The NDA thing is a bit embellished. Yes, Gary Kildall of CP/M was out flying the day IBM showed up unannounced, and his wife and business partner did not want to sign anything without him around, but the issue was resolved quickly once Gary got back into town and they had a deal with IBM. The problem occurred when Digital Research started getting way behind in their benchmarks and IBM was getting nervous that they would miss their release date. They mentioned it to Bioll Gates whi decided to pounce on a potential opportunity. IBM got to release on time with something. CP/M 86 did release later, but IBM kind of throttled them by charging more to include it instead of PC-DOS. That might have been revenge or, most likely, the fact that Gary got a better deal for CP/M than Microsoft did for DOS, and they passed along the cost savings to teh consumer. Gates had done this kind of stuff before. He sold the complete rights of Applesoft BASIC to Apple for $20,000 total.... no royalties! He had a similar deal with Commodore. It was basically all loss leader stuff to get their name out there. Honestly, I don't know how they survived basically giving away their main product.

Some of the Casio watches back then had a game on it called digital invaders where numbers would "invade" from the right, and you had to match the numbers streaming in to destroy them. There is a standalone version on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/...

I've also seen other versions on the web... There may be an iOS version as well.

Anyways, those watches were highly prized as they could provide much needed always available boredom relief back before cell phone games. I'm surprised that casino's current models (or this one) do not host the game. It would be a trivial cost and effort to add it on with today's technology.

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...

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.