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DrTung

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If you're an old geezer like me, doesn't this "AI revolution" remind you of the "BASIC revolution" in the 70s and 80s, i.e. when the BASIC language was new and hot.

BASIC at that time was heralded as a much simpler and faster way to program. Rings a bell?

Potoooooooo 2 years ago

Sometime in the late 80's I was working in MSDOS and needed more working RAM for an app, so we bought the Phar Lap DOS extender.

Got the box and started reading the manual when someone stopped and asked "Why are you reading about horses?" What horse? "The mighty Phar Lap of course."

I had no idea it was the name of a horse, but I guess since their logo had a black horse I should have known :-)

In one of the stories of Sherlock Holmes he asks Dr. Watson how many steps there are in the stairs leading up to their door. Watson replies he doesn't know and Sherlock gives the exact number and says "You see but you do not observe".

Sherlock Holmes seems to have read this article as well :-)

I think PowerShell is a bit scary, for example I could never get curl to work in it, say a simple POST command: curl -X "POST" google.com should return Error 411 (Length required) from google (as it does in CMD.EXE)

When I try it in PowerShell I get: Invoke-WebRequest : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'X'. and some more error messages

even curl -X "GET" doesn't work :-(

Switcher (2004) 4 years ago

The sidesweep you do on your iPhone to change the page of app icons or when you switch fullscreens on your Mac I am sure is inspired by the Switcher.

My escape plan is to use Wine for the apps that exist on Windows only. Wine can be a bit lacking though :-(

But there's hope on the horizon: Valve's SteamDeck is aiming to make available all Valve's games, even the Windows-only ones, on their custom Arch Linux. using Proton (which is a fork of Wine). As far as I know, this might be the first commercial product that's based on (a fork of) Wine.

If they can make all tripleA Windows games with DRM work on their SteamDeck, this will make a serious dent in Windows' monopoly on gaming. And in the process hopefully Wine will get a boost as well...

PDP-11 Booting 5 years ago

Yes the data bits were 2-way toggles, but one important switch was a 3-way toggle: the Examine (press down) and Deposit (press up) switch.

PDP-11 Booting 5 years ago

PDP 11/34 had a bootrom and an octal keyboard, which is kind of cheating.

I grew up using the older PDP 11/45 where you had to key in (using binary toggles) a boot program. Or, the way I did it, manually enter write address and byte count to the RK05 disk controller (memory mapped I/O) then writing a "01" Go command to RK05's command register and watch the RK05 disk activity light flicker briefly. Voila, RT11 was loaded. (This worked because on the PDP 11/45 DMA transfers from disk to memory worked also in CPU Halt mode.)

Born i Stockholm, I remember taking the ferry to Finland as a young boy for some cheap vodka (and you only had to be 18 years old, not 20).

This was in the late 70's and my first visit to Helsinki, I tried to order a drink in a bar. But no service until I discovered my mistake: I had spoken in Swedish.

Switching to English got me a nice Finnish beer. That was my first glimpse of Finland's "complicated" history.

This was the movie that finally cured me out of the bad habit of reading the Swedish subtitles instead of actually listening to the spoken English.

I remember watching it in Stockholm's most renowned theater at that time, all seats taken.

When Brody and Indy discuss what would happen if the Nazis got hold of the ark, Brody says: "Any army carrying it would be invincible" the Swedish subtitle read (translated back to English): "Any army carrying it would be invisible".

Hmmm one reason for Google stumbling re. GitLab might be: I was on GitHub for over 10 years (and GeezerEdit was there too) but when Microsoft bought it I fled to GitLab.

Long live WordStar and it's many brethren!

I got addicted to it when coding Z80 assembler on CP/M in the late 70's and my life since then has been on a constant lookout for an equally good program in other OS's.

In Linux and MacOS terminals there's Joe, a godsend. But since I use Qt a lot, of course the first thing I wrote was a Wordstar clone plugin for Qt Creator. Not possible to survive otherwise :-)

IMAP Email Backup 6 years ago

I've used the ImportExportTools NG Thunderbird addon to do the migration. I.e. right-click on all folders I want to download, start a new Thunderbird for the new mail provider, right-click on the new, empty folders and upload to them.

Every time I opened a network share or similar "slow" device on Windows XP's File Explorer (alas not in Windows 7 or 10) I'm reminded of After Dark, since that sweeping flashlight (that goes left/right) is more or less exactly copied from Disney Mickey Mouse something/screensaver which was a clone of After Dark.

The article just briefly mentions it, but the game I remember most from my AppleII days was RobotWar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar

We were a couple of guys (and one AppleII) staying up all night designing robots, I still remember the names of some of my robots.

Like M.U.L.E. it was a good multiplayer game way ahead of its time.