It was a pretty damn good OS... for the 1980s. When it was new, PCs were still using MS-DOS 2.x or so.

Yep, time for Apple to go to eleven. And as we all know, that's one louder than ten.

But we are next to October 1, the day opposite April 1. Last year's October Fool's was Slashdot Beta (one year anniversary tomorrow!) This year's October Fool's is brought to you by Microsoft.

A lot of people never heard of MSX because by the time it came out, the US was already going 16-bit with PC, Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST, with the C64 firmly entrenched in what was left of the cheapie 8-bit market. And the TMS9918 was pretty weak, being the same graphics chip used in the TI99/4A and Colecovision. (Coleco used the 9928, which had a different video output.) Later versions of MSX video chips were better, but by then it was even more outclassed by 16-bit systems. (The Sega Genesis graphics were also an extension of the 9918.)

Even though most of them aren't DIP anymore, you can do a lot more useful things with modern microcontrollers because they don't waste most of their pins on an address and data bus.

In fact, the earliest surface-mount TTL (the 54J/74J series) had the power and ground lines in the middle of the chip. Also, a few random regular TTL chips have middle power pins just to keep you on your toes.

What? The data sheet only tells you which pins are which, not why the pins are where they are. That's what this guy is trying to find out.

The big difference is that these old 8-bit processors were laid out entirely by hand with a lot of rubylith tape on a large piece of transparency plastic. That's why they're so interesting. But all the new stuff is entirely in CAD, with mostly automated layout.

I had always wondered why the refresh register only counted 7 bits wide, which made that feature mostly useless when 64K DRAMs came out. (a few 64K DRAMs were made with 7-bit refresh, probably because of the Z80) Turns out that the increment/decrement circuit used in the Z80 had carry lookahead for groups of bits: 7 5 3 and 1. The I and R registers were implemented as a single 16-bit register, and to keep the I register from incrementing all the time, only the first group of the increment circuit was used, resulting in only 7 bits counting.

Not surprisingly, this comes from an earlier post on the same guy's web site: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/the-z-80s-16-bit-incrementdecrement.html

Except that this is a 9-year old vehicle. It shouldn't be a $30k car, unless she bought it new, in which case where did she get a 9+ year loan?

I've had one vehicle with a $500+ payment, bought new, and the extra insurance brought it up to $550/mo. I paid it off long ago and it just hit 193K miles. Not having to pay $6600/year makes a big difference in your lifestyle, though I pay about $1k/year in maintenance to keep it running.

Be sure to keep it in the garage too, so the repo man can't tow it in the middle of the night.

Okay, let me get this straight, she had a $389 monthly payment (though that probably included late charges) on a 9 year old vehicle? (Maybe it didn't happen this year, but if so, then why did it take over a year for this to become a story?) I'm sure she didn't get it new (when would have they installed the device?), but that's a pretty big chunk of dough for a 9 year old vehicle.

But we all know there's a reason for most people who have bad credit scores, and that's because for whatever reason, they can't resist spending all the money they get and then some, buying stuff on credit that they can't afford, the big TV, the big car, saving nothing, then it's all panic when they get behind on payments.