Slashdot

I have never been tempted to go for a first post, until now.

http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=313513&op=Reply&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=20811157

I saw the 10th anniversary discussion pop up, with no comments, as I was checking email this morning. I've never even seen a first post opportunity before. I've never gone for it. And here was the chance to get the 10th anniversary first post.

I had only seconds to think. What would I say? How could I craft the perfect post?

I couldn't. I had to go for something simple, short, quick to type.

I went for a post that would:
a) seem completely banal.
b) show the 'typical' slashdot bravado about lower user nums being better.
c) NOT mention the first post. That was a tough call, but I thought it would be better to seem as if I didn't care about such a 'monumental' accomplishment. As though I were just posting because I thought my comment were actually germane to the conversation.

All in all, for 5 seconds of thought, I feel like it came off ok. If I'd had more time I would have tried to craft something more interesting, but I had no idea this was coming up.

Happened to notice this post, but it was too old to reply:


  by eddy the lip (20794) Alter Relationship on Mon Aug 15, '05 03:28 PM (#13326226)

(sorry, been away from slashdot for a few days, or I would have replied sooner).

You got me on that one - I never did this myself. A friend way back in the day claimed to have jacked his TRS-80 up to 1MB. Now, this was many years ago, when people actually used the TRS-80 for other than geek nostalgia value, so I may be misremembering (or have been outright duped. I was young. It could happen....) He bragged to me about it 'cause I was stuck with the standard 32KB.

A bit of googling didn't turn up anything that would substantiate the viability of the claim. And now I have an unresolved mystery from my youth to contend with. Thanks a lot ;)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80 (the processor in the TRS-80)

16 bit address registers + 8 bit data = 64k bytes memory max.
Hence your friend with the 1MB was lying.
Well, maybe he managed to solder on a MB chip, but the TRS-80 couldn't have used it.

If you're wondering why I friended you, it's usually that you posted something I found interesting, and I don't want to trust the moderators to interesting your other posts.

For anyone interested, squish has changed quite a bit since I last journaled. I have worked on the layout to make it more friendly for 800x600 resolution. It also no longer requires accepting an applet signature, which seemed to scare some people.

http://ptth.net/squish/

Please journal comments here.

There is now a how to play page linked from the main page.

Note: requires java 5. If you don't have Java 5 installed and usable from your browser, you'll get a class loader error in your java console, or an applet loading failure. I'm interested in pretty much any other bug reports, as there is nothing I can do about how Sun handles these errors (I've had no error reports so far that did not trace back to not having Java 5 installed & set up to be used from the browser).