There was more to it than that - see the interrupt handling and memory access were inspired by 6502 and a visit to the 6502 developers convinced Acorn that it was feasible to develop their own CPU.

Also, although the 6502 may not technically be a RISC chip according to the tick-list taught in CS, the 6502 vs. Z80/8080/x86 holy wars of the time had a lot of parallels with the RISC vs. CISC debate*: the 6502 was a simple design, with a small instruction set and no microcode vs. the more complex Z80/x86 with their more "programmer-friendly" instruction sets.

* Which, of course, RISC won - considering that mobile/embedded use has made ARM the most widely-used architecture and even x86 has switched to a RISC-core + instruction decoder architecture.

If Commodore had licensed their proprietary OS to IBM who had built it into a proprietary* PC which their smartly suited and booted sales force could sell to their vast base of corporate customers (who had, so far, stayed away from the turtle-necked hippies selling microcomputers)... but craftily made the license non-exclusive so that when some bright spark figured a legal way to clone the IBM PC and sell it to the mass market, they could buy the OS directly from Commodore ... then they could have been the worlds Microsoft and controlled the home computer market for decades.

Fixed that bit of revisionist history for you.

* In 1983, "open" didn't mean what it means now. The IBM PC was "open" in the sense that third parties were graciously permitted to sell hardware and software for it - which was a massive u-turn c.f. the restrictive practices in IBM's mainframe business, but pretty much business as usual for the emerging microcomputer market. You sure as hell weren't allowed to make an IBM compatible machine (which would need IBM's BIOS software) until someone came up with the "clean room" technique for cloning software without violating copyright (although Oracle seem to be trying to fix that now in their action against Google).

...as long as you do/don't put open-braces on the same line as 'if' statements, write functions longer than 32 lines, use camel case in variable names do/don't capitalise preprocessor symbols, use trailing "//" comments and know exactly where I think yous should put the spaces in 'typedef char** stringarray'... or preferably switch to Haskell/Lisp/Rust because everything else is "considered harmful"... Hmmm... I wonder why SJWs are so at home in the tech sector... :-)

But, really, I don't think the right to pepper code with either profanities and racial slurs is a hill to die on here. At least not ones which have been considered offensive since before electricity (terms which weren't offensive until last week are another matter). That should be covered under "don't be an arsehole". Source code is not a suitable medium in which to express your views on love, life and society (unless you're writing Perl, of course) - if nothing else, it is totally irrelevant to the task at hand.

Well, mainly irrelevant.

Truly an idea who's time has come... in today's twitterocracy it shouldn't be too hard to lobby the Government to repeal the laws of thermodynamics...

It's worse than that: These are images that appear to show flying objects... There's quite a long way between that and actual flying objects. If an object appears to be moving and changing direction so rapidly that it would defy the laws of physics then, without substantial evidence to the contrary, Occam's Razor says that its probably a reflection/refraction and not an alien spaceship need to be fitted with a freaking Bergenholm.

I agree that's handy but OTOH if you're on the road with phone & laptop, you'll often need to charge them at the same time (e.g. overnight) and by the time you've packed a multi-port hub to achieve that, you might as well have packed a second charger. Meanwhile, you've always had the option of charging your phone indirectly via your laptop. Also,if you need an emergency replacement charger, although its a bit better now than when certain fruit-branded USB-C only laptops launched, there aren't many third-party USB-C chargers that support the 80+ watts needed to more than trickle-charge a full-fat laptop.

Another problem is that the switch to USB-C only (...again, we're mainly talking malus domestica here) also saw the consolidation of 4/5/6 assorted ports into 4, 2 or even 1 USB-C ports. So, now, plugging a charger into a USB-C port 'wastes' one of a very limited number of universal display/data ports.

This wouldn't be so bad if USB-C also provided a better/faster connection than the specialist ports it replaces - but that is only really true in the case of Thunderbolt 3. USB is the same old USB 3.1 (even 10Gbos 3.1g2 works over USB-A), DisplayPort (except over TB) is not only the same old DisplayPort, but many USB-C controllers (esp. the Intel ones) pegged it at DP 1.2a for several years (the newest controllers now support 1.4) and HDMI, basically, doesn't exist - its all done with active DP-to-HDMI converters (native HDMI-over-USB-C exists as a standard but I've never heard of an implementation).

USB 3.2 does offer an improvement over USB 3.1 by actually using all 4 of those serial lanes but has yet to be spotted in the wild - and will probably be strangled at birth by USB 3.4/cheapo-generic-Thunderbolt.

I'm sure you could have driven faster rates through the physical cable - but bear in mind that, by the turn of the century, we were hitting the limits of parallel interfaces and most of the major uses switched to serial because it is (rather counter-intuitively) faster (as well as USB, think: ATA to SATA, PCI to PCIe, SCSI to Firewire/SAS).

But, to be fair, so did the old RS232 serial interface... :-)

...then the same again if you want bidirectional communications. FWIW, USB-C contains four high-speed differential pairs - which it needs top be able to carry a full DisplayPort or Thunderbolt signal - plus a USB 2.0 pair so that you can at least plug a keyboard and mouse in as well as your display. The result does have e teensy bit more bandwidth than your old Centronics printer cable...

Not that I'm necessarily saying that combining independent functions like power, display and data into a single port is remotely worth the resulting extra complexity on anything bigger than a phone (and phones will probably be going completely wireless in the near future anyway), or that USB-C shouldn't be staked, sprinkled with garlic and poppy seeds and buried at a crossroads alongside those frigging 13-pin DIN video connectors off the Atari ST.

Trouble is, any language/markup scheme designed to separate presentation from logic will gradually acquire features until it becomes Turing-complete, people will start using it for logic and someone will have to invent a new language/markup to take over the presentation...

Of course, there's CSS, which is engaged in an exciting race to see whether it will become usable for logic before it becomes usable for presentation...

Except, here in the real world where words don't necessarily mean what scientists would like them to mean, "chemicals" is widely used to refer to synthetic/artificially refined/concentrated substances that wouldn't occur naturally in the context. I know it sucks that everyday language is ambiguous and lacks scientific rigour, but pedantry is not a good response to people's genuine concerns.

Point is, anything in the wrong place, at the wrong time and/or in the wrong concentration can be dangerous. The old jokes about the hazards of the noxious chemical dihydrogen monoxide are double-edged: people have died when some idiot has held a 'how much water can you drink' contest. Carbon dioxide is in the air that we breathe, but go ask a diver or astronaut whether it is harmless. A cylinder of oxygen poses all sorts of dangers that a cylinder of compressed air doesn't.

So, yeah, while this particular case is most likely down to dodgy (or just too much) "herbal" oil, our lungs did not evolve to process glycol vapour and food flavourings (even if they're perfectly safe to swallow) let alone the 'fun' parts of vape fluid, and people do seem ridiculously keen to volunteer as guinea pigs to see what a few decades of breathing them every day does. Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, the current sample is heavily biassed towards people who've already damaged their lungs, so its not going to be very clean data.

Meanwhile, instead of having some vinegar on my fries and a glass of beer to wash it down, I'm going to send off to a chemical supplies firm for some pure ethanol (...and dig out my old chemistry notes to remind myself how you turn it into acetic acid). What could possibly go wrong?

Whereas the booming E-cig/vaping fluid industry are in it for the good of humanity and the warm fuzzy feelings it gives them (well, that might be the THC... in the unlikely event that eat their own dogfood). We can be totally confident that they're not going to target kids (...because kids don't want to look grown up, so if you only ever show young adults vaping it won't encourage younger kids) or try to confuse "safer than smoking" with "safer than not doing drugs".

That's the trouble with vaping - as a way to help existing tobacco addicts stop kippering their lungs, and maybe even progressively reduce their nicotine intake its a winner. Trouble is, there's been a long campaign to convince people of the health risks of smoking that has had an effect and - at least in the West - the habit was gradually on its way out. Now, suddenly, vaping is trendy, nicotine-addicted vapers are desperately trying to rationalise why it shouldn't be subject to the same rules and restrictions as smoking and - just because its almost certainly safer than breathing in toxic smoke - the precautionary principle goes out the window.

Pity - it was great to be able to go to a pub or restaurant and come back without every stitch of clothing reeking of stale smoke. I'm not sure that reeking of some miasmic combination of peppermint, sandalwood, vanilla and (fake, legal or otherwise) cannabis is much of an improvement.

Or, I don't know, maybe have strict standards and regulations for their production, require clinical trials of new products and make it difficult for people to obtain the stronger ones without a valid prescription from a medical professional who will (in theory) weigh the potential negative effects and risks against the subject's medical needs? (...and let Darwin deal with people who buy Save $$$ on Asma Inhalators!!! on the Internet).

Yes, but venture capitalism is investment - a bit on the scorched-earthy greed-is-good side (those 9 out of 10 failed companies cause a lot of collateral damage, but not to your collateral - so that's OK - and even the 1 in 10 that succeeds you probably want to sell to BigTechCorp ASAP for IP asset stripping before it turns into a pumpkin) but, nonetheless, investment of the turn-money-into-more-money sort. Crowdfunding (as a customer) isn't for turning money into more money.

The best you should hope for from crowdfunding is that - in return for paying upfront with no guarantee of delivery - you'll end up with a product that wouldn't otherwise have been made because it was too niche or risky for 'regular' investors to bankroll. You're not betting on it being the next iPhone - if the fundee makes and delivers their promised number and then winds down with $10 gross profit you've 'won'. What you're betting on is them not being (a) scam artists or (b) perfectly honest but incapable of organising a piss-up in a brewery.

...but you have to go in with open eyes and understand that if the product was a 'dead cert' for success and the producers exuded competence, it would probably have attracted conventional investment.

That might work with the sort of simple software product that one or two people can put together without being paid upfront for their time (how do you think companies like Microsoft happened?) - or maybe its a genuinely handmade product that you can gently bootstrap by selling the first one for enough cash to make the next two (and so on until you can afford a second person to make one... by which time your competitor who re-mortgaged their home to start a small factory has left you in the dust because you couldn't keep up with demand) .

Most modern manufactured products - especially miniature electronics - are totally uneconomical to make one-by-one. So, getting that first batch of 100, 500, 1000 made so that you have something to sell needs a metric shitload of up-front cash (or a bank loan with crippling interest).

Except that was less about Space Invaders and more about the 1990 Gulf War (and you'd probably have to explain that, with diagrams, to modern audiences).

The actual game-in-the-book was a sort of cross between WIng Commander and Elite (...although, in reality, Elite was pretty much the antitheses of the tropes the book was lampooning).

Now, Elite would make a good film or TV show... Oh, Wait... and wait some more...

I think the problem with Pratchett books is that if you're read the book you've already seen a better movie than they could possibly make. True of any decent book, of course, but Pratchett went out of his way to structure his books like movies, even lamp-shading it sometimes by actually describing camera movements or what cinematic cut technique he'd just invoked. Plus, if you leave a Pratchett book in the glove compartment of a film-maker's car for more than a week, it mutates into the script for Time Bandits.

That's probably why some of the most successful SF-novel-to-screen films have been based on Philip K. Dick stories - they're so intrinsically unsuited to film that the makers didn't even try and just cherry-picked a couple of key concepts from the story and did something new and original with them.

Then, when Hollyweird does tackle a book that is chock-full of classic videogame references, most of them get cut-out. I guess watching someone getting a perfect score on Pacman doesn't cut it in an action movie.