All that is true, and I'm aware of it, but it misses the point. The point wasn't why the ZX81 didn't last long- that, of course, was because it was superseded.

The point I was making was why the Spectrum *did* last so much longer despite also being eclipsed in purely technical terms. That, as I mentioned, was because it was the first machine "good enough" for arcade games and "good enough" for its existing software base to have value. The mid-80s point circa the Amstrad buyout, when "serious" support started to fade was (I'm guessing) the point at which the non-gaming hobbyist/enthusiast market moved on to more advanced machines, and the point at which it probably would have faded if it was being purchased for the same reasons as the ZX81. It didn't- it lasted well the early 90s, i.e. past the start of the Mega Drive era!

Also, the original unexpanded ZX81 had a full 1KB; still a tiny amount by most standards, but not the almost unusable 256 bytes (i.e. "1/4k") that you suggest. The Atari VCS/2600 had an even tinier 128 bytes (plus one line of screen memory), but that was a much older machine and intended to run programs stored on external ROM, so the RAM there was "only" needed for keeping track of scoring players, etc. Still an incredibly small amount, though.

As far as I'm aware, the Vega *is* effectively just a cheap ARM-based computer running an emulator anyway (as opposed to a logic-level reimplementation of the original circuitry like the C64 Direct to TV was), supplied in a parodically cut-down mockery of the original Spectrum keyboard.

If I was a Spectrum fanatic, I'd want something that was either a "true" reimplementation of the original Spectrum and/or something that looked and could be used like the original Spectrum- possibly with additional features or connectivity, but retaining the original features.

This is- in some respects- better than Elite's "relaunch" of the ZX Spectrum (reported as such in many places) as a Bluetooth keyboard (i.e. they designed a Bluetooth keyboard that approximates the old Spectrum case and works with some crappy proprietary Android app). But that's a pretty low bar... the Vega is still just an emulator in a nostalgia-exploiting case that won't properly replicate the experience anyway, so why bother? I've no doubt it'll still sell, though.

That may have been true of the ZX80 and ZX81 (since those weren't ideal for games anyway).

However, while the Spectrum may undoubtedly have attracted hobbyists in its early days, I suspect that long-term the vast majority were sold for playing games on (regardless of what schoolkids told their parents to get them to buy one!). Yeah, some of those kids did write games on them... most of them probably didn't!

The reason is almost certainly that the Spectrum was the first really cheap home computer on the UK market to feature high-resolution graphics (*), colour and "sound" (**) sufficient to render acceptably realistic approximations of early-80s arcade games.

It's obvious that the Spectrum- having got there first- benefitted from the "network effect" (***) I assume this is why- despite countless "me too" competitors released in the wake of the Spectrum's success- almost none gained significant market share, even when they may arguably have had better specs, or been cheaper. (****)

The Spectrum's established software base and continued support meant it continued to be popular for gaming for years, even when its limitations (e.g. "attribute clash", 8-colour palette, lack of hardware scrolling or sprites) became more obvious when trying to replicate newer arcade games with more detailed background graphics et al.

As I said earlier, I've no doubt that a significant number of early adopters were "serious" hobbyists, and it would still been a major success with them alone. However, it probably wouldn't have lasted as long; it's clear that they'd started to move on by the mid-80s as the Spectrum was superseded technically and the "never mind the limitations, check out the massive amount of very cheap games" younger gaming market remained.

To back this up, it's worth noting that after Amstrad bought out Sinclair's existing computer line in 1986, their marketing was almost entirely gaming-focused. It's also notable that by this point almost all the Spectrum magazines concentrated on games.

That's probably why the mainly-hobbyist ZX81 (for all its influence) had a much shorter lifespan- only around three years- yet the Spectrum continued to be sold for a decade until 1992(!!), by which point the Mega Drive (AKA Genesis) was quite popular.

(*) "High resolution" by the standards of the time, i.e. 256 x 192, as opposed to (e.g.) the ZX81's 64 x 48 character-based graphics
(**) Albeit via the very limited single-channel "beeper"
(***) i.e. people rushed out to buy the Spectrum, so many games were written for it, so many people more bought it because it had the most games, so more games were written for it... etc.
(****) Other 8-bits, such as the Commodore 64, BBC Micro and later Amstrad CPC enjoyed success in the UK, but those were aimed at distinctly different (higher) price points and market segments

I have two LG BD-R drives, but they are discontinued. Honestly I would just browse Amazon and read the reviews in-depth. There are some useless reviews out there but it is fairly easy to determine which products are good and bad based on the good reviews. I can say my older LG drives are still holding up just fine.

I remember back when CD drives were new in PCs (back when the CD was connected to the SoundBlaster, not PATA or SATA). After a while the mechanicals would go and they would fail to seek. I remember old burners failing to burn after a while. Honestly, any drive I have bought in the last 10-15 years has lasted as long as the rest of the computer without any problems, including the two BD-R drives I use. That is probably a combination of technology improving and the fact that I do my research and find good quality drives.

As to your SSD comment, they have improved quite a bit recently. I just bought a 512 GB for the same price as a 256 GB just two years prior. The quality and durability are improving as well. If you have been holding out making the switch, now is a good time and it will only get better.

This is oft-quoted as fact, but I've seen it disputed often enough that I wouldn't take it at face value. From as early as 1996, this thread commented that:-

Even if Sony prohibited porn from being copied in their own commercial duplications facilities (which, I assume, would have had much- if not most- of the capacity in the early days), this doesn't mean the lack of commercial porn would have been the reason for Beta's failure.

Maybe Betamax *did* fail because of a lack of porn. But I suspect the shorter running time in the early machines would have been a bigger problem.

Let's be honest, from what I've heard the picture quality was a *bit* better, and yeah, the cassettes were a bit smaller than the annoying bulky VHS ones. But if they couldn't record more than an hour, then that's a severe limitation for timeshifting films, longer dramas and sports games.

I know the story's meant to be that people went for quantity over quality with VHS, but if the improved quality meant it wasn't actually useful for a lot of what most people wanted then IMHO, it's a perfectly reasonable decision that doesn't make you a philistine. Video recorders were a means to an end, and I'm sure a lot of people knew Beta was better quality but preferred to be able to record a whole film and went for VHS.

There's also the Beta licensing/manufacturing issue, but this wasn't really meant as a "*why* VHS beat Beta" post. Point is that the "porn won the war for VHS" thing probably took the (supposed) lack of porn on Beta, assumed it *was* the reason Beta failed and the argument gained currency because it was "obvious" and catchy... not because it had been proven.

Whoosh!

You had a joystick *and* a button? Luxury! I used to *dream* of having a joystick. I only had a disconnected joystick cable and I'd control it by making the connections with my tongue.

And the button wire was missing. And I didn't have any games. Or a computer.

But you know, I were happy in those days, even though I was poor.

(FWIW, I was still using that type of one-button Atari-format joystick on my Amiga until the mid-90s when the Amiga died altogether as a mainstream format and I was losing interest in games anyway. That was probably the point at which the "classic" one-button 9-pin Atari stick died(?); I don't count the Mega Drive/Genesis controller, as that had three buttons even though it used the 9-pin Atari connector and was sort-of-compatible).

"we've got monkeys that have rapidly learned to control a robotic arm using only signals from a tiny cluster electrodes in their brain,"

"rapidly" and "control" are very much relative terms in this case. And note the "in their brain" - you need to implant an electrode array to get good, reliable signals. With monkeys you can do it to half a dozen animals and hope than one or two get a fully working implant. And the array has to be working for a few months or so. With a human patient you need to get it right every time, and the array has to be viable for a decade at the very least.

I worked for NTG/3DO for just under five years, so I know (knew) the machine inside and out. It will be interesting to go through this code and see what kind of tradeoffs were made.

Some comments on the README:

My friends at 3DO were begging for DOOM to be on their platform and with christmas 1995 coming soon (I took this job in August of 1995, with a mid October golden master date), I literally lived in my office, only taking breaks to take a nap and got this port completed.

*snerk* I could have told you at the time that a ten-week dev cycle was crazy talk.

Shortcuts made...

3DO's operating system was designed around running an app and purging, there was numerous bugs caused by memory leaks. So when I wanted to load the Logicware and id software logos on startup, the 3DO leaked the memory so to solve that, I created two apps, one to draw the 3do logo and the other to show the logicware logo. After they executed, they were purged from memory and the main game could run without loss of memory.

An interesting and valid approach (3DO's OS had full memory tracking). I'd be interested to know which of the 3DO libs was leaking memory on you.

The verticle walls were drawn with strips using the cell engine. However, the cell engine can't handle 3D perspective so the floors and ceilings were drawn with software rendering. I simply ran out of time to translate the code to use the cell engine because the implementation I had caused texture tearing.

Were the floor/ceiling textures not power-of-two dimensions on each side? As I recall, you only got texture cracking when the dimensions were not power-of-two.

You could have decomposed the floor/ceiling textures into strips as well, but ultimately the lack of perspective correction meant you were going to have to do some heavy lifting somewhere.

I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.

Ah, yes, the Norcroft compiler (or, as I always called it, Norcruft). It was a piece of shit. It was also the only thing available that would run on the Mac. It was never anything but a C compiler, but kept throwing unblockable warnings about constructs that C++ would have problems with (such as implicit cast from void*). There was no MacOS port of GCC, and there were no usable ARM backends for GCC available at the time, anyway. (Bear in mind, this was before the Web existed in any familiar form, and you had to go trawling through USENET for clues -- not even AltaVista existed yet).

I hope that everyone who looks at this code, learns something from it, and I'd be happy to answer questions about the hell I went through to make this game. I only wished I had more time to actually polish this back in 1995 so instead of being the worst port of DOOM, it would have been the best one.

I'm sure many memories will come flooding back.

Mostly wrong. Only high-end professional-oriented DSLRs have 35mm-sized sensors, the majority use smaller APS-C sized sensors or something in that ballpark.

Even with Slashdot's slightly hyperbolic headline, the summary correctly reports the planet as having been "detected" rather then "discovered", and clarifies that this was "only" an already-discovered exoplanet (as does the original article).

If that was your implied criticism, then, it's not valid.

If you understood this, but your point was that "detecting" an already-known exo-planet was pointless because it's alredy been done... even though the person involved did it with equipment orders of magnitude cheaper and lower-end than that originally used by NASA less than a decade back, and which few of us would have assumed possible, which *is* the point here... then Slashdot probably isn't the place for you.

... and now at fifty nine I'm back cutting code. I prefer it, and I'm better at it.

Management suits some people, but the problem with our business culture is that if someone is really good in a technical area they get promoted into management, which means you lose your best technical people and gain a lot of second-rate managers.

Coincidentally, this is broadly similar to something I already mentioned elsewhere in this thread!

Wasn't that a popular diagonally-scrolling shooter in the Early Middle Ages?