that. Apple DOS was very well designed considering the fact that most of the disk control was done in software instead of hardware. Apple formatted disks had significantly more data on them than standard MFM formatted disks, and the date was more reliably stored--most Apple II disks still work today after decades of age. The one big flaw of Apple DOS was that the interface was through BASIC instead of a standalone shell, and the +D escape kludge to have programs access DOS commands was pretty clunky, but the underlying system code was very well implemented.
I'd definitely buy the Altair Classic, especially if it has a working front panel.
No, we are talking about the same thing. The ZX-81 CPU would update the screen the same way as the ZX-80, but would only do non-screen related calculations when the screen was taking a break from drawing. The ZX-80 just shut off the screen until there was a pause for input. Both drew the screen in the same way, but the ZX-81 managed to find a way to do calculations during the vertical blank, which would keep the screen "alive". The ZX-80 did not. This made teh ZX-81 "slow", mode look good, but at the cost of significant speed.
The ZX81 still used the cpu to draw the display, it just did so during the vertical blank interval when nothing was being drawn on the screen. It slowed everything down by 75%, but it eliminated the flicker. The ZX computers seemed to be the only micros besides the Atari 2600 that required cpu to actively draw the screen. I'm sure ol' Clive saved a buck or two doing it that way.
Perhaps he was playing the PAL version on an NTSC TV. It is possible to get a pal signal on an NTSC TV. It is black and white and you have to really mess with the vertical hold, but it works, especially if you have an old black and white TV. That's how I manage to get a PAL ZXSpectrum running here.
It's unlikely, of course, but certainly not impossible. What's more likely is he may have turned the power switch on and off a few times quickly (called "frying" the cartridge), causing s blip in the ram which happened to give him a nice score that time around. Noticing that it was a great score, he took a picture and sent it in. I will have to find my old dragster cartridge and see if it's possible to "fry" it into a good score.
Byte your tongue.
